SOME amiable nonsense, underpinned with real curiosity value, is on offer at Bewley's at lunchtime.

Michael James Ford has adapted, and directs, FitzJames O'Brien's short 19th century play Dinner in chit berry Street, with total disregard for the perils of pastiche. A young married couple are starving and freezing in a New York tenement, and pass the time by creating an imaginary feast, pheasant stuffed with truffles and so forth. They laugh in the face of adversity, but are on the brink. The man decides to make the last sacrifice he will sell his cherished copy of Erasmus to buy sausages...

Don't worry this is the stuff of happy endings, and has a with one mighty bound denouement. En route to it, we are treated to language of deepest purple couched in speeches rather than dialogue, and whimsical chunks of narration by way of letting us know what's going on. Structurally and verbally, this is a play so awful that it has to be funny and that is the secret of its entertainment value. You have to laugh.

Brent Hearne and Bairbre Ni Chaoimh are deliciously hammy as the couple, only to be out hammed by Michael James Ford when he eventually arrives to a metaphorical blast of trumpets. In all, a distinct aid to the digestion.