Helen Meany reviews Finders Keepers Peacock, Dublin

While a poet from Monaghan was contemplating the still green

waters of Dublin's Grand Canal in the 1950s and early 1960s, across the city a young boy was experiencing his own canal-bank walk: Peter Sheridan's new play celebrates the north inner city where he grew up and the people who lived and worked beside the Royal Canal.

It is a memory play, evoking an area on a cusp: with the decline of Dublin's docks and the closure of the canal to traffic in 1961 came unemployment and decay. Sheridan is capturing a

moment in the city's recent past

before it is obliterated by the current redevelopment.

Boys' friendship, first love, the freedom to swim and dive for bottles in the canal: the memories have a warm, Ready Brek glow, emanating from the central, autobiographical character of Redser (Aaron Monaghan), a clever schoolboy whose love for his

locality is expressed implicitly and explicitly.

While he, his friend Pancho and Pancho's sister Catherine (the "auld triangle") are not cocooned from troubles, with an alcoholic father, a bullying Christian Brother, money worries and the threat of

emigration, the tone remains

essentially comic.

As we watch boys rescuing frogs from the canal and kissing them in the hope of transformation; crones who regain youthful beauty; fathers who intervene to protect their sons at the eleventh hour, it becomes clear that this is, in fact, a fairytale - or it would be, if the writing and direction allowed it.

Each act opens with a monologue from Redser, filtering the precise sounds, tastes and textures of childhood through his observant consciousness. Performed with awkward grace, these establish the nostalgic mood, stopping just short of sentimentality.

The ensuing dialogue with Pancho (Feidlim Cannon), Joe Joe (Domhnall O'Donoghue) and Catherine (Lisa Lambe) is, by contrast, slack and repetitive, an attempt at faithful recreation, or mimicry, rather than evocation.

Particularly in the first act, in the boys' encounter with two elderly sisters (Anne Kent and Máire Ní Ghrainne), the humour becomes laboured and the scenes seem static.

Director Martin Drury is not helped at all by Carol Betera's set, an all too real canal lock that takes over most of the stage, restricts the possibility of movement and forces the actors to stand in a row downstage. Stagnant waters encroach.

Runs until March 6th