Bedbound, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London

A high-pitched stream of vomit and guts

A wall drops to the floor with a terrific bang at the start of Enda Walsh's Bedbound. It's like seeing the horrified falling-open of a giant jaw. The imagery is not accidental: for after this visual coup, it's jaw-jaw all the way – relentlessly, unstoppably for an hour. This piece has a gob on it like a gargoyle in a flood. Except that it's vomit and guts that seem to be spewing forth here.

The play is Walsh's follow-up to Disco Pigs, the cult hit (recently filmed) about teenage love and twisted dependency penned in an invented language that sealed the two protagonists off from the rest of the world. That is much the predicament of the two characters (father and daughter) in Bedbound – here claustrophobically immured in a tiny bedroom on her cruddy single bed. Liam Carney's superb Dad, a wiry Irish coronary-in-waiting in a frayed blue suit, talks in frenetic spasms about his murderously determined struggle to become cock-of-the-walk in the Cork and Dublin furniture-dealing business. Littered in his wake are the steaming remains of dimwitted colleagues, his marriage and his polio-stricken daughter. Shame at himself and her condition has caused him to turn their house into a maze of partitions at whose centre she is literally walled in.

Norma Sheahan turns in an equally terrific performance as the Daughter, a pixilated little wraith who jabbers drivenly, the latest in a long line of Irish characters who cling on to words as though they were lifebelts in an ocean of nothingness. Her wizened mouth has the twitchy alertness of a snout; she cowers and contorts. At the start, Father seems to have the advantage. His blaring defiant braggadocio is suffused with the actorly talents needed to be a successful salesman, though from the terrible wear-and-tear of his manner, you sense that he is essentially his own punchbag. In between bouts, he retires to the corner, covering his head with a sheet, while the hideous piercing chanting of some spectral lynch-mob shatters the nerves. And, as he admits to more and more, the Daughter gradually comes into her own.

Walsh's own production is nothing if not a visceral experience, but a bit of me didn't believe in a word of the play. It is flecked with arresting turns of phrase, as when Dad, berating the inexpertise of his workforce, describes how "the three stooges grappled with the wall unit like it were made of clitoris". But Bedbound also feels overly tradition-bound. The debt to Beckett is obvious, and from what I've written so far, you may feel that the father-daughter axis here makes some of the relationships in Beckett seem rather casual, come-and-go-as-you-please affairs.

A high pitch, though, does not necessarily entail depth. In a play like Footfalls, Beckett penetrates to the root of the morbid parent-child symbiosis. By comparison, Bed-bound, scrabbles showily at the soil around it. And the kisses of apparent redemption at the end come across as textbook rather than as something properly felt on the pulses.

The play, it seems, received rapturous reviews when it opened at the Traverse during the Edinburgh Festival. This reveals more about the Festival's perennial damaging effect on critical standards than it does about the worth of this play.

To 2 Feb (020-7565 5000)