Union of troubled natures

Gary Mitchell's disturbing play exerts a slow and stealthy grip upon your attention. It takes time and four scenes before you realise precisely the author's intentions. Mitchell vividly portrays the Women's Local UDA as masculinised, replicating the fierceness, violence and flinty intransigence of their monolithic male counterparts.

At first, though, the mood and style is that of a domestic Ulster drama, an everyday story of working-class Protestant women folk, their particular stresses and strains, values and views. There is more than a whiff of serious soap opera about the emotional and erotic entanglements of these lives in Josie Rourke's beautifully pitched and acted production.

The existence of Michelle Fairley's grim, gaunt Brenda Ford revolves around an apparently unemployed teenage daughter, Jenny (cool Lisa Hogg), who neglects her own infant upstairs. Brenda's prematurely senile mother-in-law, Rita, lies in a makeshift bedroom, which is intermittently separated from the parlour by net-curtaining: Christopher Oram's windowless, domestic set looks too grandly spacious and the backcloth of blue sky seems irrelevant.

But the sense of domestic tension rises interestingly. Brenda's estranged husband, Terry, (Stephen Kennedy) recently released from prison after serving nearly two decades for murder, looks in to spread a little unhappiness. He riles his wife and jealously goads Mark, a young builder who hopelessly dotes upon the lady of the house.

Mitchell, who won the Evening Standard's Most Promising Playwright award for The Force of Change in 2000, has already written in a spirit of critical compassion about the tense, polarised dogmatics of Ulster. Once the local leaders of the Women's UDA come calling the play begins to relate Brenda's secret, violent past to her present-day role in policing relations between Protestant women and Catholic men.

Sinead Keenan's powerful, teenage Adele, found guilty of associating with a suspicious Catholic, is subjected to a process of questioning, intimidation and harassment by the prayerful, vicious UDA women who finally turn to violence.

Loyal Women, which makes full, ironic play upon the adjective in the title, has a slight tendency to melodrama. Valerie Lilley's Rita whose senility proves to be skindeep and the self-sacrificial Terry prove to be more contrived than convincing characters.

The value of Mitchell's fascinating revenge drama is discovered in its sharp expose of a fearful Protestant working class mind- and heart-set.

Loyal Women