‘Youtube’ has promulgated the concept of the family-friendly lecture: science, philosophy and economics are gracefully deconstructed in minutes by smiling Brian Coxes and Ken Robinsons for the benefit of TED, celebrity audiences, humankind, and other oiks. In fact, all that stuff you didn’t quite digest at school is processed into clickable, likeable, byte-sized nuggets by stand-up professors and streamed direct to a tablet on your lap. Novelist Julian Gough does much the same with the Irish boom-to-bust phenomenon for the Galway stage with his bemusing but un-dramatic Shaggy-goat parable explaining how our Celtic Tiger lost its teeth.

It’s 1987 and the 3:30 train to Dublin from Ballinasloe is delayed. On the platform, Somalian economics guru, Dr. Ibrahim Bihi (Wil Johnson), chews his dried goat’s leg as he engages with woefully thick Paddy-Irishman, Jude. The wait gives Bihi the opportunity to explain the tragic economics of the soon-to-emerge Irish financial boom through the telling of his ‘The Great Goat Bubble’ story. Blaming his clipped speech and formal manner on his various degrees in economics, he illustrates how the “invisible hand of the free-market economy” works by telling the story of how he once exploited a (fictitious) compensation culture in Hargeisa airport, where his ruse of allowing an airplane to run over his three-legged goat spawned a vast virtual market for the animals that eventually collapsed.

In such an absurdly overheated capitalist world, even relationships are measured in economic terms. Bihi, we learn, is off to witness C.J. Haughey’s opening of the IFSC on this day, and by analogy, we are to realise that such a facility will create a similarly vacuous economy. Every so often, the insufferably grinning Jude (Ciarán O’Brien) interjects with a crushingly inane question just in case anyone in the audience is lost or needs nudging: a Watson to a Holmes but without a Professor Moriarty to spice things up.

And nothing really happens. There are certainly a lot of knowing chuckles from the audience, because, of course, they do know what will happen twenty years later. There is no drama, no conflict, no tension, no real dialogue or credible relationship between the stereotypes (Bihi loves lecturing: Jude is entirely out of his league), and just a little humour – predominantly provided by increasing bizarre and ironic excuses by CIÉ for the delay. The train arrives eventually and, yes, another metaphor creaks into view. Even the economic theory seems to fall short since the source of the compensation and its mechanism exploited by Bihi in his initial airplane/goat ruse is glossed over. However, Wil Johnson works well and delivers an engaging explanation of a complex subject, despite Ciarán O’Brien being required to make increasingly irritating goat-bleat imitations and give knowing glances at the audience.

Director Mikel Murfi stylises the piece with precise choreography and asks for very conscious vocal tics and strict delivery from both actors - but his decisions do not make absolute sense, even though they begin to reflect the surreality of Gough's zany text. Little of the mise-en-scène, however distinctive, can change the fact that the strength of this piece is its intriguing pedagogical story, which would have suited a page rather better than the Galway Arts Festival stage. Julian Gough’s clever and prescient original, published in the Financial Times in 2003, wonderfully anticipates the Lehman Brothers (et al) but, perhaps lacking a firmer dramaturgical hand from Fishamble, the work has not survived its transposition from the book to the boards. There is drama in Sabine Dargent’s suitably distressed set design of concrete sheets merging satisfactorily with the walls of the Druid theatre, and in the well-judged lighting from Nick McCall - but The Great Goat Bubble is not a play.

Perhaps the most notable aspect is the magnificent irony that this production about the absurdity of the financial system is presented as part of a festival proudly sponsored by a bank - one infamous for its recent inability to manage its I.T. resources let alone handle its own bottom line!

Matthew Harrison