The Seafarer Starring Jim Norton, David Morse, Ciaran Hinds, Conleth Hill and Sean Mahon

Written and directed by Conor McPherson

At the Booth Theatre, 222 West 45th Street and Broadway

BY the time Irish playwright Conor McPherson's new Broadway show The Seafarer finally lays its cards on the table, it's hard not to hope they'll fold.

In The Seafarer, which finally opened last Thursday at the Booth Theatre after having its original opening postponed due to the stagehands strike, we meet five lonely, loveless Irish men who have to drink flagons of whiskey just to achieve enough lucidity to complete their own sentences.

Until then each of them punctuate their pronouncements with inscrutable Celtic utterances like "Ah, sure, well, like." And by the end of this odd, retrograde play, I guarantee you'll be doing it yourself, sure, well, like.

Critics have frequently acclaimed McPherson's gift for storytelling, but what are we really looking at here? The Seafarer is set in a kip house in Dublin, where blind (metaphorically and literally) old Richard Harkin keeps home with his much younger brother Sharkey.

Richard, a drunken old reprobate with a - wouldn't you know it - surprisingly rarified nature, is played with impressive gusto by gifted Irish actor Jim Norton. Norton, an Irish national treasure familiar to a generation as Bishop Leonard Brennan in Father

Ted, has a rich sono-rous voice and a Shakespearian range that he gives unbridled expression to throughout the play. Other directors might have restrained his raptures, but McPherson has elected to direct as well as write this show.

American actor David Morse, who plays Norton's younger brother, is a toweringly tall and regular featured actor whose whole bearing and size make him completely unbelievable as the hapless doormat he's been cast to play. Morse is a talented actor and he makes a successful stab at a Dublin accent, but he looks like he could easily flatten anyone who dared to look askance at him, and so he's not the most convincing victim - a role he has been cast to play.

The premise of The Seafarer may sound interesting in theory. A houseful of hopeless Irish drunks (all of them men) receive a visit from the devil without realizing it - but in practice it's so contrived, so full of stock characters and scenarios, that you may start to pray that the author's setting us up.

Irish male drunks? Check. Stoic uncommunicative males who live without women? Check. Rows and drunkenness and competition? Check.

A half mythic, half Christian allegory, The Seafarer is in the end as prescriptive and didactic as the early medieval fables of Hroswitha Von Gandersheim (but not nearly as funny).

Watching The Seafarer, a few parallels with the works of Irish playwright John B. Keane begin to surface, but Keane's rustic characters have an authenticity that McPherson's suburban oddballs do not. Just when the silly banter and slapstick antics of act one are threatening to sink the entire enterprise, Ciaran Hinds appears right on cue in the role of evil personified, the dandified Mr. Lockhart (geddit?).

How do we know Mr. Lockhart is the devil? Well, there's that billboard name of his, for a start. He wears a red tie and a black shirt, he wears a very dandified coat over a three-piece suit, he sulks and glowers evilly behind people's backs, he flinches when people sing Christmas carols - and eventually he plainly tells us so himself.

Hell, it turns out, is not the fiery furnace that we've all been warned about. In The Seafarer, Lockhart tells us that hell is really walking the rainy streets all alone and looking in the windows at happy people having a meal in a restaurant we can't enter.

Hell is being poor and lonely and full of self-loathing. Well, fair enough.

Says Mr. Lockhart, "You see all the people who seem to live in another world all snuggled up together in the warmth of a tavern or a cozy little house, and you just walk and walk and walk and you're on your own and nobody knows who you are."

In hell they don't take reservations, apparently. But this is hardly shattering stuff. In fact the truth is, it's rather trite.

When Lockhart finally tells Sharkey he's the devil come for his soul, all the lights in the Harkins' kip house flicker ominously. It's supposed to be a theatrical moment, but in reality it's a farcical one, and it's impossible not to stifle an urge to laugh.

Weren't flickering lights and crashing lightening hoary and embarrassing clichs a hundred years ago? In The Seafarer hell isn't other people, it's just the inability to communicate with them without being soused in booze.