No Romance

Peacock Theatre, Dublin

MIDWAY THROUGH the fretful making of an erotic photo collectionfor her boyfriend, while she is dressed in a fuchsia-colouredmedieval-style dress that aims for "sexy Guinevere" but comes off as"Bunratty psychedelia", Janet Moran's effervescent Laura wonders ifthis is all a bit desperate. Her photographer, Gail, is sceptical:"I think the wand is confusing."

But the great comedy, keen sympathy and lingering poignancy ofNancy Harris's Abbey debut will wisely avoid simple answers. Laura,like everyone else in these three teasingly connected short plays,has been weaned on a diet of fantasy. Harris's astute triptych showswhat happens when reality intrudes.

Surprisingly fluent in Arthurian romance, Celtic mythology andtasteful internet smut, Laura could be a ditzy scholar of erotica.Describing one blog, The Story of C, as a series of sexual talesinvolving ordinary people or mythic figures - each told with a twist- she may as well be talking about Harris's play. That isn't tosuggest that Wayne Jordan's production has a one-track mind.

Laura spills a secret that deepens her anxious naughtiness intothornier matters of body politics, sex and death, while NatalieRadmall-Quirke, stately and dispassionate as Gail, will discoverherself on the emotionally rough end of a "courtly love" triangle.Here, you're either searching for a love story or condemned to livethrough one.

Harris's writing is bracingly witty, alert and incisive, althoughits articulacy and bothersome scene changes suggest it would loselittle as a radio drama. An expertly judged performance by StephenBrennan in the second play strikes a more physically dependentbalance between farce and psychodrama. A victim of the "too muchinformation age", Brennan's Joe is less concerned with the death ofhis mother than the Facebook frolics of his daughter, but he becomesa mortifyingly funny dissembler when his own internet activitiescome back to haunt him.

Confronted by wife Carmel (Tina Kelleher), their exchanges carrygrace notes of Arthur Schnitzler, raising chuckles as they induceshivers: can fantasy and life be reconciled, or should some secretsstay buried?

The last play, like Paul Keogan's sparing set, is burdened bydemands of structure and resolution. Keogan's solution is tosteadily peel his design away, from a canny Roy Lichtensteinembellishment in the studio to the merest suggestion of a West Corkhome strewn with packing boxes. But Harris must thread earlierconnections into the story of the elderly eccentric, Peg (anengaging Stella McCusker), whose tortured romantic history and depthof feeling makes her harried, exacting son (Conor Mullen) anddisconnected grandson (Daire Cassidy) seem both tragically hollow bycomparison and too lightly drawn.

When giving counsel on the importance of desire and passion,Peg's exhortation to the unquenchable fantasies of myth supply theplay's animation and finally its logic. "Just because you have atragic life, doesn't mean you have to have a tragic story," shesays. "We make our own stories."

The secret of Harris's play, vividly and touchingly realised, isthat the reverse is also true. Whatever the title says, and howeverit goads or guides us, romance isn't dead.

Until April 2