Lovers

The New Theatre, Dublin

It isn’t easy to say which of the two sets of lovers in Brian Friel’s 1967 companion plays are the lucky couple. The teenagers expelled from school for getting pregnant in

Lovers

:

Winners

are treated to a lovely summer day on a hilltop that holds an enormous promise of tomorrows, while the play closes in around them with a much colder certainty. The mature couple of the second play,

Lovers: Losers

, find their passions bloom late in life, before they are expunged by a situation so tragic we can only laugh.

Efficiently staged by Road to Ithaca and Room to Move, these plays are no less tragic than the fated couples of the Abbey's Translationsor the blinded romance of the Gate's Molly Sweeney, yet they don't share the same terrain. Away from Friel's favoured Ballybeg, Winnersis set in Tyrone's fictitious Ballymore, a "big town" with a specific context. Here the well-to-do Mag (April Bracken) and the striving Joe (Martin Burns jnr) are star-crossed lovers in a divided, watchful community, where Michael Wallace and Ann-Marie Taffe's figures tell a story of young hopes with the dispassion of an inquest.

Director David Ferguson isn't hung up on specifics – to judge by Neill Fleming and Sharon Coade's accents, the less explicit Losershas been shifted to Dublin – as though universality works best by roaming. Fiona Carey's set, where curtains of striped wallpaper summon nature and domesticity, helps reunite the plays, but the production is strongest in its handling of time. The narrators of Winners pre-empt and outpace the continuous moment that Bracken and Burns vividly share. "I think this is the most important moment of my life," says the engaging Bracken, and as the moment anticipates the life they might lead while the shadows of fate draw near, we realise, with an exquisite ache, that she's right.

Losers, a funnier and more despairing piece, is somehow also slighter. Playing Andy, Fleming, a naturally comic actor, peers at the wall through binoculars, doomed to become his similarly stunted father-in-law, just as his wife (Coade) will turn into a facsimile of her passive-aggressive, devout mother (Eileen Fennell). "Nuns are screams – if you don't take them seriously," Mag asserted at her most contentedly defiant. Her victory is never to experience the slow repressive force of church and state that intrude on Andy's sex life – a man who fought the Lord, and the Lord won.

Ends tomorrow