Michael Durkan, producer and director of Gaelforce Dance, says in the souvenir programme that his creation is "vastly different from all the other Irish dance shows". Well, it doesn't appear to be. It's the same old stuff - slicker as an ensemble piece and schmaltzier in tone perhaps, but utterly devoid of originality or of any individual performer with enough star quality to rise above this mire of eye-candy banality.

The show is an Australian production with various North American performers involved, while Durkan's biography reveals him to have made "numerous albums with the Irish Drovers". A narrator putting on his best Niall Toibin voice portentously sets the scene, but the - - two brothers, one girl, girl dies, brothers make up - is hackneyed at best and the whole affair a sickly blancmange of Enya, Eurovision and Jethro Tull's Songs From The Wood.

Musicians sit conspicuously at the back, coming forward to prance and posture expressively every time a costume change is required. Can there be anyone in the auditorium unaware that most of this soundtrack is canned?