THE soundtrack used to be a tool employed solely in the film world, dextrously manipulating moods and emotions, and garnering popular appeal.

Increasingly in live drama, music, loud, contemporary and with several associations of its own, is weaved alongside more traditional stagecraft, not as an addendum to the production but integral to the plot's movement. So it is with John McArdle's Something's In The Way - music figures so largely in the play as to be a shadowy sixth character.

Radiohead, Nirvana, Oasis and Alanis Morrisette are blasted out to us as Lesley Conroy's Deirdre, Gavin Kelty's Kurt and Ashley Mellet's Arianna meet in a field.

Deirdre is from an emotionally stunted middle class background escaping from a disastrous barbecue, intent on killing herself. Kurt has just, nearly killed his father who has made a fool of his mother for years and is intent on gaining some kind of relief be it through music, fantasy or bedding Deirdre. Arianna is a spooky little Puck of a child who "saw something at eight and never grew any more" and is intent on protecting her protector, Kurt.

The music throws us and them into various fantasies or memories which they act out within the confines of the field, eventually achieving a tortuous kind of communication.

The play is part of a new season of plays for young people at the Peacock, Unplugged Live, which aims to express the areas in the lives of young people that go "unplugged" in the media, in a format that looks more to cinema than traditional theatre.

Certainly, Something's In The Way uses many of the tricks of the big screen, which for the most part work to the production's advantage. Ironically, it was those bastions of traditional drama, the script and direction, that let them down a little.

It steers safely away from the pitfalls of anachronistic slang" but tends towards the melodramatic. Kathy McArdle in directing attempts to pitch a note so high as to be unsustainable.