This lifeless production of Brian Friel's 1979 play secures the impression that monumental scenic design is now the official understanding of directing on the main stage of Ireland's national theatre. Ben Barnes, the Abbey's artistic director, evidences no driving reason to stage this most Chekhovian of Friel's plays other than to fill the space with a classic. The play takes place in Ballybeg Hall, a crumbling pile where the O'Donnell family reassemble for the wedding of youngest daughter Claire and end up facing the death of their patriarch and with it the symbolic final gasps of the obsolete Catholic big-house aristocracy.
All the characters are plagued by the past, but Joe Vanek's massive and ungainly set so dominates the action that it mires the production in what feels like interminable real stage time. Uneven casting and little apparent company work on relationships hardly helps matters. The actors all seem in different individual worlds and it is only the text, not their behaviour nor their physical relationships on stage, that informs us of the currents, desires, and resentments passing among them. Justine Mitchell has a simply brilliant second-act moment of panicked clarity as the depressed Claire; and Peter Hanly comes into his own in the third act as the fabulist brother Casimir.
But Elisabeth Dermot Walsh is well out of her depth as the drunk Alice, the usually excellent Paul Hickey overacts alarmingly as her fallen-idealist husband Eamon, and Ingrid Craigie fails to make an impression as the downtrodden Judith. Where was the director to regulate these performances and bring the actors together? Peter Brook's deadly theatre is alive and well and living in Dublin, and Irish theatre and Irish audiences are much the worse for it.
· Until January 24. Box office: 353 1 878 7222
