In a one-man tour de force, Irish actor Paddy O’Keeffe, grey-bearded and green-clad, introduced, impersonated and interrogated George Bernard Shaw.

We learned that Shaw thought that not only was true life more interesting than fiction, but that he was his own greatest work of art.

This slightly diluted Shaw’s credibility as atheist and Fabian socialist – how much tub-thumping do we believe and how much is theatrical posturing?

How much was a reaction against his environment, his parents and his country of adoption, chosen because England was a country which privileged his chosen weapon of words?

The blurring of fact and fantasy may be Irish in every sense and creative in a Shavian one: one trick of the Great Man was to invert the familiar and check the result for truth or meaning.

But alas, even the hardworking and likeable O’Keeffe failed to capture the same excitement as the plays and books of his hero.

Shaw’s fiction seems so much brilliantly more imaginative than any recreation of his own life and we are left pondering the philosophy of Roland Barthes who declared that biography is no clue to the creative genius.

The spark, Irish or other, remains elusive.

Three stars