Fabulous Beast is an award-laden Irish dance company, based in Longford, but sponsored by the Barbican. It's run by choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, but the cast jointly take credit for the "choreography" of James Son of James, and have fused themselves into a tightly integrated unit that generates a lot of Irish angst, and not a little Irish humour.

The event around which the work revolves is the return of the son of the elder James just in time for his father's funeral. He's been away a long time and isn't immediately recognised. The idea is that from here on, Keegan-Dolan told me, we see the effects of the return of this prodigal on the ten members of the small community who have assembled for the funeral.

Gradually we see into the lives and situations of the pretentious politician and his ambitious wife, their unhappy teenage son, the androgynous doctor, and the policeman whose wife is desperate to become pregnant. Then theres the slightly mad farmer who employs, and then marries, a "woman from the east", only to find that she is stealing his stuff to send back to her family. There's the washing-machine salesman whose head has been bandaged since he failed to save his wife from a fire a year ago, and there's his frustrated daughter.

We witness various traumas - the removal of the bandages, the farmer's discovery of his new wife's activities and a final, shocking, moment of violence against the eponymous James. All this is well done, and enjoyable enough, but it doesn't quite deliver the goods. What we see is a series of vignettes rather than a developing story that embraces them all. Only at the start, at the wedding, and in the final moments, do they all come together. James himself seems almost sidelined, and it's only the fact that he has made the policeman's wife pregnant that draws him in for the tragic conclusion.

There isn't much of a goods delivery either from a group that calls itself a dance company. There's a bit of fairly athletic sexual wrestling, but the only actual dance happens at the wedding, and here they're portraying local people at a dance, who aren't very good at dancing. This is really a play, not a dance production; the cast talk throughout, and also perform a series of songs. Much of what they talk about could have been expressed through choreography rather than words. Viewed as a theatre production this is a pretty decent show; viewed as an offering from a dance company, it doesn't do what it says on the tin.

James Son of James is at the Wycombe Swan on April 11 and 12.