Ioanna Anderson has a sad wisdom beyond her years. After seeing her first major full-length play, I am still pondering its central argument: that a happy upbringing might be as emotionally crippling as a miserable one.
Words of Advice for Young People is set on the grounds of the Golden family home in rural Leitrim, which depressive Nora has transformed into a B&B mostly patronised by fans of her parents, famous children's book authors. Father Harry resisted his wife Margaret's slow death some six years ago and disappeared a year later, presumed a suicide. Now his remains have been found and younger sister, TV star Clara, returns for the funeral, along with family friend Rob and Nora's good-for-nothing husband Danny.
Themes of loss and love are underlined through a framing subplot concerning the local young undertaker Jack, who is shadowed onstage by the ghost of his recently deceased wife. Death confronts the characters with their inability to embrace life fully: as written, these are a believable catalogue of half-realised, regret-fuelled, hyper-aware people. Anderson's great gift is for intelligent and insightful dialogue. "Happy fucking families," grouses one character. "Know any?" zings back another. "Are we having one of those conversations where everything means something else?" wonders Clara, when Rob finally starts to broach their long-simmering mutual attraction. The play gracefully references the theatrical past - a faulty onstage tape recorder echoes Beckett, while the big-house setting is reminiscent of Friel - while setting itself definitively in the immediate present; it is the first play I have seen in which a character sends a text message.
Philip Howard's production, however, feels emotionally under-realised. There is a sense of actors delivering clever lines rather than fully inhabiting the characters that Anderson has created, perhaps in part because they have been cast so predictably to type. It is nonetheless an auspicious introduction of a writer with a great deal to say and exceptional skills with which to say it.
· In rep until March 13. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
