As playwright Malcolm Hamilton struggles to finish the last two paragraphs of Sanctuary, his latest play for Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, he finds time to mull over its meaning with Ian Kilroy'You've got atension between the recording and the living of life. Inmodern times, we tend to record and analyse ratherthan actually do things'............................................

Playwright Malcolm Hamilton has his head in his hands, his face lit by the mute light of a laptop screen. In a dark corner of Blue Raincoat Theatre Company's office, in Sligo, he stares blankly at the pulsing cursor before him. As actors rehearse in another part of the building and as the pre-show publicity machine cranks into gear, Hamilton works feverishly, trying to finish the play that is already happening all around him. The posters are all over town, the actors are pacing back and forth, the performance dates are fixed - there's just the minor matter of the play itself.

"I'm still on the last two paragraphs," says Hamilton later, staring out of the large, spacious window of Blue Raincoat's rehearsal room, where he has come to take a break from his writing. In the distance the rain is falling on Ben Bulben, and as Hamilton surveys the scene, he appears remarkably calm for a man whose as yet unfinished text is to be presented to an audience in a matter of days.

"I've been developing the idea more or less full-on for the last two months," he muses. "I had a draft of the idea for maybe a year before that." Malcolm Hamilton will not die from want of being laid-back.

The play itself is Sanctuary; it is Hamilton's sixth, and shortest to date. It's being presented as part of Blue Raincoat's lunchtime series, sandwiched in between two Beckett works, Krapp's Last Tape and Rough for Theatre II. Over six weeks the company is presenting three lunchtime shows and an installation by Ciarán McCauley. As Niall Henry, the artistic director of Blue Raincoat, explains, the entire six weeks is conceived as one project, the exploration of a theme.

"All the basic themes of all the pieces - well, I want to say this without sounding too pretentious - they're all discussing existence," he says. In the rehearsal room, Henry sits, legs crossed, hand on chin, monitoring the performance of actress Sandra O'Malley.

Before him is the unfinished Beckettian world that Hamilton is busy upstairs finishing. O'Malley's intense concentration on her character's dense language draws the attention in. She is dressed in something that resembles a white nightshirt. Her long black hair is down. She is barefoot. To her right, some distance away, sits a stenographer dressed in black, actor David Heap.

At his feet is bundled a long coil of white paper, snaking out longer as he records with a typing motion the words of the distressed Dolly, as O'Malley's character is called.

Behind Heap stands a stern inquisitor, played by Jenni Ledwell. Also dressed in black, she interrogates Dolly. Like the stenographer, she is cold and formal. Only Dolly is emotional, although in a panicked and, at times, hysterical way. All three characters remain largely motionless, staring out at the audience, as they deliver their lines.

The mise en scène is pure Beckett. We are in an unspecific nowhere - the lights rise and we discover it; the lights fade and we leave it. A character records events - in this case, the stenographer, reminiscent of the assistant in Beckett's Catastrophe. Time passes. Questions are asked. An interrogation takes place - it is a scenario that conjures up Kafka, or Pinter's short Mountain Language. Where we are is unclear.

Hamilton acknowledges his debt to Beckett. "It is largely located in a kind of Beckettian no place," he says. "And it's not much of a coincidence that it will be on between two Becketts." As no one does Beckett better than Beckett, the question does suggest itself, why not leave it to the man himself, why not three Becketts, rather than two and a Hamilton? But asking such a confidence-undermining question of a man trying to finish a play is unfair, and so the question remains unasked.

Hamilton's five previous plays have all been staged by Blue Raincoat, and all but one were directed by Henry. Indeed, the theatre company was set up by the two men as a vehicle for their respective ambitions, one to direct, the other to write. Since founding the company in 1991, Henry and Hamilton have forged a dramaturgy all their own, influenced by mime and with an emphasis on the body. In making theatre, they have considered the text as just one link in the chain of production, rather than the fount of meaning that it has traditionally been in the Irish literary theatre.

Sanctuary is something of a shift, then, in its stillness and lack of movement. In rehearsals, it seemed to restore the sovereignty of language, while the body remained static. Has Hamilton shifted toward a writer's theatre? "Language has always been very important to me," he says. "I'm drawn to language, drawn to the words . . . but I do very much believe that theatre is an actor's medium. I believe that writing is secondary to that, and that my job is to deliver a character to the actor."

In this instance, that character is Dolly. A woman in her early 30s, she clings to decaying memories in long and agitated monologues. It is not clear why she is being questioned, or by whom. Her every word is being recorded, for some unclear purpose. What is this scenario, where is this located?

"There's a question outside the play as to whether she is dying," says Hamilton. "She is in a distressed situation - maybe she has woken from a living nightmare? It's really open to yourself. Maybe she's in a hospital. Because we're dealing with no place, those questions are best left open."

It is all a little vague. The meaning of the piece, it seems, is anything but clear. Like the poster for the lunchtime series the play is part of - an Andy Warhol portrait of Jackie Onassis - it says nothing specific. The poster has nothing to do with the play; it is merely an image with a certain vacuousness at its heart.

The world of Sanctuary seems somewhat the same. This is a universe with a vacuum at the core. As Hamilton puts it, "the piece takes a slightly absurdist view of existence". And therein lies the philosophical basis of this 30-minute piece. What Hamilton is showing us are three lives in search of meaning, each character suffering from the nullity at the heart of their existence.

"You've got a tension between the recording of life and the living of life," says Hamilton, "a tension that exists a lot in modern times, when we tend to record and analyse and consider things, rather than actually doing things.

"The girl is actually the person who lives. The stenographer is actually the person who is trapped in a world of endless recording. And the inquisitor is someone who is trapped in a world of endless questioning - that's essentially the tension that exists in the play."

It's an old problem that Yeats, for one, was aware of: "Players and painted stage took all my love,/ And not those things that they were emblems of" - his concern with art, rather than life. As Hamilton finishes his text, maybe the wet slopes of Ben Bulben might offer him some inspiration, as he stares out the window and the cursor pulses and flashes on the screen before him.

Sanctuary is at the Factory Performance Space, Lower Quay Street, Sligo from Wednesday until July 27th (no performances on Sundays and Mondays), starting at 1.10 p.m. Tickets: €6.50/€5. To book, tel: 071-70431.

Beckett's Rough for Theatre II runs from July 31st to August 10th