Suburbia

Youth and freedom appear to be fairly major burdens, at least in the hands of the unhappy characters in Eric Bogosian's grim fable about lives without hope.

Set somewhere in consumer USA, Tim (Niall O Sioradain) went to Vietnam, returned and is an aggressive drunk; Jeff (Ciaran McMahon) has a conscience and little else, while Buff (Stewart Roche) is interested only in sex, drinking and vomiting. Apathy keeps them to get her.

They spend their days hanging around the local shop run by an earnest

Pakistani, only two years away from an engineering degree and flight from his tormentors.

Norman, efficiently played by John Lovett, does stand up to the lazy, abusive white boys. Racial tension quickly becomes central to the work. Sooze (Maeve

Coogan), Jeff's girlfriend, wants to go to New York and become an artist. The bickering is briefly interrupted by the arrival home of Pony, now a rock star with a stretch limo.

Brian McGuinness's Pony is suitably world-weary. McMahon's Jeff conveys helplessness and frustration, yet at moments of realisation invariably resorts to exaggerated double-takes.

Most of the difficulties encountered by the cast are created by the script.

This is believable, if uneven, heavily polemical and totally dominated by

Bogosian's interest in Tim, by far the best-written part. O Sioradain takes over the show, by wisely underplaying Tim's menacing belligerence.

It is a superb performance.