Pineapple

Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda

BEGINNING WITH its prickly defences and tender core, a pineapple does not give up its sweetness willingly. Or, as the 16-year-old Roxanna (Jill Murphy) puts it, slurping a Bacardi Breezer with withering Ballymun disdain, "I can't f**kin' stand pineapple." Phillip McMahon's new play for Calipo, staged in association with the Drogheda Arts Festival, doesn't stress the incongruity of exotic tang in concrete jungles. But in Caoilfhionn Dunne's delicately affecting Paula, a single mother of two and Roxanna's elder sister, he has given us a similarly guarded figure, someone fortified with folded arms, sceptical eyes, and a wince where others might smile.

The flavour of Calipo's production is similarly sweet and sour. Set largely in a tumbledown tower block whose inhabitants are deserting in a steady trickle, McMahon's play is as much about the succour of community as it is about the struggle to be happy. Suggested in skeletal outline by Paul O'Mahony's set, Paula's flat echoes with a chorus of female voices – supportive and snooping – that visit almost as frequently as Janet Moran's enjoyably acid Antoinette.

Into this busy refuge comes Roxanna, a model of irresponsibility, followed by Dan (Nick Lee), a charmingly schlubby northerner, whose growing affections strike Paula as "a bit lastchance.com" but who may provide romantic escape to an unflinching realist.

If that sounds like a contradiction, the production has a similar tension, where director David Horan is asked to realise a conventional drama, photo-realistic speech and keen emotional and social detail, together with a briskly episodic structure, occasional nudges of abstraction and sudden injections of lyricism.

Dunne and Lee give warm, understated performances as bruised souls with daring hearts, and though Paula appears even to sleep in her leggings and purple Ugg boots, Moran bears Emma Fraser's street-chic costumes with the most comic dignity. Playing well below her years, Murphy gives a more studied performance and you admire its effort without feeling you have met a character. What sustains them all, though, is the ache of sympathy and the absence of judgment in McMahon's portrait. Here, adults suck alcopops through straws, parents abscond, and sexually frank teens dangle from climbing frames as though no one can accept their responsibilities or act their age.

It is compassionate but unsentimental, hopeful but worldly wise and though its flow still seems hesitant its juice carries a sharp, bitter-sweet tang.

Run has ended at Droichead Arts Centre and tours to Draíocht, Blanchardstown, on May 5th-6th and Axis, Ballymun, on May 11th-14th