Actor Conor Lovett's companion piece to his award-winning adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Molloy sees him marching further into Beckett's trilogy of novels with this slim, wise little solo performance.

One has to suspend one's image of the terminally bedbound Malone in the institutional home, unable to die. Lovett stands before you, almost apologetically, talking you through the relentless churning of thoughts, as Malone's mind, "flayed alive by memory", spools out fragments of tales both remembered and invented.

The staging feeds off Beckett's own pared-back stagework, with Lovett dressed in brown layers of coats and a foolish, sawn-off trilby. Trained in the Jacque Lecoq school in Paris, he brings something of the absurdist clown to this tense, nervy incarnation. He also uses a vivid natural shorthand to signal movement, landscape or characters, but there is also quite a bit of old-fashioned storytelling in his polished Cork tones.

This is a mainly comic Malone: the lip-curling contempt occasionally breaking through the hauteur; the ugly, self-congratulatary little smirks; the impotent misanthropy.

Lovett makes much from the dismaying description of ancient sex ("like trying to put a pillow into a pillow-case, having it bend in two"); and supporting shadow characters, such as Big Lambert, the bleeder of pigs, and Lemuel the psychopathic little orderly who steals fat from the soup. The piece truly darkens and engages here, as Lemuel leads his frightful crew of inmates out on their murderous excursion.

Lovett has played larger theatres with this material, but it is a pleasure to examine him in this tiny studio, his wary eyes raking people's faces like a haunted stand-up. Directed by Judy Hegarty, it's a very clever, enjoyable, even moving piece. But maybe Lovett will have to age into greater decrepitude truly to impart Beckett's deep drone of mortal tedium, or his distant allegories of the disaster that befell Europe when Beckett was in his prime.

• Until Saturday. Box office: 00 353 1 6795720