Theatre: Coming up clean from a writer's dirty laundry

A SPECIAL circle of hell may well be reserved for writers who sell their papers - every faltering first draft, every sordid scrap of correspondence, every slip of the pen and rejection slip - to an American university archive. The posthumous torment for this category of the damned will be to wade endlessly through the mountain of false conjecture and interpretation that the hacks of academe proceed to base upon such a trove. Better to be an enigma that's compellingly ajar than a misread open book.

On the other hand, the temptations to flog off one's literary dirty laundry can be powerful, as we see from the experience of Tom Connolly, the novelist at the heart of Give Me Your Answer, Do!, a new play by the great , but latterly below-par Irish dramatist, Brian Friel. Like Aristocrats and Dancing at Lughnasa, this is one of Friel's tragi-comical homage's to Chekhov - a kind of octet, played under a slowly westering sun, whose separate voices of defeat and disappointment interweave involvingly in Robert Lefevre's superlatively acted production.

The play begins and ends, though, more in the world of Peter Nichols' A Day In The Death of Joe Egg. Visiting his long-institutionalised daughter, Brigitte - a young woman who sways, open-mouthed and beyond communication, on her bed - brilliant Niall Buggy's shabby teddy bear of a Tom rattles off reams of cod father gossip, its ludicrous fancifulness, and the fact that he casts his daughter as the silent stooge in a tenderly gruesome comedy routine, indicative of despairing paternal love.

To secure a better private hospital for this unreachable creature might be one good reason for selling his papers, the monetary value of which escalates when it emerges that he has the manuscripts of two unpublished pornographic novels he wrote in a fury of inspiration just after the adolescent Brigitte was taken into care.

Why then exactly, and why pornography in a career otherwise marked (held back even) by integrity? The play seems to be resistant about the murky background to this more out of periodic forgetfulness than a desire for Chekhovian ubiquity. By contrast, there's far too little left to be deduced between the lines in Friel's dramatisation of the preparing for, and aftermath to, a bibulous lunch party at the dilapidated bill-ridden manse Tom shares with his wryly wise wife, Daisy (Geraldine James, excellent, the most glowingly beautiful go-to-seed incipient alcoholic you're ever likely to see.

Gawn Grainger and Sorcha Cusack are wonderfully wasp-ish as the successful popular novelist and wife, a double act of veiled mutual recrimination that is now Canaries-bound on the proceeds of his manuscript sell-up.

This is the kind of play where Daisy's mother (Margaret Tyzack) is established as a doctor principally so that strangers can unload their nervous breakdown stories on her. The result still feels improbable, as do her dreadfully stagy set-piece speeches about (and at) her semi-retired cocktail pianist husband (John Woodvine) a compulsive petty pilferer. Even Daisy's eventual argument against the sale (that it would rob Tom of the uncertainty necessary for creation) seems a bald and weak piece of reasoning rather than an emotionally nuanced response to their fact. An evening you'd want to recommend, though more for the quality of the acting than the play.