The realms of the hyper-real

Boxy and desolate, the Blackpool flats stand abandoned on the verge of Cork's city centre. A classic misconception of 1960s planning, they loom raggedy and forbidding in the icy bite of a sharp April. Inside, the film-maker Alan Gilsenan is putting a bunch of rib-skinny waifs and snot-nose scuts through their paces, shooting a nasty little heroin-chic number to advertise a new and exclusive unisex scent.

The scent, "Craving", is fictional, a central device in the new play of the same title from Meridian Theatre Company. Gilsenan, sporting a nifty, complicated-looking, digital videocam is working quickly, packing a fat load of filming into a chaotic, race-around three-day schedule. There are lumps of narrative to be shot and for one scene, two real-life Special Branch men play detectives hassling a rent boy. It is duly noted that one of the guards displays an uncanny feel for the acting lark.

Later, Gilsenan is whizzed about in a motor, shooting from the higgledy-piggledy topography of the city's north side, committing the topsy-turvy sprawl to videotape. The tape, edited in a rocketing five days, is used as a narrative-assisting backdrop and as a thematic visual underscore in the play. Caught at dusk in the film-maker's trademark blurry, jumpy, cinematically scatty style, Cork looks terrific. "It's the great lost location," says Johnny Hanrahan, the play's co-writer and director.

Cut to Attica, a hulking mock-Italianate building perched on Camden Quay. Once the Atkins Garden Centre, it's labyrinthine and deserted and has lately been used by artistic sorts for all manner of creative noodlings. Skulking about inside, Craving's co-author and musical director, John Browne, and electronica boffin, Cormac O'Connor, are eating bananas and smoking fags surrounded by a sampler, a sequencer, an eight-track, some keyboards and countless other thingamajigs with lots of buttons and flashing lights.

They are collaborating on the play's score, a symphony of pumped-up excess that explores the many and varied mutations of a decade's worth of dance music. It goes further back, too, carrying hints of early 1980s electro and screaming 1970s disco. Music has always been crucial to Meridian's productions, it's never just an incidental element. Browne and Hanrahan have been working together for the guts of 15 years, edging closer to an idyll of pure musical drama, where words and melody combine to give heft to a knockout narrative punch. Craving is as evolved a beast of the species as they've yet produced. Throughout the play, the Cork singer John Brosnan, lately acclaimed for his work with New Cabaret gurus Sexual Chocolate, appears as a sort of benign, compassionate chorus figure, delivering spooksome torch songs in a scorching, dark falsetto.

With just four days to the previews, about half the score has been completed. John and Cormac are middling flustered, baggy about the eyes, getting set to miss the weekend's reggae festival. Long days and long nights are ahead.

Fade to the velveteen plush of the Everyman Palace Theatre as Meridian wallow deep in the tearful fluster of eleventh-hour rehearsals. Marshalled by Hanrahan and assistant director Fiona Peake, the three principal actors (Simon O'Gorman, Elizabeth Moynihan and Frank Bourke) are coming to terms with the play's intricate chronology. An uncostumed run-through of Craving eases the fear that the multimedia effects might draw the gaze away from the main action unfolding onstage. Instead, the film and the music thicken the soup, seasoning the traditional with a dash of digital innovation.

Though it's mid-week maudlin outside, the Everyman is chock-full of bustle: Brosnan is roaring songs from an on-stage mezzanine, Bourke is making hay with some vintage early 1990s vogueing and Hanrahan is estimating that maybe 80, maybe 90 per cent of what they want to achieve with Craving will work out. I leave them to their devices and going out the side door, find a wino trying to sneak in to the theatre. Everyone wants in on the action.

But what's it all about, Alfie? The plot, without giving too much away, centres around Dublin-based ad exec, Noel, his investigative hack wife, Aisling, and Corkonian rent boy, John Paul. While she's busy probing the dastardly doings of a hooky politico, Noel picks JP for a starring role in the Craving campaign and the three lives conspire to tangle up in a mess of confusions. We see different worlds - the couple's patch, Temple Bar and the Cork underworld, pregnant with the threat of random violence. It's a pretty sleek thriller.

Themes and motifs? Craving concerns itself with the hellish vapidity that transmits like a virus through the sleek modernity of the millennial metropolis . . . It's a world where design minimises physicality, and souls are singed to a crisp in the microwaves of media distortion. The multi-media stuff isn't just for show; it's a central concern of the story. We look at how media influences the perception of reality, how it spins the everyday into the realms of the hyper-real. Heady stuff.

Craving, by Meridian Theatre Company in association with Everyman Palace Theatre, runs until May 16th and will tour later in the year.