The play Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner at Dublin's Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin is reviewed by Fintan O'Toole.

Leo Tolstoy famously wrote that "All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Thus, of course, the preference of novelists and dramatists for unhappy families. The distinctive  tang of domestic discontent is innately more interesting than the sweet perfume of household harmony.

One of the very few Irish writers to have challenged this assumption is Roddy Doyle. Colm Toíbín has remarked that the only successful novels in all of the Irish canon that have happy families and good, if foolish, fathers are The Vicar of Wakefield and The Snapper. He might have added two others - The Commitments and The Van, which make up Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy.

Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner, which has returned with a largely new cast after its debut last autumn, re-visits the world of those immensely popular books. The Linnane family, like the Rabbittes and Curleys, is a big, noisy Dublin working-class household. As in the trilogy, the basic question of form is whether a happy family can be made to seem as unique and vivid as its tragic literary neighbours. Like the Rabbittes and Curleys, the Linnanes are saved from sweetness by a crisis.

Here, though, the crisis is, in the broad sense, political. The play, like everything that the Calypso Productions company does, is unashamedly intended to make a point. What it does remarkably well, though, is to make that point gracefully, entertainingly and with a lot more subtly than is obvious on the surface. It is a rare example, indeed, of a play written for political purposes that does not simply confirm the prejudices of its likely audience. In the course of its engagement with the issue of asylum seekers, it manages to challenge both racism and smug anti-racists.

The basic idea derives from the 1960s Spencer Tracy/ Sidney Poitier movie of (almost) the same name. Larry Linnane, middle-aged but kept young by his lively interest in the world of his daughters, thinks of himself as a modern, liberal man. He is proud both of his daughters' feisty independence and of his own unshockable openness to experience. He can't understand, therefore, why he turns into a raving maniac when his eldest girl Stephanie forms a relationship with a Nigerian asylum-seeker.

The play works so well precisely because it does not allow the audience to feel superior to Larry. Where a less subtle writer would have set him up as a villain, Doyle allows him to launch a pre-emptive strike by getting his self-accusations in first. Larry's reactions disturb Larry even more than they disturb us. He is not a brute or an ignoramus. He is sure he is not a racist.

Joe Savino as Larry doesn't have quite the Everyman charm and warmth that Gary Cooke brought to the role last autumn. But he captures very well the underlying pain of Larry's dilemma. You always feel watching him that he would be much happier if he could just go along with his daughter's wishes. The ranting bigot that rises up within him, and not the refugee Ben, is the real unwanted guest at his dinner table.

The psychological richness of this situation is matched in Bairbre Ní Chaoimh's deft production by a style whose apparent simplicity is also deceptive. The staging feels very straightforward, almost to the point of being a conventional domestic drama. In fact, the realism is continually disrupted by shifts between narrative and dialogue and by sudden changes of character, as the four actors fill in for three other members of the family. Barbara Bergin as Larry's formidable wife, Mona, bears the brunt of these shifting perspectives with considerable elegance and economy.

There is thus a neat coherence between the politics and the presentation, with each revealing a complexity that the surface tends to hide. The result is a fast, vivid, concentrated piece, light of foot but serious of mind, that has important things to say and says them without a trace of self-importance.