At last, a production that embraces the tragic heart of Brian Friel's late-career masterpiece. The famed 1990 Abbey production, revived in 2000, played the narrator Michael's reflections as rose-tinted nostalgia, but what he is remembering is a time of waste, loss and profound cultural dissonance. The year is 1936, civil war is brewing in Spain and back in Donegal "hair cracks are appearing everywhere" in official Catholic Ireland. Friel is chronicling the ravages of colonial and neo-colonial repression, symbolised by the pagan, indigenous spirit that infiltrates the play and eventually undermines matriarch Kate's attempts to hold the unconventional Mundy family together.
Robert Jones's set squeezes the family of six adults and a child into a tiny kitchen, and the gorse-covered hill behind adds to the sense of claustrophobia. Joe Dowling's excellent casting starts with getting the ages right: the five unmarried sisters are tragically young - Kate, the eldest, is only 40. When Catherine Walsh's movingly stoic Agnes begs Kate (in vain) to let the sisters dance at the harvest festival, your heart aches at the wasted potential of these vital women. When that spirit none the less breaks out, in the sisters' savage dance to the "voodoo" of their new Marconi radio, the feeling is one of unleashed fury and, when the music suddenly stops, of embarrassed, frustrated exposure.
Dowling lets the play unfurl at its own leisurely pace. Derbhle Crotty, as the wisecracking Maggie, and Dawn Bradfield's sweet, simple Rose stand out. John Kavanagh traces a very believable trajectory as elder brother Jack, the returned missionary priest whose wholesale embrace of native African traditions leads to the family's downfall. The only missteps are a strained performance by Ben Price as Michael's father Gerry and Rupert Murray's overly bright lighting, which makes it all look a bit like a failed science experiment. Perhaps Dowling's masterstroke is the interpretation of adult Michael, agonised by memories: particularly in the second act, Peter Gowen's monologues are magnificently affecting.
· Until April 17. Box office: 00 353 1 874 4045.
