Tif Eccles has woven a dense fabric of words, ideas and symbols into his brief first play, to be seen at lunchtime in Bewleys of Grafton Street. The words are, for the most part, fluent and imaginative, thoughtful and thought-provoking. The ideas combine the mundane with the imagination and confront what might be ancient myth with what might be contemporary psychiatric illness.
The story is simple enough: Patrick Conway is a long-stay patient in a locked-ward mental hospital, said to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia but believing that he may be suffering from a curse deriving from the discovery by his elder brother, on a mound on the farm in Clare, of a bronze-age decorative collar.
He is tended by a rather superficially caring nurse and attended by the conjured ghosts of his mother, his uncle Matt and elder brother Donal.
It is the imaginative fluency of the author's writing, his Friel-like ability to run litanies of words to conjure a sense of place, of time and of routine, which makes the work compelling, but there are times when the construction is too light to carry all the implications of exactly what is happening or being said, and there is an insufficient sense of resolution at the end to make the drama complete. But Gerry Walsh's committed and sustained portrayal of Conway is excellently varied and yet consistent with either the curse or the illness model of what is going on.
Stella Madden is his nurse and, when required, the voice of his mother. But it is the monologue that matters and, in this, Mr Walsh touches both the mind and the emotions, and often enough the funny bone.
The suitably unobtrusive direction is by Michael James Ford.
Until June 17th at 1 p.m. To book, phone: 01-8308419