It's hard to know how effective theatre can be nowadays as a tool for advocacy, yet there's little doubting the sincerity of the Calypso company and Dublin writer Paula Meehan's new play, set inside Mountjoy women's prison in Dublin. For many years a much-criticised, draconian, heroin-raddled, overcrowded place, the jail will be finally replaced this month with a new building.
Meehan wrote the piece to "acquit a huge debt" to prisoners she took for creative writing classes (of her original group of 12 from the mid-80s, all but one have succumbed to suicide, overdose or, as they say in junkie parlance, "the virus"). As a result, the play is a sympathetic inside track on the conditions, and indeed the dynamics among the prisoners, which led so many to take their own lives.
Set in a cramped, grimy cell - the only contact with the outside world is a window, and the dehumanised rasp of the screws from the intercom - the play concerns four prisoner characters. Delo is a heroin dealer who uses her stock-in-trade to enslave her cellmates - Martha, an angry, young HIV-positive mother, and Lila, a teenager who buckles under Delo's intimidation and heroin-for-masturbation antics and takes a lethal overdose.
These wild urban types are taken aback by the new arrival, Alice, a solid, moral, once-respectable country widow, now serving a life sentence for stabbing a violent neighbour to death in self-defence. The showdown between the two older women is inevitable.
Under Garrett Keogh's unleavened direction, there is little room for pacing or dramatic irony. His emphasis on cheery comic Dublin criminality makes for much transgressive humour, yet constantly reduces the rural character to a crude piss-take - despite Joan Sheehy's pained, concentrated performance.
As a result, the piece is engaging enough but lacks the vocabulary of despair. It's also curiously conservative, with the sexuality between the women, for example, portrayed as merely manipulative. Yet a few little factual shocks sent me reeling - most of all, that having widely shared syringes under a regime that turned a blind eye, the women were HIV-tested without their consent or knowledge - and then segregated by screws in "white space suits".
It's these wake-up jabs that count. This show is certainly a blunt instrument, yet it calls for a scrutiny of the realities behind all this play-acting - and all the distant mirrors that polite theatre throws up.
• At City Arts Centre, Dublin, tonight, then touring to Limerick, Cork, Galway, Portlaoise and Belfast. Details: 00-353-16-704539
