Latch

Harbour Heights, Cork

Getting there is part of the Hammergrin experience: here we are on the bus for Latch,as per instructions. My disreputable trainers assure me that I'm clad, as per instructions, so I won't mind getting dusty. Instructions remind us that there are no toilets at the site from which we return to town somewhere around midnight. Hmm.

And here's the rain. It follows us all the way to Harbour Heights, an uncompleted housing estate where we are numbered, divided, warned not to budge from our places and led to a row of unfinished units, empty and potent as whited sepulchres. From here we can see a spread of glowing greenery crowned with trees waiting like Watership Downfor its concrete lawns. Inside and upstairs we sit on builders' planks or a chair between the spokes of an awaited radiator. There are small binoculars on the ledges of open windows. The gloom is punctured by the amplified voices of the players on the green outside, where Ray Scannell and Róisín O'Neill set the production in motion.

Written by John McCarthy and Sara-Jane Power – both also direct – this follows a latch-key kid into the world he creates while waiting in diminishing hope for the return of his negligent parents. His fantasy is haunted by phantom watchers; premonitory sound effects (Ciarán Ó Conaill) and orchestral music conducted by Conor Palliser emphasise the surreal in a narrative sustained by the poignant gallantry of Douglas Queally as Latch and Ciaran Bermingham as Donnelly the Waking Dead.

There are phone calls, a marvellous car, something like Calvary tilting on a distant hay-barn (focus! focus!) and a growing suspicion that we, at the windows, may be the Watchers even as we train our binoculars on innocent bushes.

– Runs to June 25 as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival