Hilary Fannin's first play abounds with promise unfulfilled in its brief 90 minutes. Bristling with big ideas, it splutters with glib domestic comedy before petering out with insufficient substance to sustain the ideas which remain merely implicit rather than being fleshed out in the characterisations.

The Brazils, living in Dublin in the 70s, are a severely dysfunctional family living severely separate individual lives. Father went to sea and never returned, his absence made material by a cardboard cutout which young Stephanie brings into the kitchen for her mother Mamie's birthday party. Stephanie believes everything the nuns ever taught her in school, despite all evidence to the contrary. Mamie, an over-the-hill singer, goes off to do a radio interview which, she believes, will revive her moribund career.

Mamie's mother Tom, the crazed widow of a doctor (or maybe a vet), sits with a shotgun in her lap waiting to repulse the bailiffs coming to evict them. Stephanie's sister Madeline may, or may not, be pregnant by Eddie Coot, but is more concerned with getting her hair ironed. And poor dull Ted, the neighbour and a childless widower, wants to marry Mamie and take the whole family in to live with him, including brother Jack, who works unhappily as a deck-hand on a fishing trawler.

But none of them is given words by their author to make them any more substantial than the cardboard cut-out of Dad standing sentinel over the birthday party which Mamie misses anyway. Not Doreen Keogh as the crazy Tom, nor Ruth Hegarty as the fading Mamie, nor Marcella Plunkett and Emma McIvor as her disparate daughters, nor Michael Devaney as the disenchanted Jack, and certainly not John Olohan as the dismal Ted, can get any dramatic blood flowing through their skeletal characters. Zany as it all sounds, very little human life is evident to flesh out the author's ideas.

Jim Nolan directs it efficiently in Ben Hennessy's suitably drab setting, well lit by Jim Daly. It entertains mildly where it needed to do so exotically. But Ms Fannin's next play should still be worth waiting for, if only because of those dark ideas which fail to be realised in this one.

At Garter Lane until June 12th. Booking: (051) 855038.