Talk is never cheap in Tom Murphy's mighty mid-1980s thunder through three women's lives in an isolated Irish cottage, but it does come thick and fast. As the bed-bound Mommo is gradually prodded into unravelling the mythology that shaped her destiny and that of her granddaughter, the story she tells about how a town's laughter is stolen away becomes a way of holding on to each other in a world of quiet brutality.

Talk is never cheap in Tom Murphy's mighty mid-1980s thunder through three women's lives in an isolated Irish cottage, but it does come thick and fast. As the bed-bound Mommo is gradually prodded into unravelling the mythology that shaped her destiny and that of her granddaughter, the story she tells about how a town's laughter is stolen away becomes a way of holding on to each other in a world of quiet brutality.

Andy Arnold's elegiacally paced production - his swan- song as the Arches' artistic director - takes full advantage of Mommo's torrent of words to seem as if an entire history of Irish drama is embodied in the play. And that, at one level, is exactly what Murphy has done. Mommo's free-associative hand-me-down routines echo the internal monologues of Joyce and Beckett, but with colour and social context enough to look further back, to the spit and sawdust of Synge and O'Casey. The barren shack setting even seems to predate the postmodern domestic nasties of Martin McDonagh.

None of this could stand up without the presence of great actors, and Arnold has gifted us a set of performances that are by turn fearless, touching and beautifully understated. As Mary, Muireann Kelly presents a drained, frustrated figure endlessly at odds with Kathleen MacInnes's pregnant Dolly, a seeming fly-by-night with pains of her own to contend with.

It's Kay Gallie's heroic turn as Mommo, though, that makes Bailegangaire so hypnotic. Giving form and meaning to what in lesser hands could have ended up a guddle, Gallie lends enough weight and vulnerability to Mommo to make clear that here is someone who's not keeping alive just herself, but everything that follows.