Give Me Your Answer, Do!

A mood of unrelenting, Chekhovian melancholia clings like mist to Brian Friel's new play in which everyone is seriously sad beneath the cover of bright, buoyant manners. There's no missing the artful conviction with which he treads his familiar Irish terrain - on this occasion an old manse in County Donegal - where people have learned to take unhappiness uncomplainingly like medicine. As a bitter comedy of three couples valiantly nursing unwell marriages and keeping up appearances, the play works in comic though essentially undramatic fashion: no ripples of real change.

Friel begins and ends with a scene of wretched stasis, distilling the play's emotional essence and character. Tom, the elderly author whose reputation, creative output and finances have all dwindled away, is seen visiting his catatonic 22-year-old daughter in her cell-like hospital situation of solitary confinement. There, she has languished for 10 years. Everyone else exists in a state of similar though far less extreme languishing - as Friel reveals when Tom and Daisy his wife play host to five unhappy people, beautifully brought to life by a superlative cast.

The presence of David, a young literary agent hired by a Texan University to buy up the manuscripts of Irish authors, ignites the hope he will save Tom from poverty. But this small cliff-hanging question assumes no crucial importance. Friel's real interest is in the symptoms of inveterate marital discord. How deftly he piles on the agonies. While Geraldine James's handsome Daisy poignantly registers unhappiness in grimaces of pain, Niall Buggy's extravagant Tom roars, declaims and droops, pulling out the emotional stops.

The dejected state of their relations parallels that of Daisy's parents. Margaret Tyzack's retired, arthritic doctor looks down acerbically upon her piano-playing kleptomaniac husband - whose dapper dandiness and child-like vulnerability is vividly evoked by John Woodvine. Gawn Grainger and Sorcha Cusack as another author and his wife at perpetual daggers drawn, while gaily bantering, wittily contribute to the comedy of marital unease in Robin Lefevre's sensitive production.

But Friel never gives serious clues to an understanding of what has so tarnished these couples' lives and relations. He works here only as a master of dramatic still-life.

Give Me Your Answer, Do!