When Radio Active first hit the Dublin stage a dozen or more years ago in production by Team Theatre aimed primarily at school audiences, it was a pirate radio station.
Bernard Farrell, in a redrafting of his play for Barnstorm Theatre of Kilkenny, has altered its status to that of a legal, local small-town station with a licence from the IRTC and has up-dated both the music content of the station's output and all necessarily topical references.
But the mood and the broad outline of the piece remain much the same - rough and broadly-drawn satire of mindless music and phoney disc jockeys for a dim audience.
The plot, such as it is, concerns the arrival home of Nuala Ryan (Helen Walsh) in search of a serious journalistic job while she minds her recently-widowed mother (Joan Brosnan Walsh).
When Nuala gets a job on the station she alarms its proprietor Sean Delaney (Gerald Fitzmahony) with the controversial content of her news and magazine programmes and she seems to have an unsettling effect on her old small-town chum Joan (Aisling O'Neill), who is engaged to local electrician and pool-addict Declan (Leonard Hayden).
But she appears to entrance "elegant" disc jockey Justin Day - actually the bedraggled and neurotically insecure Eamon McGovern (Eugene O'Brien) who is the main anchorman and floor-sweeper of the station.
Dramatically, it is slight and superficial stuff which must rely for its theatrical effect mostly on the comedy in its author's text.
Philip Hardy's direction does not take best advantage of the comedy in either its pacing or the spacing of the action, and the acting is too often of that coarse variety which signals facially in advance what the next line is likely to contain. More assured dead-pan would be funnier and more effective.
Harry Harris's set is necessarily simple for subsequent touring, but is unnecessarily primitive in its execution. But it all drew frequent laughter and an enthusiastic response from a full house last night.
After its current Dublin run, the show moves to Kilkenny on September 23rd, Longford on October 9th, Waterford on September 16th and Sligo on October 2nd
