THE elusive "dream music that seems to be its own echo" is much in evidence in Conall Morrison's rhythmic, resonantly melodic Lyric production of Brian Friel's great play, which can in no way be judged to be lingering in the shadow of its hugely praised premiere in 1990 by Patrick Mason, now Morrison's boss Fat the Abbey Theatre.

Friel's characteristic, theatrically bold fusing of smoky Donegal reality with richly symbolic unreality is encompassed in Stuart Marshall's set, composed of a farm kitchen, complete with furiously smoking turf fire, and a burnished woven backdrop, embellished with motifs of ripening, fecund harvest.

Into this set has descended, with a ready made life of its own, the all female Mundy family, five unmarried sisters who snipe and squabble, dance and joke with each other, while at the same time beneath the surface with barely contained sexual frustration and claustrophobia.

Morrison has coaxed splendid performances from Aine McCartney as forcedly jolly Maggie, sometimes going over the top in her efforts to keep everyone's spirits up; Paula McFetridge as a simmering, wasted Agnes; Nuala Hayes as bossy schoolteacher Kate, boxed up in her prim spinsterhood and suffocating Catholicism; Cathy White as a deceptively simple Rosie, veering between distracted monosyllabic and startling articulacy; and Eileen McCloskey as Chris, subtly set apart in gesture and worldly appearance by the very fact that she is the only one of the five to have borne a child.

David Howarth is not entirely at ease as the seductive, fleet footed Welshman, but Roy Hanlon finds a gentle way to our hearts as the disgraced priest returned from the African missions. And Niall Cusack creates a real flow in the tricky role of adult narrator/child character, lyrically carrying off the beautiful final elegy to these sad, barren lives for whom the joyous celebration of the season of Lugh, god of the harvest, is just a cruel parody of their clumsy, despairing dances to their own inner music of time.