IT is hard to criticise a creative account of child abuse with any objectivity. Verbalising an horrific problem that has for too long remained not only socially but also culturally taboo, is clearly a worthwhile project.

Yet, equally clearly, some kind of artistic standards must still stand or the reviewer veers dangerously close to a patronising pat on the head for both the production and in passing themselves.

Written by the pseudonymous lmmanuel DeRyker, The Irish Theatre Workshop's Daddy's Little Girls is most certainly worthy. It traces the destruction a father brings to his three daughters by years of sexual and physical abuse.

We are witness to the tortured reminiscences of the three girls both before and after the court case with the action never leaving their claustrophobic bedroom. The figure of the father, though omnipresent, is seldom physically on the stage while "mammy" is no more than a voice from downstairs.

This leaves the O'Keefe sisters, played by Lydia Mulvey, Lara Lenehan and Andrea Shortall to carry the action and the heavy script forward, a task which they manage for the most part with considerable courage and not a little skill.

While it is dangerous to set forth any responsibilities for drama, a play of this nature must surely accept some, if it is not to be mere sensationalism. It seems to me the most honest task it could have set itself would have been to force us to look anew at a societal evil that is constantly in danger of becoming ignored.

Yet this is exactly where Daddy's Little Girls fails, as it produces cliche after cliche and buzz word after buzz word, to the point where it is hard to tell if this is drama or a dramatised information pack.