There is no space - perhaps even on earth - that Corcadorca Theatre Company cannot transform. For Neil O'Sullivan's short Hatch 22 the Granary's uncompromising contours are broken into gantries with internal and exterior acting areas mounting in irregular sequences from floor to ceiling.
The setting is urban, but the effect has a fairy-tale quality, in which a Hansel and Gretel live out their little day somewhere in the 1950's - a provenance indicated by details such as the radios suspended here and there.
Beds, couches, hatches filling in the design are exaggerated beyond normality, so that a sofa mutates into a raft on the Zambesi river, and the diagnostic pathology slide used as a metaphor for a miscarriage dissolves into an African moon.
All this imagination, technology and staff (five people are required to elevate the settee) are brought to the subject of a marital crisis in which a couple, communicating only through their shared fantasies of escape, resolve their difficulties as suddenly as they came together in the first place.
Neil O'Sullivan's play, directed here by Pat Kiernan, won the inaugural Corcadorca Playwright Award this year. He is very well served by Gary Murphy and Terry Dineen, both acting with an accurate pathos. But it is time to ask if Corcadorca's dynamic allegiance to spectacular design (in this case at the hands of Cliff Dolliver) can eclipse subtle material, with the production style becoming all-important, Cormac O'Connor's sound allen-compassing. At 45 minutes duration (and I'm being generous) the suspicion grows that the play affords imaginative opportunities to the company rather than having a significance of its own.
Continues at The Granary until November 27th at 8 p.m.