All aboard the drama express

Some journeys take longer than others. Barring delays, you can depart from Dublin's Heuston station and arrive in Galway in a sprightly jaunt of just under three hours. There is rarely such a fast route to opening night. When writing a single play can occupy some writers for years, and their track toward production is scattered with leaves, there has never been such thing as a drama express. Until now, writes Peter Crawley

Don Shipley and Mark Lambert's design for the most athletic event of The Dublin Theatre Festival's Olympics programme was as intimidating as it was simple: send six playwrights on the train to Galway with instructions to each write a five-minute piece based on their experience; pair them with a director, chosen by lottery, on their return journey; assign a cast by the same method; and perform the results that night in the Sugar Club.

Madly Off in All Directions (or "the train show" as it became known), a benefit for the Irish Equity Benevolent Fund, was not an unprecedented experiment in insta-theatre - Semper Fi did much the same thing in their Within 24 Hours series - but the locomotive muse certainly was.

"Used to be you'd get on a train and find out about people's lives," sighed Rosaleen Linehan sometime after midnight on the small stage of a jam-packed Sugar Club. "Everybody had a story then." Performing in Marie Jones's excellent piece, The Last Connection, Linehan could have been articulating a theme for each playwright, nearly all of whom focused on the buffer zones between strangers on a train: the mobiles, the laptops, the iPods. But Jones best articulated the difficulties of prising free somebody's secrets when, like all good passengers, they never leave their baggage unattended.

Jones's play was hilarious, neatly directed by Annabelle Comyn and beautifully performed by Linehan, Janet Moran and Clelia Murphy (what a suspiciously lucky lottery draw . . . ) but it left a poignant aftertaste: the sense that personal contact can only be established by persistent eccentrics impersonating clairvoyants.

Billy Roche's solution, in Tea or Coffee, was to thread the narratives of his several characters through the bored progression of the tea-lady, played, with nice implacability, by Lisa Lambe. Here, upheaval walked hand-in-hand with the mundane: a man is arrested for theft, but pays for his tea before leaving. The most direct exchange (between Lambe and Ingrid Craigie) amounted to, "Are you going up to see . . . ?" "Ah, yeah . . .", and we knew exactly what they meant.

Gerard Stembridge's untitled play revelled in such elisions. As Karen Ardiff's conversational efforts are smothered by a garrulous, offstage passenger, her increasingly agitated efforts at self-assertion - "you'd wonder what kind of money changed hands there" . . . "we should get out on the streets and protest" - portray an all-too-recognisable Ireland, where corruption is small-talk and redress an absent-minded fantasy. But Stembridge ultimately leaves us with the imponderable tragedy of a stranger - played by Bosco Hogan - whose life falls apart while he misses a series of phone calls, plugged into his laptop and an Mp3 player. We never discover the reason for his final sobs, but it's hard not to blame the iPod.

Paul O'Brien may have offered a train-free and broad satire about banking, impecunious playwrights and 100 per cent mortgages, while Tom Swift seized comic monologues and fetchingly silly puppets as the form of commuter isolation, but neither young buck could hold a candle to the surreal leaps of Fergus Linehan's imagination.

Rumour has it that his cast were initially perplexed by the juddering motion of What Time Do We Get In? until someone discovered that page two was missing. Under Tom Creed's direction, the play actualises a widely-held suspicion - that the train to Galway is hell on earth - while the journey there will go without refreshment (where's Lisa Lambe when you need her?) and conclude with an evil cackle worthy of Scooby-Doo.

"What was he on?" wondered our compère Mark O'Regan as this engaging experiment in return-trip theatre-making yielded teasingly accomplished results.He was, I suspect, on nothing more potent than the InterCity from Dublin to Galway. That, it seems, is mind-altering enough.