You have to ask the question "why?" Why are these broken characters thrown together above and around a seedy bar in 1979? What does the Pope's visit have to do with it? And why should we want to know?

In fairness, Celia de Freine, writer of this new play for Amharclann de hIde, makes a fist of answering those questions. The Pope's visit, a phenomonally unifying moment for this State, can in fact be seen as the last dam which delayed momentarily the flow of the country into secularism. And in hindsight, the old unity was illusory. De Freine's characters were scarred in an Ireland which kept too many secrets, and during the Pope's visit they find a spiritual balance which is all their own.

The questions are not silenced, however. You'd want to be particularly unlucky to find such a collection of scars in a group - three industrial school survivors, a child of a chronic alcoholic mother and one comparatively fortunate woman who is obsessed with wanting to marry a man she can't seem to even get a date with. You'd be doubly unlucky if they all told their stories in the space of the weekend - but this is what happens. Inevitably, the misery is just too great for catharsis to be meaningful - it's too great to be meaningful, full stop.

The cast struggles to grow characters bonsai-ed by misfortune. Lesley Conroy is just too pretty and fresh-faced to be a convincing alcoholic. Brian Thunder can't fill in the sketch of a gentle man warped by a violent upbringing, nor can Brid McCarthy do a flip from marriage-mad to independent woman with the lines she has. Gavin O'Connor, a rogue Protestant, a nerd who plays jazz piano and steals kisses, just doesn't make any sense as a character. Brendan Murray goes too far in his unfeeling violence as the criminal formed in an institution, but he is, at times, quite convincing.

Brid O Gallchoir has filled out these characters as carefully and gently as she can, and with de Freine has embarked on a worthwhile project of psychological exploration, which just doesn't go far enough. Katherine Sankey seems to have been the only one having a really good time, conducting the symphony of 1970s browns that is the set, with a bar advertisement for Smithwicks "Beoir mar ba choir" featuring two stern gentlemen, their sideburns and forelocks splayed like black cats on their heads.

Runs until tomorrow (01- 4759012), then transfers to the Town Hall Theatre, Galway (091-569777), from Tuesday to Saturday, May 13th.