CULTURE SHOCK:THERE ARE TIMES, however rare, when a piece of theatre has an effect way beyond its intrinsic merit.

There is some weird chemistry between the play, the setting and the circumstances that makes the event unforgettable. One of those rare conjunctions occurred in Dublin this week.

I've felt many things, over many years, watching plays. But I don't think I've ever experienced quite the eeriness of watching Brian Friel's obscure 1969 satire, The Mundy Scheme, earlier this week. The play is being staged (it finishes its short run tonight) in a place that could hardly be more resonant: against the backdrop of closed luxury shops in the concourse of the trendy CHQ mall in the IFSC in Dublin. It is not a great piece of theatre, but it doesn't have to be. Walking into this cathedral of the Celtic Tiger, with talk of bailouts and endgames ringing in your ears, to see a 40-year-old play about Ireland's financial and political bankruptcy is a haunting experience.

Consider the opening 15 minutes: a voiceover before the action begins asks “Does the transition from dependence to independence induce a fatigue, a mediocrity, an ennui?” Then we see the Taoiseach’s private secretary wading through letters from members of the public: “Your whole party is crooked, but Moloney, the Minister for External Affairs, and you, Ryan, is the biggest gangsters of them all.” And then, when the Taoiseach, FX Ryan, enters, he mutters “Republic on brink of collapse”. The country has run out of money. The headlines are screaming that Ireland is “on the point of national death”. The Minister for Finance returns from a trip to Geneva to report of the international bankers that “they have shored us up twice already. And to put it crudely, they now think we’re beyond repair”.

There is even a line that I assumed had been added for contemporary relevance. The international bankers, it is said, “know about the three byelections coming up and that we’re going to lose all three”. I checked the text later: the line is Friel’s, from 1969. Spooky or what?

There's a large body of his work that Friel himself considers a failure and seldom allows to be seen. It includes plays, like Crystal and Foxand The Gentle Island,on which that judgment seems far too harsh. The Mundy Schemeis not one of them. It was rejected by the Abbey in 1969 (probably for reasons of political gutlessness rather than of aesthetic judgment). It was then staged at the Olympia by the late Donal Donnelly. Rather bizarrely, it then opened on Broadway, where, rather predictably, it closed after four performances. Apart from a production in upstate New York in 1996, I'm not aware of any other stage history.

And this is not, sadly, a case of a misunderstood masterpiece. The Mundy Schemehas an authentic moral outrage. It is, for its time, extraordinarily brave in depicting what is obviously Fianna Fáil as both absurd and corrupt: the bankrupt government comes up with a scheme to sell most of the west of Ireland to a New York property developer as a giant graveyard (the world's "eternal resting place") and the Haugheyesque Taoiseach Ryan sets about buying up much of the land for himself before the scheme gets out. It is not surprising that the Abbey fought shy of putting a gangster Taoiseach and a Cabinet of drunken buffoons on its hallowed stage.

But as a play The Mundy Schemeis too enclosed and static to sustain itself beyond a one-act sketch and fails to justify its three acts. By its very failure, indeed, it reminds us of the nature of Friel's dramatic imagination and why it does not stretch to straightforward political satire.

The satirist must have a stable point of view from which to attack the follies of others. Friel's natural elements, on the other hand, are ambiguity, doubt and confusion. The rage that lies behind The Mundy Schemeis too blunt and uncompromising to ignite his true inventiveness. Once the idea is established it has nowhere much to go.

Yet, right here, right now, the play’s obvious limitations are less significant than the way it chimes with the immediate moment. Jim Ivers made the inspired decisions to stage it in the present context for his Newbridge-based Tavistock Arts company and, especially, to stage it in such a resonant site.

At the simplest level, seeing all this stuff from 40 years ago points up the truth that neither Fianna Fáil's corruption nor disgust at it started with the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. Beyond this political point, though, there is a creepy sense of deja vu. Seeing The Mundy Schemeright now feels like discovering a letter written when you were a child that accurately forecasts your fate as an adult.

Ivers’s production, performed by a raw but mostly effective cast, is at its best when it does not try to hammer home the contemporary relevance and lets it emerge for itself. Some of Ivers’s deviations from the script make complete sense – putting Ryan’s TV interview on screen, for example, rather than playing it out on stage. Others are less successful. Ryan’s drawing room, which has been converted to an office, is turned into a child’s playroom, with the set dominated by colourful toys – an idea that promises more than it delivers.

In this very unusual case, though, the execution matters less than the idea. Simply by being what it is, where it is, in the week that's in it, The Mundy Schemeis a memorable experience. And if it fails as satire it is only because, yet again, Irish political reality makes satire redundant.