Alcoholism - and the way someone with a serious drink problem lives - is not ostensibly comic material, and the humour in Owen O'Neill's excellent one-man show in the Temple Bar Music Centre on Friday was dark and bitter. Anyone seeking the usual kind of stand-up laughs from this performer in the Murphy's Ungagged Comedy Festival might have been surprised - but not disappointed, because this scripted piece of drama walked a tightrope between comedy and tragedy and found its balance in a searing honesty.

Off My Face looks at his - and his family's - relationship with drink. The framework is provided by sessions with a slightly ridiculous American psychiatrist, to whom he tells "a ball of shite - if he was any good he would have copped me", while he shares the true story with the audience. It is, in fact, a series of stories about his Co Tyrone childhood - about his grandfather giving him his first drink at the age of five, his cockney Uncle Harry stealing a sheep for the Christmas dinner and burgling three local shops for clothes - "the fact that the owner was the leader of the local Orange Lodge was just a stroke of luck".

These stories - with O'Neill slipping in and out of the characters - are hilarious and horrifying in equal measure, and it is by leavening the horror with black humour that he prevents it being a tale of unremitting misery.

At one point, the first time he is honest with the tinpot psychiatrist, he explains why he drinks. He describes a recurring dream, where everything has reverted to a time when he didn't need to be grown-up, where there were no responsibilities. "I drink so I can dream the dream again."

A successful and accomplished stand-up comedian, this more structured style seems to be the way Owen O'Neill - who has been sober for seven years - is going, and the mixture of raw candour, a storytelling ability and dark humour marks him out as different to so many of today's glib comedians and may in the future take him in other creative directions.