Project Cube

All the world's a game, and all the men and women merely players in Engine13's ambitious Paper Boy Friends. Shaun Dunne's elliptical text has a poetic verve which can lead to both underdevelopment and overwriting, its rules bending and breaking.

At its centre is a 1980s arcade icon (the multi-talented Daithí Mac Suibhne), asking to be loved as he fades from our memory banks. Oddly, the three “real” people around him are more thinly sketched, pursuing lives that seem no less virtual.

Their props emerge from a toy chest, neighbourhoods materialise in overhead projections and everything adheres to game protocols: sex begins with spin the bottle, truth lies at the end of 20 questions, and even the harrowing testimony of Roxanna Nic Liam’s sexually-abused young woman hovers somewhere between reality and simulation.

Director Tara Robinson wisely counterbalances the show’s metaphorical ambiguities with expressive physicality: the most moving sequence comes via Paper Boy’s frenzied dance – an emotional delivery before it’s game over.

Final performance tonight