THEATREclub’s fiercely-realised production of Heroin manages to convey the needle and Irish society’s willful ignorance of the damage done. Writer/director Grace Dyas’s ambition to chart heroin’s three decades in Dublin through the words of a Rialto drug team’s young men’s group is beyond her, but that doesn’t diminish her play’s raw power.

The cast of three – Barry O’Connor, Ryan O’Conor and Lauren Larkin – play actors struggling to render the drug’s dark side. Barry O’Connor is memorable in his tyrannical efforts to control the set design, lighting and soundtrack, on top of the other actor’s habit. His interplay with the Clubhouse production team is fluent, and constant media intrusions – like an oddly-poignant Fresh Prince of Bel-Air excerpt - provide levity.

Liberties native Dyas is keenly aware of the inability of language to convey heroin’s anguish: when the actors aren’t physically enacting the drug’s violence upon each other, their words are drowned by advertising, noise and their own competing narratives. Staging the play in Smock Alley, near to where many of Dublin’s junkies congregate, helps crystallize the challenges of confronting a social blight as destructively familiar as heroin abuse. While its rage becomes numbing, Heroin’s last words belong to the survivors, as a recorded voiceover plays us into a sharp clap of darkness.