When Roswitha and Johann tried to escape from East Germany via Czechoslovakia they were caught at the border and had their infant daughter forcibly taken from them by the authorities and put up for adoption back in East Germany. She was adopted lovingly by the Steinmanns, a childless couple, and reared by them until, when she was 16, the borders between East and West were opened. When she receives a letter from an unknown woman asking for a meeting at this time, several literal and metaphorical cans of worms are opened up and lives are changed.

This is, more or less, where Renate Ahrens-Kramer's short play starts. As a first work for the stage, it is an accomplished and taut drama written in oblique dialogue, whose participants appear not to want to hear what the others are saying. It is about breaking down borders at several levels - political, emotional, intellectual and familial. Its construction is a little too contrived to be wholly believable, but it allows its author to make her thoughtful points with clarity, even if the characters become subservient to the messages and cannot always become fullblooded characterisations.

The Storytellers company, efficiently directed by Bairbre Ni Chaoimh, make the most of a theatrically unsympathetic space to get the messages across, illuminated unnecessarily and inadequately at times by old newsreel projections of life and times in divided Germany. Paul Keogan's lighting is sharply effective in Carol Betera's necessarily minimal setting. Ruth McCabe manages best to inject some depth of character into her playing of the unknown woman, and Johnny Murphy is effectively restrained in his portrayal of Herr Steinmann, faithful both to the lies of the old authorities and to his love of his adopted daughter. Iseult Golden plays the daughter with some verve and a confident violin, and Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy is her concerned adoptive mother.