Johanna Connor's set for Ken Harmon's Wideboy Gospel consists of three lozenges of grey cement, suspended at different levels to create the impression of walls of concrete spiralling into the distance. This is the physical environment of Snorkey, and the emotional environment isn't much better. Even when he blows his Lotto money on a holiday on Crete - that's Crete, not Ibiza, though one of the party never deciphers the difference - he can't make much of the relationship with "Nick-la", so it's home to the family, where his alcoholic mother presides over her unpromising offspring.
Ken Harmon, aided by Catherine Fay's costume design for Snorkey - an attractive shirt and shell-suit number teamed with an earring and a shocking red scar - keeps reinforcing the message: this is what it's like to be working-class, or call it under-class, in one of Dublin's sprawling new towns. Again and again the point is made that it is hard to "Re-jaysus-lax" in such an environment, that a spiral of crime, ending in a vice-grip of violence, is the norm. After a while, the audience member, typically middle-class, finds herself thinking "all right, I've got the message, now move on".
Harmon does move on, but too late. He has a wider context, but comes to it too slowly. Setting the play against the background of the violence during the England-Ireland football match at Lansdowne Road in 1995, he quite cleverly exposes the superficiality of the cultural divide between English and Irish fans - and the strength of the divide between middle and working classes in both countries. And he scrolls forward to the new economic order in Ireland, showing how thin the veneer is, how the old class order still lingers.
Ronan Leahy's one-man performance is impressive, given the initial limitations of the script. But this is less theatre than story-telling. What is the current huge attraction of the one-man genre, apart from its cheapness? Is it the influence of stand-up? And do all these plays have to be about men snared in nets of violence? Conor McPherson has more successfully mined this seam (Rum and Vodka, The Good Thief), but it is running out of ore.
Back to the set, which is the most theatrically effective element of this show, directed by Jimmy Fay, and adds horror to its climax: Lee Davis's lights project on the concrete a virulent tricolour and then a deep, insistent red.
At the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from next Wednesday until August 12th at 8.15 p.m. To book, phone: 01-6796622