With this new play Vincent Woods breaks ranks with Yeats and Synge by reimagining the story of Deirdre and Naoise not as misty Celtic twilight, but as a dark and lusty bloodbath: Irish myth as Greek tragedy. He has an eager co-conspirator in French director Olivier Py, whose production involves on-stage rain, male and female nudity, simulated sex acts, and the actors moving big black set units around on casters.
Pierre-André Weitz's design has the cast of 13 in white make-up and dressed in black and red, with lots of fur, stiletto heels, and big clunky jewellery; the play starts and ends with them addressing the audience via stand microphones. The production, in short, screams "European" and "different," sometimes so aggressively that its strengths - excellent acting, Woods' fine free verse, and the story itself - seem secondary. But the soundness of Woods' approach to the material wins out: as told here, this is a horrific, ultimately gripping tragedy that resonates through Shakespeare all the way up to contemporary ethnic conflicts.
Beautiful, cursed Deirdre's birth is marked by an unworldly shriek. She becomes the fetish object of weak King Conor, whose problems are clearly of the Oedipal sort: through Olwen Fouéré's fantastically committed performance as Ness we can imagine what Lady Macbeth would have been like as a mother. Deirdre meets her fate in the form of the gorgeous, heroic Naoise, and runs away with him and his brothers to temporarily escape the royal wrath.
Excellent female performances are this production's strongest feature: Kelly Campbell brings to life all the human ambiguity that Woods gives Deirdre: she is never innocent, always flirtatious, but eventually a woman in love who loses everything before our eyes, horribly. Gabrielle Reidy is also excellent as the nurse Leabharcham, whose love for Deirdre forces her to share information that sets the tragic cogs in motion. At three hours this is a challenging night, but offers new insights into familiar material.
· Until July 16. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
