She is a young and very beautiful girl and she has a miracle in her belly - a little sprog they call "the chirpaun." It is a mystery which has bewitched through the centuries, from long before the first apple-cheeked Madonna appeared in an Italian fresco.

It really is not that mysterious a mystery, however: just nature taking its course.

Tom Mac Intyre's cast of old, broken men are spellbound, just as Sharon Rabbitte's father was spellbound in The Snapper - because natural as the condition is, in the past its implications were removed as far as possible from the lives of men.

Picking up some of the themes of Mac Intyre's mid1980s play, Dance For Your Daddy, The Chirpaun is concerned with the distance between this generation and the young, independent girl, Jacinta. It is a distance which causes hurt, anger and desire.

The men also desire the girl - it is chilling that Eva Birthistle, who plays the mother of the Chirpaun, appeared most recently in Alan Gilsenan's film All Soul's Day, and in that was also desired by her father's generation, and also spent time in a lunatic asylum.

Perhaps that says something very telling about the position of very beautiful young girls.

However, the mother of the Chirpaun is dedicated to finding her own, mystical path, and leaves behind the men, who seem to have strayed into her world from an old Abbey play, or she into theirs.

Whether or not these men feel the mystery of the girl is immaterial, however, if the audience does not; this writer felt irritated by the iconic status she is given.

This was not helped by Birthistle being ill-cast. She never masters the north-midlands lilt, and so the sense of her having strayed in from another play is intensified.

This judgement - and if it was not made by her she should not have stuck with it - unhinged Kathy Mc Ardle's direction of what was always going to be a difficult and static piece.

The other characters are essentially bit players: Pat Kinevane is a class of a hypnotist, Dolores and Pauline (Renee Weldon and Pauline Hutton), Jacinta's cronettes, Granpa and Bossman (Des Keogh and Bosco Hogan), Jacinta's father, John Joe Concannon's cronies.

The saving grace of the night is a wonderful performance by Tom Hickey as John Joe, full of ill-channelled affection.

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