In Christopher Marlowe's words 'the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come and Faustus must be damned'. Amongst others, the historical figure was damned by Martin Luther, the tale was dramatised by Goethe and Gounod and the idea allegedly lived by Paganini and Robert Johnson. It is now also at the heart of Conor McPherson's extravagantly admired new play 'The Seafarer' at Galway's Town Hall Theatre.

In this Abbey Theatre production of McPherson's amalgamation of the fifteenth century legend and an eponymous twelfth century Anglo-Saxon poem, a reforming alcoholic Dublin Northsider (Sharky) is the Faustian hero and, in the modern mould for baddies, an Englishman (Mr Lockhart) is his Mephistopheles. In this 21st Century version, Faust's thirst has not been for knowledge but for oblivion from past horrors with the aid of the demon drink.

For Homer Simpson, alcohol was 'the cause of, and the solution to, all of life's problems.' Similarly, for a sinning quartet of soon-to-be winos sousing their livers and memories with Miller, Malibu, Gold Label and poteen in the Stygian depths of a Baldoyle basement flat, it would seem that alcohol both releases and damns them for their faults. Life is hell, until a devilishly suave stranger wagers more than money during a Christmas Eve poker game...

McPherson does particularly well when he dramatises the paradoxes of Homer's dichotomy: this nation has a doomed love affair with its tippling. Ireland's drinkers, it would seem, create 200,000 alcoholics, consume the world's second highest per capita levels of alcohol and in the process drink €7 billion a year, and suffer over 1,500 annual deaths directly attributed to alcohol abuse; yet all rites of passage (in this case Christmas), are ambivalently both celebrated and corroded by booze. Consequently, the audience, MacPherson and the Abbey's powerful cast all seem to demonstrate more than a rueful understanding and respect for the forces shaping the paralytic sops on stage.

Whilst much of the humour is perhaps over-dependent on laughing at cavorting drunks and their strings of expletives, MacPherson creates crackling dialogue, distinctly memorable characters and a particularly fine soliloquy describing hell. 'The Seafarer' is a darkly effective comic lurch through a serious drinker's psyche: the leaden paralysis of hangover, neglect of family, muddled memory and desperate blindness (both literally and figuratively) to his own plight.

Liam Carney as the troubled 'Sharky', Maelíosa Stafford as blind bully Richard, Don Wycherley as the short-sighted Ivan and Phelim Drew as Nicky relish the opportunity to swear, swig, slur and stagger in the manner of men who inhabit the circle of alcoholic hell. Costumed in Niamh Lunny's appositely hobo rags on Paul O'Mahony's intricately detailed set, director Jimmy Fay has choreographed a strong and persuasive ensemble whose panache perhaps camouflages niggling problems.

Aspects of both the production and the writing feel a little incomplete: the narrative is slow to start; there is an uncomfortable clash between realism and symbolism between the contemporary Dublin context and the medievally-styled devil on stage; the rather clunky final lines re-iterating Mr Lockhart's already well-established identity are redundant; the sound effects (thunder, lighting and rushing wind) are half-hearted, and the dramatic devices (the winos rioting outside the flat) are repetitive.

'The Seafarer' harks back to the Morality play and whilst it may not be a particularly challenging, profound or even modern work, it is actually a perversely uplifting and, indeed, moral play. Johnny Cash's version of 'The Mercy Seat' plays during the interval: 'Christ was born into a manger and like some ragged stranger he died upon the cross' and while salvation for those ragged strangers born into poverty and dysfunction may descend from above, in this play redemption also arises from man's humanity unto man.

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