This is a painfully overlong and overstreched original play by Bisi Adigun, whose high profile work on Kings of the Kilburn High Road and The Playboy of the Western World offered hope for a new multicultural voice in Irish theatre. In spite of the heady mix of racism, religious hypocrisy, gender conflict and cultural collision it promises, this speculation on the events leading up to the notorious 2005 ‘Scissor Sisters’ murder of Farah Swaleh Noor is mainly a platform for a leisurely series of ruminations and race jokes: some funny, some flat, but not nearly enough for its two-and-a-half-hour running time.

Yes, there are pointed and repeated statements on the difficulties of being black in Ireland, but the generally feeble ‘explanation’ for how ‘Rafah’ (Gabriel Uche Akujobi) ends up brutally murdered is lacking in drama. There is never any tension, just a seemingly endless amount of unremarkable details that do not so much add up to a sense of context as pass the time. Good performances from Mary Duffin and Yomi Ogunyemi are not reason enough to endure what might have worked as a tight one-acter, but drags at full length.