Comedy on a slippery slope

Chas Addams once drafted a superb cartoon for the New Yorker: a theatre audience was collectively cowering in fear and horror from whatever was being offered on the stage, but just one of its number was sitting up with a gleeful smile on his face. Everyone, as it were, to his or her own taste.

It was a little the other way around last night when John Godber's comedy opened in Dublin for the Christmas and New Year season. This reviewer sat cowering while the bulk of the audience laughed, or at least tittered, and then gave the show a resoundingly complimentary curtain call.

The story (somewhat adapted for this city) is of two Dublin couples who go to Austria for a week's skiing. Chris and Bev are young and jolly and, ostensibly, very much in lust with each other while Tony and Alison - thirty-somethings - seem to be drifting apart after 10 years of living together.

Then there is the enigmatic, but very shapely, Melissa who is on her own while her husband is off in Brussels, and there is Tony, the handsome ski instructor, who tries to please everyone, including himself.

Almost entirely devoid of wit, save for semi-adult scatology, the plot (such as it is) lumbers along through everyone's sexual uncertainties and up, down and across Niki Turner's elaborate setting upon which no expense has been spared - it takes us from the ski slope to the bar to the sauna to the bedroom to a chair-lift to (imagination slipping) a bench to a snowman and always back to the ski slope.

Graham Watts's direction is stolid and the players - Katy Barfield as Melissa, Peter Warnock as Tony, Tara Quirke as Alison, Seamus Power as Chris, Anne Marie McAuley as Bev, and (liveliest of all) David Gorry as Dave - do their best to give some effect to a series of implausible events couched in dialogue which veers from cliche to banality.

Yet it was warmly received by a large audience which must live in some other world never previously visited by this reviewer. The box office is likely to be very busy for the next six weeks or so.

Runs until the end of January. Booking at (01) 4544472.