Tender recreation of 1950s Belfast

WHERE Paddy Scully's tenderly crafted new stage adaptation of Brian Moore's novel wins friends and sympathy is in its evocative recreation of Moore's fictional landscape Belfast in the 1950s and, most specifically, the boys' grammar school and seminary where the writer himself spent many unhappy years.

Frank Quinn's mellow, bricklike set divides between the drab bedsit where middle aged teacher Diarmuid Devine has lived for most of his professional life, under the beady, moralistic eye of landlady Mrs Dempsey (the excellent Laura Hughes), and the mock Gothic arches and walkways of the school seminary, where he tries valiantly to instil a love for English literature into unruly young minds preoccupied with other things. Moore's persistent themes of Catholic guilt, obsession with the sins of the flesh, clerical double standards, women as icons and objects of desire find life and clumsily suppressed passion in poor, inexperienced Devine.

In the first act. Toby E. Byrne's Dev is a nervy, linear character, barely changing his persona, as he moves from home to classroom to staff party, where he meets the flighty, vivacious, Protestant Una Clarke (Farrell Fleming), young niece of his longtime colleague Tim Heron (J.J. Murphy). But as the machinations of his painfully unsuccessful pursuit of Una grow ever more complex and puzzling, he and the entire cast step into a higher gear, with John Keyes coming on late as the wily president of the College, giving a master class in the art of cover up and damage limitation, and Dev left to reflect on bow the joyous celebration of fertility that is the Feast of Lupercal will never be one for his diary.