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“I guess I just prefer his old stuff.” Such is the sad refrain for many leaving Mark O’Rowe’s Our Few and Evil Days, a play that takes a pinch of the grisly surrealism he is so admired for, a dash of his characteristic storytelling craftsmanship, and sprinkles these over a chiefly realist piece of work.

O’Rowe’s first new stage piece since 2007’s Terminus — a riotous tour of Dublin’s underworld told in rhyme — clearly disembarks from where he left off, obvious from the moment the audience sits down. The Abbey’s main stage is dressed in plush greens and dark woods to make up a rather imposing living room, dining area, kitchen, and even a glimpse of a utility room out the back. Paul Wills has spared no detail (even down to working taps) when moving off from O’Rowe’s previous minimalism. This family home, so beautifully crafted, contains even the darkest of moments in such a believable trapping that the viewer feels like a voyeur; like these are the lives of a real family unfolding before us.

Unlike those in Terminus, most of these lives could very well be real. The text contains suicide, incestuous rape, heinous obsession, and tempestuous violence — it can feel a bit like O’Rowe is ticking off a list of disturbing taboos at times — but nothing so fantastical as a celestial being made up of a body of worms. The most important segments of the play are delivered by the unnervingly natural Sinéad Cusack and Ciarán Hinds, doing his best Dublin Da, so even when the play tends toward the farfetched they maintain the tone within the realms of verisimilitude. As the couple battle over the consequences of the murder of their son, the audience can see themselves using the same pleas in their own tiffs, buckling in the same sad way — their acting is the production’s biggest strength.

Our Few and Evil Days tells a surreal family story in an admirably realist way, but just doesn’t shine so much as the playwright’s more hypnagogic work.

Our Few and Evil Days runs at The Abbey until October 25 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.