A NEW THEATRE, a new play, a new playwright and the first formal celebration of the Druid Theatre's 21st birthday: it was quite a night in Galway! The new theatre (formally opened last night by the Mayor, Councillor Micheal O hUiginn, and the Minister for the Arts, Michael D. Higgins) is comfortable and intimate, with just on 400 seats. The new play is dangerously funny and the new playwright, Martin McDonagh, has made his striking debut with what seems to this reviewer to be a highly original voice and vision.

The drama reveals 70 year old Mag Folan and her 40 year old daughter spitting like cats at each other. Hypochondriacal Mag is demeaning and demanding of her daughter. Drab Maureen, feeling like a skivvy, is venemous in her responses, even as she delivers the Complan and the porridge and the tea and biscuits. They speak at one another with a directness that is at once literal and unreal, each exchange laced with emotional violence. They seem to exist in a world of dislocation in which people go to England or America to work, or stay at home to watch television programmes from Australia.

Fantasy and reality are inextricably interwoven: it is never clear where fact and fiction start or finish, not least when Pato Dooley enters Maureen's life for a one night stand. He works on a building site in London and his young brother, Ray, living a mile or so down the road from the Folan's, gets a message to Maureen (despite Mag's best effort to prevent the communication) that Pato is back to attend a farewell party for their uncle, who lives in Boston.

The play is unceasingly serious in content, unremittingly, funny in delivery, its dialogue and narrative sharply, darkly and cruelly comic. In the hands of a lesser director than Garry Hynes, it could easily have fallen between the blackness and the humour, and with less skilful actors it could have seemed a great deal less serious and less funny.

Anna Manahan is repulsively unpleasant as old Mag, sitting like a great black pig in her rocker in front of the telly. Marie Mullen contains within Maureen's weary resignation a coil spring of malevolent and frustrated energy. Brian F. O'Byrne is wonderfully awkward as the man, Pato, for whom Maureen has yearned. Tom Murphy is outright hilarious as his unsettled and unsettling young brother.

Author and audience are superbly well served in a production which should not be missed.