Picture the scene. In a cluttered bedroom on the top floor of a high-rise in Ballymun, a 13-year-old girl is getting ready to go out. Through the open window, her best friend chugs from a noxious blue alcopop and helps straighten her hair with good-natured savagery, writes Peter Crawley
The city behind them - beautifully played here by Dublin - lights up at sunset like a wilderness of candles.
If the view is startling, the conversation can match it: Kelle is pregnant and Dannielle wants to know if the father is a man or a boy.
A play about teenage pregnancy staged by a youth theatre group may not sound like an immediately thrilling proposition.
But the fact that this is Roundabout Youth Theatre, an almost unfairly talented company which treats site-specific performance as a complete immersion in experience, makes Roy Williams' short drama seem groundbreaking.
This is no mean feat. Any play that includes the line, "Anyone can be your friend. Only I can be your mother," frequently threatens to collapse into cliches.
Spoken by Stephanie Kelly, who plays Kelle's 26-year-old single mother Sam, the words become more complicated.
In a play about responsibility and maturity, everyone would rather take the easy option.
This is the source of the play's tension and its comedy. A grandmother at 26, Sam is tempted to report herself to the Guinness Book of Records. The worst taunt that can be levelled at Lewis Magee's young father-to-be Nathan, is that he smells of old people.
A more unsettling whiff comes from his brother Richie (Robert O'Connor), an 18-year-old father of three, who hangs around the school gates in search of easy pickings.
Taking a cast close enough to each other in age, director Louise Lowe makes a virtue of something potentially confusing. That it is hard to tell mother from child, or boy from man, is the point of the play.
But the genius of Lowe's production is its staggering attention to detail.
Owen Boss's design includes something for every wayward glance, from an amusingly defaced poster in the bedroom, to character graffiti in the stairwell.
Williams' script, written for NT Connections in a London Chav argot, has also been adapted for the locality. Given that the flavour of speech is largely scathing sarcasm, this actually improves it, with Sinead Moloney's Kelle, Kiara Noonan's ditzy Danielle and Nicola Moore's hilarious Yvette delivering their wicked barbs like brutal music.
The entire cast are adept at a style you could call camera-phone naturalism, a bracingly realistic method which is not without its excesses - if a line here can be said, it will be shouted; if a door can be closed it will be slammed.
But the style matches the electrifying intimacy of the piece, where a tiny audience will shuffle through the flat, flinch from a fight and, at one point, even share a bed.
Fearless and quick-witted (the way Lowe sidesteps the preachy issue-drama ending is just masterful), this company is doing phenomenal work to introduce its participants and its audience to theatre.
What they will learn there, though, is that it doesn't get any better than this.
Ends run tonight
