THE Sunbeam Wolsey factory in Blackpool, Cork city, was, until its closure, perhaps the most progressive workplace in Ireland.

The business the Dwyer family conducted there was based on the economic viability of making clothes. Textiles were fashioned - by nigh-on 4,000 people in the factory's heyday - into the manufacture of "finished halfhose, outerwear, underwear and any other kind of wear you might imagine". There were baths for when work was done, "free medical care and dentistry too" and there grew in this exceptional place of work a life-defining set of friendships and relationships, a cooperative and communityoriented spirit that, even on the closely-knit north side of Cork city, can barely be imagined.

"I was studying across the river at UCC when I saw the smoke rise from the old Sunbeam factory in 2003, " says Marion Wyatt of 7.3.1 Theatre Group. From childhood memory I thought? there's a story here that just has to be told." The tale told by the play is a "fictionalised account" of a reality encapsulating "seven women, three generations and one secret".

The play impresses as a multitextured, tragi-comic meditation on woman as family lynchpin, as unsupported emotional being and wage-earner, as bag carrier for an unkind lack of independence but also as the link-made-flesh that defines this older, less egalitarian, time.

The play rightly attests to the pivotal position of these "earthy, direct women without opportunity", abundant, vivid with talent and glamour, even to the extent of scaring the men of Cork by displaying such Acopyrightlan as they moved in massed groups through the Saturday-night streets of late 1960s Leeside.

The play, staccato and furiously funny on the one hand yet poignant on the other, is carried by a superb cast that pulls no punches and flexes no insignificant welter of nuance and gravitas. 'Aisling Cara' is a pseudonym for seven women who sat down to strawberries, chocolate and tea one day and brainstormed "a play that named itself? practically wrote itself too".

Yet The Sunbeam Girls feels like it derives from a singular vision. The threads and skein of community and friendship all reinforce this bold work as a humane and socially conscious drama.

The Sunbeam Girls, by Aisling Cara, runs until 23 February