This week we were

. . . watching ‘Perve’ at the Peacock, Dublin

Stacey Gregg’s new play is a deliberate contradiction: a cool and detached work about runaway hysteria. Its main character, Gethin (Ciarán O’Brien), is a 23-year-old would-be filmmaker who cracks wise with his phlegmatic friend Nick (Peter Campion), scoffs at society’s knee-jerk reactions and seems forever at a slight remove, ensconced in headphones, caught in the pale glow of his laptop.

Gethin's new project, a documentary entitled Exploding Taboos, is not about paedophilia but about "how everyone goes crazy at the P-word". To that end he uses himself as bait, encouraging his teenage sister (Roxanna Nic Liam) to spread creepy rumours about him in school in the hope of courting controversy, all of which will be great for his "concept".

The problem with Gregg’s play isn’t so much its implausibility – once Gethin reminds his mother, Lorraine (Andrea Irvine), of the English paediatrician hounded from home by vigilantes, it’s unclear what thesis needs to be tested – but how she can find dramatic traction.

No characters are harmed in the making of Exploding Taboos, which is not quite true of Perve, but its argument is so couched in ambiguity and deniability that little is ventured.

Even the spectre of actual abuse, when it finally appears, is glibly summoned and dispelled. This makes the play unsettling but not challenging, questioning but not brave.

Given an aloof text, director Róisín McBrinn focuses mainly on the mise en scene, where Alyson Cummin’s bare, sloping stage and rear glass walls conspire to make everyone seem curiously placeless. The performances, though, locate the play’s strongest points. “You can’t catch pervitis,” Gethin says, but objectifying glances, mirrors and sexualised banter suggest otherwise, as though society is in its fever. Nowhere is this more amusing, tragic or real than in Nic Liam’s astutely judged Sarah, first sweetly tongue-tied with a schoolgirl crush, then automatically performing a lubricious dance.

“It’s an idea about complicated issues,” Gethin weakly protests, still clinging to his concept when social services come calling. The same goes for the play: an abstract on sexual and social perversity that is afraid to get itself dirty.

Until June 25th