Dressing RoomBank of Ireland Theatre, University of Galway★★★★☆ For more than a decade, Enda Walsh has added a new instalment each year to Rooms, his series of immersive theatre installations created with the designer Paul Fahy for Galway International Arts Festival. Premiering at the festival before touring internationally, each work invites a handful of spectators into a meticulously realised interior where an unseen life unfolds through a recorded monologue.This year’s Dressing Room, voiced by John Olohan, centres on an old caretaker and under-13 GAA coach whose marriage has reached a moment of crisis.A festival steward leads five of us to a white box and, before opening the door, encourages us to “be as nosy as you like”. Inside is an immaculate re-creation of a boys’ GAA dressing room: blistered brick walls, synthetic jerseys draped over hooks, Lucozade bottles, a Tupperware of sliced oranges, mud-flecked trainers, and clumps of earth scattered across the floor. Dressing Room. Photograph: Emilija Jefremova Morning light filters through a high window. Most uncannily accurate is the smell – muscle relaxant, spray deodorant and the lingering musk of sweat – which has everyone coughing and sneezing.Then the voice begins.The caretaker arrives half an hour before the boys each morning to clear away the evidence of the previous evening. The cigarette butts and cans he mentions are actually in the bin – a nice touch. From there, Walsh opens the piece into something larger: the erosion of rural life, young people leaving, “the soul of the place gone”, old neighbours waiting around to die. This communal melancholy dovetails with the caretaker’s private grief as his marriage has stagnated.Walsh’s writing is beautiful, capturing the stoic endurance of ordinary life alongside moments of transcendence, as in a remembered image of courtship – “the light moving through the trees, on and off her face” – and the Joycean drift towards revelation: “Why have I kept this love silent?”It’s a meditative and moving 15 minutes.Dressing Room is at the Bank of Ireland Theatre, University of Galway, until Sunday, August 26th, as part of Galway International Arts Festival. Performances take place every 30 minutes from 11am until 6pm Sunday to Wednesday and from 11am until 8pm Thursday to Saturday