Pit

Megan Barker's gothic tale of family values and culinary complications receives a welcome revival following two acclaimed runs at The Arches.

Myrtle has a meal to prepare and an unpalatable story to tell. The audience sits expectantly around a dinner table as three actresses - Yvonne Caddell, Ray Farr and Patrician Kavanagh - prepare a meal of meatballs while recalling the sequence of harrowing events that led social services to her door and kept her locked into a life of misery fed by fear of her family being torn apart.

All three play the Southern mother-of-three and, as the story unfolds, her father, boyfriend, two sons and a grotesque, drug-addled outsider nicknamed Worm Georgie (an exquisite silent turn by Caddell).

Completing the family is a baby girl known only as Whistler, represented by a crudely adapted sandbag. The only character with an independent voice, she takes centre stage (or rather, table) in a memorably surreal interlude to croak her way through a politically astute ballad lamenting her premature birth.

Barker's highly entertaining 60-minute play, inspired by a true story, vividly evokes the everyday desperation of her characters' lives while never letting Myrtle off the hook for her own actions. The story unfolds gradually, allowing the audience opportunity to piece together the clues for themselves before a timer signifies dinner time.

The soundscape muffles the dialogue at times (though presumably it depends on where you're sitting), and Farr occasionally slips out of Myrtle's otherwise consistent accent, but Neil Doherty's taut direction ensures that any brief distractions are quickly forgotten. One to savour.