Reviews of Conor McPherson’s play The Weir rarely fail to label it unassuming yet profound, dwelling on the play’s interest in isolation and ghosts of all kinds. Unfortunately, the line between being unassuming and dull is thin, and profundity is easily lost – as my friend pointed out afterwards, watching The Weir was rather too much like watching your mum have conversations with people you’ve never met about their slowly dying or already dead relatives.

The play’s action unfolds over a single night in a rural Irish pub and revolves around a series of ghost stories told by locals and one newcomer. Sam Draper’s set was realistic, featuring a bar that actually sold drinks before the show began, but, rightly, did not draw attention to itself, much like the simple lighting. However, the static setting meant that the action was all static too – there was little physical acting for the cast to perform and as such every rushed comic pause or oddity of register was extremely noticeable, and distracting. This was particularly jarring in the play’s early scenes, when the locals engage in what is supposed to be friendly gossip, but the atmosphere never quite reaches convivial and instead stalls somewhere around bearable.

Part of the reason for this was the accents, which broke often enough to strain the tenuous connection between cast and audience by making the characters seem oddly hollow. Ghost stories rely on the listener believing, at least on some level, in what they are being told – something which is difficult to do when you are uncomfortably aware that you are in the Corpus Playroom, watching students haltingly imitate middle aged Irish folk.

At the supposed climax of the play, a woman from Dublin (Kate Marston) tells her own story and, according to the publicity material, “the group will never be the same again”. I am glad that I was informed of this beforehand, as in the production itself Valerie’s story was upstaged by those that came before it, especially Jim’s (Tom Ingham) genuinely disturbing graveyard tale. The structure of the play meant that after her revelation the play limped on, dissolving into awkward small talk and losing any narrative momentum the storytelling scene had managed to create. Although primarily a problem of plotting, the lack of chemistry between the cast (and audience) created a production that was ponderous and uncomfortable, but sadly not for the right reasons.