Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

“They don’t need help, they need someone to believe in them, to fuckin’ love them.” From one of the dozens of real-life testimonies from young men across the North, which form the framework of Damian Gorman’s new play for Tinderbox, this line pops out as the classic panacea. But Gorman, with his usual subtle knack for subverting the predictable, gently proceeds to demonstrate that, in the case of one troubled youngster, love simply is not the answer. The problem for Terry (John Travers) is life itself and, to the bewilderment of his caring parents, the total lack of meaning it holds for him.

These are guys who feel marginalised, who have been failed by the system. We encounter them – sexually confused Joe (Brian Markey), drug addict Ronnie (John Shayegh) and alcoholic born-again Christian Daniel (Shaun Blaney) – in a halfway house between treatment centre and home, wrestling with their personal demons. Terry is among them but no longer of them, having resorted to suicide, for reasons best known to himself. Roisin Gallagher’s Shannon, a single mother who has managed to sort out her life, completes the ensemble of engaging characters who, under Michael Duke’s sensitive direction, move with almost balletic grace through Ciaran Bagnall’s hard-edged, softly flowing steel-and-wire set.

The lines are beautifully spoken and played with truthfulness, and an additional energy boost to the careful opening-night performances would have cranked up the full impact of the optimistic climax. Gorman’s dramatic and poetic craft is plainly in evidence and once this fine young cast has acquired the confidence to cut loose, this will be a significant piece of verbatim theatre for and about the times in which we are living. Until Nov 19, then on tour to Coalisland, Derry, Monaghan, Coleraine and Lisburn