MANNIX Flynn opened at the Da Club last night, for three performances only, with an autobiographical monologue called Talking to the Wall, being Part One of a work in progress.

For some 50 minutes the author actor holds the small stage, and his audience, in such thrall that one feels deprived of the balance of his story.

He begins the torrent of verse and prose with a humorous review of life in the womb and immediately after, but the fun soon turns to nightmare.

One of a family of 15 in a city corporation flat, with feuding parents and the constant grind of poverty, his life is a round of oppression, soon to be taken over by the State.

Ahead of him lie the brutal regime of a Connemara reformatory run by the Christian Brothers, a further spell in a midlands borstal and the full rigour of the law in Mountjoy prison.

The amazing thing is that his spirit survived these brutalities, and the story ends here with his discovery of the world of actors and the stage, and his first venture into it. It is a tantalising point at which to close the show.

Mr Flynn's delivery of his own words is extraordinary.

They come tumbling like a river in spate, but always well phrased and lucid, marking the actor he has become. He can find laughter in his darkness as well as pain, and his craggy face and mobile physique are vividly expressive.

Both as a piece of writing and a performance in dept this is the best thing he has done, and I find myself eager for its completion.