About love

When we meet Katherine and Jim, it is the day in their small sub-post office in their small Clare village when the last manual telephone exchange in Ireland has finally been disconnected. Once they were the Dancing Dooleys, Jimmy and Kate, winning all the competitions before them with their pastiche of Fred Astaire and, maybe, Ginger Rogers. The competition may not have been great, but it kept them happy. Now Katherine is near death and Jim is looking after her, getting her up, washing her, feeding her, brushing her hair, doing her make-up as her Friedreich's ataxia progressively immobilises her.

But Katherine conjures her children - Francis, who has gone to be a physics lecturer in California, Ger who has gone to be a nurse in Africa and teacher Nora, who got pregnant, married her Paddy from Leitrim and moved to a new house nearby. Theirs was a happy childhood of make-believe when their mother taught them to dance and to fly on moonbeams. The disconnected telephone exchange is just a metaphor. For Katherine, being connected is all that matters and, as long as everyone is connected, everyone is a live wire and time and space do not matter.

Niall Williams's new play, given its first performance in Galway last night, is about love and about the battle between dreams and realities. Maybe the kids left home because they discovered that their parents lived only in make-believe? Maybe Jim was a philanderer? Maybe realities had to be faced? It is a tender and deftly under-written drama, mostly joyful and ultimately heart-rending. And it is adroitly, intelligently and imaginatively directed by Paddy Cunneen, and superbly acted by its cast of five.

Its audience is never quite sure how much anyone in the family knows about, or wants to know about, the others. Britta Smith as Katherine is tough, helplessly vulnerable and cheerfully demanding. Jim, protesting that he just wants to read his newspaper, is tenderly gruff and generally acquiescent. When they both join in the dreams of younger days (with Astaire projected in white tie and tails) they are clearly in love. And, mostly, they are mutually evasive. The kids, as they play back and forth in time and place, are fresh and lively, angry, and wonderfully uncertain.

Sonya Kelly's Nora is the bully (or so she may think), George Heslin's Francie the realist (or so he would like to think) and Jennifer O'Dea's Ger the romantic. They and the play (excellently set by Francis O'Connor) are not to be missed.

Runs until mid-January. To book phone 091-568617.