There Came a Gypsy Riding? In Ireland, in 2007? There Came a Call-Centre Line Manager Driving, more likely. And, to add to the fey Oirish title, we start with the sound of a plangent violin, or feedle...

Frank McGuinness’s new play is a family drama. Margaret and Leo (Imelda Staunton and Ian McElhinney) lost their son Gene a couple of years back. He slit his wrists on the beach, leaving no note. Now, on what would have been his 21st birthday, they return to the holiday home with their other son, Simon (Aidan McArdle), and their daughter, Louise (Elaine Cassidy).

Down the road lives their distant cousin Bridget, played by Eileen Atkins in a quite outstanding comic performance, albeit in a brilliantly written part. A mad old biddy in pink wellies, with quite a streak of motiveless malignancy, she is a stalking figure with rolling eyes, pushing a salvaged pram, her crazed garrulousness taking in the metaphysical consequences of ironing on a Sunday, the disgustingness of chickens and her own recurrent headlessness. She’s Synge updated, or Crazy Jane’s granddaughter. Without her, the stage is too bleak and bare.

Staunton, as the mother, is a tight, hard-faced little woman with curly reddish hair and rough hands. The survivor of a grim childhood, she evokes less sympathy than she should. McElhinney’s immensely likeable performance is more natural, while Cassidy and McArdle are convincing, mercurial adolescents. However, while we are never in doubt about the family’s grief, the countervailing familial raillery isn’t funny enough: never as comic as the fine art of Irish insult is in real life, and certainly not up to Roddy Doyle standards. Though Leo’s line about how Margaret used to open beer bottles between her breasts did have me laughing.

You wonder about the characters’ motivation and psychological truth. They worry at Gene’s suicide like a scab and turn on one another endlessly. Margaret and Simon cap each other’s recitations from Keats, which stretches plausibility, even though she lectures in English and he works in a bookshop. Is this really how people cope with grief, two years on? Then Bridget casually produces a note she found on Gene’s body, explaining that she has kept it until they were ready. It becomes a crude device to prolong dramatic tension, as they lay it on the table and sit around staring at it. The trouble is, you can’t believe they would do anything but fall on it like hungry wolves. McGuinness does not extend the device for too long, but, not for the first time, plausibility is undermined.

The play is almost entirely free of action; about the most vigorous thing anyone does is chop a carrot. It’s a talking play, but much of the family’s conversation is slow, self-torturing and not necessarily revealing.

The compensation comes in the character of Bridget. When she talks, you feel you could quite happily listen to her for ever — even if the more you listen to her, the more vague you become about what is true and what is not, until you end up feeling you know absolutely nothing.

The set is appropriately melancholy, the backdrop a vast watercolour of a Connacht rainscape, and the lighting tries hard to capture the stage direction for “the magnificent early light of the west of Ireland”, even if it does not quite succeed. Michael Attenborough’s directorial pace, however, is plodding and ponderous; and, aside from Margaret’s climactic veering into the fringes of madness and out again, compelling moments of high drama are too rare. On the whole, this is a less harrowing and less convincing evening than it should be.

There Came a Gypsy Riding, Three stars
Almeida, N1