DERMOT Hudson, rendered redundant from his job in a multi nationally oriented company in Dublin, has persuaded his wife to give up her job in the bank and removed, his reluctant daughter to a remote Wicklow farmhouse incompetently re-furbished by himself, there to prove to himself and his successful old friends that the country life (along with some astronomy, through telescopes and the Internet) is the only way to live even if the shelves keep collapsing and the heating system seldom works.

His wife Stella is complaisant. Their daughter Tara is, rebellious. Tony Curtis, the engineer with ambitions to move to South America, who is to take Tara to her debutante dance, turns out to be Tommy Carney, a puncture mender in a Terenure garage, driving a hearse for the big event. And the oldest of friends Paul, who usurped Dermot's position in the company, and wife Geraldine, who has serious reproductive domestic problems to resolve, are visiting that night to be impressed by the country life style and by Dermot's commission to photograph a comet crashing into Jupiter.

It is very much the mixture of social pretence, larded with darkness and anarchic comedy, with which Bernard Farrell has charmed and threatened countless audiences. And large chunks of the audience last night were clearly delighted again. But the theatrical mechanics of the piece remained implausible this time, and Ben Barnes's direction of the piece allowed too many different styles of performance to reveal, rather than conceal, the dramatic implausibilities.

Tom Hickey's Dermot is too over the top at the start to make plausible his admission of failure at the end. Marion O'Dwyer's Stella is too understated at the start to make plausible her rebellion towards the end. But even that rebellion is framed in a private soliloquy which, although it merited its round of applause, is never repeated in public. Stephen Brennan's smooth Paul and Gemma Craven's conspiring Geraldine come in rightly as from another social world but remain too individually isolated to spark any convincing dramatic interactions, while Eanna MacLiam's lively Tommy and Janet Moran's excitedly resentful Tara remain the teenage cyphers created by their author.

Frank Hallinan Flood provides a plausible setting, well lit by Robert Bryan, and Joan Bergin's cost Limes are excellent. But for all the individual excellence, the whole thing did not quite hang convincingly together last night.