Life driven to its literal extremes

PAULA MEEHAN'S first play for adults, staged by Rough Magic, demonstrates a lively theatrical imagination woven through its paeon to women who can survive extreme hardship with humour, much love and more sacrifice.

Set in a flat in Maria Goretti Mansions, somewhere in Dublin, it offers Lil Sweeney, Mariah Donoughue and Frano O'Reilly surviving one month in a life lived in extremis. Lil, whose young daughter Chrissy died from AIDS a year earlier, has had the flat burgled and vandalised several times over by young neighbours while her husband - affectionately, Sweeney - has had his mind blown by the massacre of his beloved homing pigeons.

Mariah has got off drugs and applied for a job in community work which she obviously won't get. Frano gets beaten up on a regular basis by her alcoholic husband. They lean on each other in their own quirkily independent ways.

Their chat is cliche ridden and, for the most part, banal. In this they are no different from Father Tom (recently returned from the missions) or Oweny Bourke (the neighbour who sees himself as a Mister Fixit and is seen as a sucker for pseudo science).

But the author has set herself a most difficult task in trying to get her characters to say something significant without straying from their limited language and an even more difficult task in going for theatrical extremes as well as the literal extremes of her women's lives. There are threads of surrealism in the weave of "realistic" drama which do not sit easily in the whole dramatic fabric, and neither the players nor the director, Kathy McArdle, can quite reconcile the uneasy and often implausible contrasts.

Further, the narrative lacks theatrical momentum, and the dramatic construction, while it offers much conflict, does not deliver that other essential of drama change. They are all, at the end, much as we originally found them. The players do their best: Ger Ryan is Lil, Neili Conroy Mariah, Gina Moxley Frano, Anto Nolan Oweny, Tim Ruddy, Father Tom and, most impressively, Mick Nolan is the crazed Sweeney.

Barbara Bradshaw's fragmented setting and cost times are fine, as is Paul Keogan's lighting. But the play remains an apprentice work, albeit one which displays the vivid imagination of an author who may offer much more magic when she has mastered the discipline of playwrighting.