Sadly, this children's Christmas show displays all the imagination and verve that its tiresome title suggests. That's not to say that a spirited school group won't get something out of it: An Unusual Christmas lasts less than an hour, and - with plenty of opportunities for shouting and stomping feet - the time fairly flies. It starts promisingly. Before the audience of four to 11year-olds enters the auditorium, they are taken in small groups through a dark room (three screamers at the performance I attended) representing winter, where a bear, bats, badger and squirrel hibernate and a butterfly escapes the cocoon. Very nice. But the 35minute play that follows, complete with doggerel songs, badly sung, adds nothing. The form is slightly "unusual" for an Irish production - a puppet show played out on a table, with puppeteers fully visible - but the story of the tussle between Winter (a silver-booted spider) and an over-eager Spring (an acrobatic caterpillar) goes nowhere, repeatedly.
The characters lack character, apart from Jack Frost, a converted umbrella who amusingly crumples as he melts. The children seemed to enjoy a certain moral ambivalence about whether to support Winter or Spring, but frankly the ambiguity seemed less a product of craft than of half-hearted scripting.
An Unusual Christmas runs until Friday, December 19th, at varying times. To book phone 01-6770643.