Asylum! Asylum! Granary Theatre, Cork

The many talents brought together for the production of Donal O'Kelly's Asylum! Asylum! at the Granary Theatre can't disguise the play's determined tilt away from drama towards polemic.

Vic Merriman's fluid direction uses Patrick Murray's slatted stage imaginatively; his cast is led by the imposing George Swanika Seremba as the asylum-seeker in an Ireland where out-reach and compassion stop at the airports.

An immigration officer whose ambition is to leave the country and a refugee whose hope is to enter it collide in the plot's only likely encounter, and their relationship becomes more complex as their mutual memories of childhood flare into recognition.

Justifiable as O'Kelly's concern and anger may be, they are diluted by the coincidences which drive the action: the immigration officer's disliked sister is a newly qualified solicitor who takes the case of Joseph the asylum seeker, falls in love with him, brings him home to a barbecue prepared by her brother the immigration officer who is thrown out by her father (a stoic performance by Vincent McCabe) while Joseph is welcomed instead.

The immigration officer is going off to Europol to deal with refugees in Germany: the barbecue reminds Joseph of an atrocity in which he may, or may not, have helped burn his own father alive.

This scenario is handled with conviction by a cast which gives it as much balance as its members can provide, assisted by the staccato drumming of Adesose Wallace.

Asylum! Asylum! is the centrepiece of UCC's cultural programme for The Scattering, an international conference on Ireland's Diaspora, which inaugurates the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at UCC from September 24th to 27th.