IN THE Project Arts Centre's small downstairs space, a tiny audience crams into the room, finding seats around a large boardroom table. Interspersed around the table are This Is Not A Life's four characters . . . Kevin Healy, Caitriona Ni Mhurchu, Joe Roch and Megan Riordan.

The play opens with Ni Mhurchu addressing us directly, thanking us for coming with a warm and rambling welcome, which breaks the ice but also breaks the fourth wall.

This Is Not A Life is one of Bedrock's 'urban ghosts' productions and the category seems particularly fitting here, as the play seems to float around in the limbo of modern Ireland, replete with workaholics, endless anxieties and a phrase book of pop psychology to hide our real feelings behind.

As the characters continue to address the audience and each other, it eventually emerges that they are a group of colleaguescum-friends; two are a couple (Kevin and Caitriona), and the other pair are younger and American (Megan and Joe).

In the course of the discussion it emerges that Kevin has had an affair with Megan and so the play begins.

This first act seems a little disjointed, because of the apparent aimlessness of the script, the randomness of the topics covered, and the characters being constantly distracted and interrupted.

The second act returns to a more conventional format, with the boardroom table now a stage and the four characters having a peace-making dinner party following a terrorist attack in Dublin in which Megan and Joe received minor injuries.

Any attempt at rising above it though is lost as the tensions caused by Kevin's infidelity take over and are exorcised through Caitriona's drunken antics, dousing Joe and Megan in flour and wine, and sniping at Kevin.

The main point of This Is Not A Life seems to be to highlight how our new way of life . . . long hours at the office, more long hours in the car, lots of money but no time to spend it . . . may not be much of a life at all.

But it is also illustrates wonderfully, with unsettling accuracy, the pettiness and minor irritations that exist within relationships that have long-since passed the romantic high-water mark.