Corcadorca as a theatre company is always clued in to topical issues, but not even writer Enda Walsh or Director Pat Kiernan could have anticipated the immediacy of the apparently unpretentious Misterman, which opened at the Granary, Cork, on Monday.

Or could they? A programme note indicates the collaborative process involved in bringing the script to the stage: consisting of a dramatic monologue in which the ubiquitous Enda Walsh plays Thomas, evangelist and prophet of Inishfree.

The piece seethes with youthful alienation in a world in which all is not at all well. A prostitute is found among the invoices, tea-rooms use cheesecake to mask the odour of something less than sanctity, even the bronchitic Mammy may wheeze out inferences of wrong-doing. As Tommy is quintessentially a Mammy's boy, such stirrings provoke his spirit of retribution in which he sees himself as an agent of his personal, diligent, but not necessarily merciful God.

Walsh's physical elasticity emphasises his ownership of Thomas as a character and of the few other roles (the voice of Mammy is from Kay Ray Malone) as aspects of that same identity. The piece is brief - an unbroken 50 minutes - but sharply written and given theatrical shape both by the direction and by an interactive sound and lighting plot (Aedin Cosgrove and Cormac O'Connor). The vivid backdrop, with its stepladder lifting Thomas to his judgmental seat among the clouds, is by set designers Aedin Cosgrove and Mick Heffernan - a typically optimistic counterfoil to the dark subversive humour of Corcadorca.

Misterman continues at the Granary to May 8th.