IN a closed-in attic of a set by Marie Tierney, banked with dusty black forgotten clothes - a bit like a sawn-off hunk of disputed country shrouded in hatreds - a man is torturing himself with thoughts.

Because he can believe in nothing, he has worked as a double agent, sifting through other people's lives and even through their dirty underwear, to find out their business. With the gods on both sides of his family roaring, whether with rosary beads in hand or from fire-and-brimstone pulpit, it is no wonder that he is paranoid. When he quotes "We believe in one God" from the Apostle's Creed it actually comes as a shock.

In Hard To Believe, commissioned by the Cultures of Ireland group and presented by Bickerstaffe Theatre Company, Conall Morrison has brilliantly shown how the sickness in a state seeps between people and poisons their relationships.

The part was played in the premiere, which went on tour, by Sean Kearns. Lalor Roddy seemed on this first night just a little shaky. Under the writer's direction, however, he still took up all the hints the script to give a superbly accurate rendering of the different drum beats of Northern speech whether of hollering preacher or of fussy mother mo chroi.