You might expect the most vigorous translation of Brian Merriman's Gaelic classic - the one by Frank O'Connor - in the hands of a seasoned actress and director would produce a lunchtime of great entertainment. You'd be wrong.

All the spiciness of this rude, funny, passionate, at times tragic lyric fantasy is reduced through Nora Relihan's recitation and Stephen Holland's direction to the level of an insipid, anodyne fairy-tale. The four drastically different voices of the poem - hapless poet, wronged young woman, bitter old man, stern fairy queen - are blurred into one barely differentiated simper. Also, in a fatally misjudged attempt to communicate a sense of everyday realism to the poem, Relihan mutters her way through great chunks of the piece while perambulating about the stage in an indiscriminate and self-consciously thespian manner.

She almost succeeds in sweeping all the humour, eroticism, and biting wit of the poem away.

Almost, but not quite, and what makes the performance almost worth seeing is the furtiveness with which its odourous, earthy matter is daintily side-stepped. The daintiness is intensified by the way Relihan is dressed: for a Ballsbridge dinner party rather than 18th-century Co Clare.

The accompanying guitar music by Denis Costello should help to introduce some slight dramatic shifts in an undramatic hour, but if anything it only reinforces the insipidity of the performance. The guitar is silent in what should be the darker parts of the poem, and only chimes in with Relihan to remind us that all things are really bright and beautiful.

There is strong affinity with one of the themes of Merriman's poem however: impotence.