ASKED recently what his plays are about, Tom Murphy told a watching audience that they were about "my life". In a sense, however, they are about all of our lives, which is why, no matter how experimental or mysterious they may be, they continue to hold such resonance and strike so deep a chord.

There is no braver playwright than Murphy, in his experiments with both form and content.

Often described as having a restless imagination, it is true that none of his plays are alike, that each stands apart from the other, exploring different issues in different ways. Yet if plays such as Bailegangaire, The Gigli Concert and The Sanctuary Lamp could be said to have one thing in common, it is surely that they are each an exploration of the human condition: in effect, what it means to be alive.

The playwright continues this theme, explicitly so, in his new work, a dramatisation of three mental stages in the life of one woman: Alice . . . wife, mother and discontented dreamer.

Murphy is 70 this year, and it is stunning to note how, despite all of the accolades that have been heaped upon him, he continues to rigorously experiment, to search for the difficult, or the untried.

Although Alice Trilogy is a play in three acts, it is the very antithesis of a well-made play. Instead, it is a kind of snapshot . . . of the Beckettian kind . . . of restlessness, confusion, longing and compromise, the very stuff of all our souls.

Nor is this a naturalistic piece of writing. Although it has recognisable characters and dialogue, it has something deeply mysterious, almost mystical, at its heart . . .

from the beginning, when the young Alice is baited by her alterego Al, to the strange appearances of the bundler in the second act, to the behaviour of the waiter and waitress in the final act.

And while the play is a journey into the interior of a mind, this takes place, on each occasion, in a different manner. In the first act, 25-year-old Alice, already married and a mother of three, discusses her discontentment and fears that she is going crazy over whiskey-spiked coffee with Al. In the second, she reunites with an old flame in a darkened laneway and muses out loud as to whether she is "seriously incapable of doing no more than producing three children". The final, most difficult, and ultimately, most satisfactory act, is a genuine monologue, but one in which Alice discusses herself in the third person, from the outside looking in.

Despite all this, however, the play stands or falls on the performance of the lead actress, and here Jane Brennan, charged with a difficult task, does not disappoint. As directed by Murphy, she grows in scope from a skittish girl who retreats into alcohol to escape the life she has created, to a bored housewife who still allows herself to fantasise, to a resigned, compromised wife and mother to whom the worst has happened, and who discovers that it is . . . like the life that Murphy has set out to interrogate . . . "slow, tedious, grey, and yes, of course, bearable".