If you have seen other plays by the Irish playwright Enda Walsh, the territory may seem familiar. A few characters, trapped in a domestic environment, recount or re-enact some moment in their past that has scarred and somehow defined them, and create, through language, their own private reality. This was the premise of The Walworth Farce, which Druid theatre company brought to the National Theatre last year; it is also, in a different key, the basis of a companion piece, The New Electric Ballroom, brought to the Riverside by the same company.

This time it is ladies’ night. Here three sisters re-enact a traumatic moment in a small-town dance hall in the 1950s. It is a moment that seems to have nipped in the bud any urge to risk the hazards of love or engage with the messy outside world. Instead the sisters obsessively retell the story, as if repetition might yield insight and narrative might dignify a grubby moment. There is a moment when the narrative could change – but the sister who might break free subsides back into the same elaborate ritual and closeted safety as her siblings.

Walsh has his own original style, but he also consciously writes in a tradition: there are echoes of Beckett, Joyce and Friel in the trapped characters, distilled reality and sense of the absurdity of life, in the rich prose, in the use of lengthy monologue as a means of finding some sense of self. There is, too, the influence of the Catholic church: the urge to confess; the confused feelings about sexuality. And Walsh creates a stage reality that brings together the oddness of many a domestic set-up and the claustrophobic interior world of a mind unable to break free from obsession.

All this is fascinating and Walsh’s use of language can be dazzling. But there is something a little self-conscious and strained about the play and a nagging worry that Walsh, like his characters, is repeating the same scenario. However deliberate that might be, it seems limiting. The performances, in Walsh’s own production, are compelling, however, with Ruth McCabe and Catherine Walsh as the younger sisters, Mikel Murfi as a nervous visiting fishmonger and Rosaleen Linehan, excellent as the oldest sister, the most contemptuous of the world into which she has been born.