Hugh Leonard won a Tony award in 1978 for this autobiographical story of a playwright, Charlie Tynan, mulling over his past on the night of his adoptive father's funeral. The text has held up beautifully: Leonard's portrait of family relationships is subtle, convincing and often shockingly blunt. Key to the play's success is the use of doubling: two actors play Charlie, one in his 40s who inhabits the play's "real time", and one who plays the character in his late teens. Thus it is not just his crotchety Da who haunts Charlie's memory, but also his younger, callower self. The play is at its most engaging and complex when we see older Charlie in open warfare with them both.
It is a shame, then, to find the Abbey Theatre dressing up this dark memory play as a lightweight summer entertainment. The director, Patrick Mason, makes the actors perform in exaggerated, cartoonish style, and so downplays exactly the thing that makes the play unique and compelling: its honest portrait of deeply flawed people. Sean Campion externalises and overplays older Charlie's bitterness, and in a key scene at the end of act one does some cringeworthy kiddy-acting as his younger self, even though Leonard's stage directions instruct the actor to play the role as an adult looking back. Anita Reeves is strong and believable as Charlie's mother, but there is too much mugging from Alan Leech's younger Charlie and Ronan Leahy's Oliver.
The centre of the action is Stephen Brennan's Da, and though this excellent actor has impeccable comic timing and moments of great clarity, he too often seems disconnected from the rest of the action. On several levels, of course, Da's idiosyncrasies are the point. Here he is a creation of Charlie's memory, popping in and out of the action. When alive he embodied enormous contradictions: an unrepentant Nazi supporter, secretly jealous of his wife's romantic past, awkwardly trying to shelter his adoptive son from slurs of "bastard", forever playing the grovelling, shambling fool to his employers. It is a fantastically rich and difficult role, but here it is played too much as a star turn, not enough as the crux of the action.
· Until September 21. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
