Is there a problem when one wants to rave about the venue – the extraordinary, atmospheric Boys’ School at Smock Alley – rather than the play, the production or the acting? It’s a breathtaking, gaunt three-storey cuboid, stripped of flooring and ceiling, to make one dark, cavernous space, with three church-like openings and some granite projections. The audience was dispersed on three levels – standing mostly, the action was intimately close. Marcus Costello (Set) and Sophie Bradshaw-Power (Lighting) wisely applied their skills sparingly and allowed the stones to dictate the atmosphere. How heartening to see a space like this being discovered and put to dramatic use; how disheartening that the material was, on this occasion, in no way equal to the location.

Lally Katz, an Australian playwright, is being lauded "as the most original Australian playwright to emerge in the last ten years" (according to the press release) but here her work appears disjointed and incoherent. The ‘plot’, if it be such, is of a witch (half gothic, half contemporary) who yearns for the return of her hunter-man and fills the time, with her assistant, visiting mayhem – sometimes anarchic, sometimes absurdly banal - on her bereaved neighbours. The theme, the listeners are repeatedly told, is sex and death, but there is no shock element in the treatment of either. The assistant wants some quality time of his own and fraternizes with three little pubescent maids from school, but the naughtiness is awfully tame. The text is awash with metaphors – an Apocalyptic Bear, a Witch, Fire and Forest. It’s hard to tell if it’s for relief, or confusion, that there are also references to the Internet, teenage angst and study groups, lasagna and espresso. The piece invited more puzzlement than reflection, or was it a case of this critic’s Prufrockian fatigue – "I grow old, I grow old"?

While it’s good to see a young cast of recent graduates (from the Gaiety School of Acting) stepping up to the plate – articulate, word perfect, confident in movement and poise – it seemed as though they had little grasp of nuance. A lot of emotion was discharged through shrieks; there was no finesse and little illumination. The actors worked frenetically hard (with vehement vocal expression and a lot of running about) but did not achieve much for their labours. Here were eager learners, but they needed more direction and more training. The actors seemed more comfortable with the space than with the text, but what might have been daring or outrageous was verging on the tedious. The death at the climactic moment of the production flopped - the only major disadvantage of the intimate acting space being that the audience was too close for illusion of witch-burning to work.

Some pleasures were to be salvaged: Ciara Goss, cast as an unlikely ‘postman’ – a kind of bunny with an exotic plumed tail – pranced in an eye-catching way to deliver her letters; Sarah Allen-Clarke was a widow of considerable hauteur; Usanga (the Bear) had a physique, if not quite the vocal gravitas, to turn heads; Simon Stewart, as Martin the personable assistant, brought a kind of Ulster ennui to his acting.

The most fully-realised part of the evening was Roger Gregg’s score. He seemed to have soaked up the haunting spirit of the place, caught some of the playwright’s aspirations and made some eerie sounds to enhance the atmosphere. Even so, it’s the sense of the place, more than of the play, that lingers.

Derek West has reviewed theatre for almost 25 years. He also edits publications for NAPD, the school principals’ national organisation.