Little Gem

In the writing debut of Dublin actress Elaine Murphy, the audience is presented with the shared lives of three generations of women from a working class Dublin family. They never interact. Instead, the spotlight falls on them in turn, prompting each actress to rise from her chair to deliver a short monologue while the others sit in the dark.

But despite this contrivance, which in a weaker play might rob the story of its realism, Little Gem never loses a sense of the messy, overlapping intimacy of family life. That it manages to do so is to the massive credit of both Murphy, whose script demonstrates not just a good ear for Dublin vernacular but a near-reverence for it, and the three actresses, whose performances are unfailingly on the money.

Teenager Amber (Sarah Greene) shifts from foot to foot with slovenly charm as she tells the story of her accidental pregnancy by "that bollix" Paul. "We hardly made a baby out of that, did we?" she says, marvelling at the unsatisfactory sex that led to the conception. Her lonely mother (Hilda Fay) is tentatively dealing with a nervous breakdown - she's scarred from her marriage to Amber's junkie father (another bollix). But Anita Reeves leaves the strongest impression as grandmother Kay, whose husband (not a bollix) is on the way out. At 60, she's sexually frustrated, telling us in a hilarious vignette about a shopping trip to Ann Summers.

Entirely down-to-earth, extremely funny, sad but ultimately heartwarming, Little Gem turns the story of three cramped, limited lives into something lyrical and grand.