Getting under the Orange skin

Gary Mitchell's fascinating play has that rare capacity to make you see a supposedly familiar situation in a new light. The "little world" of the title refers to Rathcoole, a vast estate in north Belfast housing 20,000 people, with one road in and another out. This geographical sense of closed community is echoed in the end-game of Mitchell's play where one estate family faces up to deep criminality in its midst and struggles to impose its own justice.

Robert Delameare's production for the Foundry Company, in the Donmar's 1998 Four Corners season, creates a mood of brooding edginess which never relaxes and gathers force for the violent finale. Simon Higlett's stage set - a red carpeted expanse in one Protestant family's home in Rathcoole, where an invalid mother lies dying upstairs - looks familiar in its domesticity. But this is a far cry from England.

The tense relationship between Richard, a mentally disturbed teenager, and a young Catholic girl who disappears precipitates a family crisis. Mitchell shows not just the state of fraught social relations between Protestants and Catholics, or how freelance Protestant discipline overrides the police and legal system. But he also dramatises the existential unease of impoverished working-class Protestant families - presented in furious, impassioned disarray.

The family's internal disputes are mirrored in the ancient Catholic-Protestant animosities beyond. The performances of Stuart Graham's hard-man Ray and Colin Farrell as his flailing, adolescent sibling, are eloquently powered by fury and pain. Paul Hickey's weak-willed Gordon and Helen McCrory as his fianc?e vainly seeking divine guidance are just as powerfully rendered.

Four Corners: In A Little World Of Our Own