Chestnut season arrived early at the Abbey this year. Lennox Robinson's 1933 play is a light satire of pretensions, theatrical and otherwise: a self-important touring theatre troupe arrive in a poky seaside Irish town and transform the locals, who absorb and mimic the high emotions of the Russian and Scandinavian plays the group perform. It is easy to see why the play has become a set piece of the amateur dramatic repertoire: it provides a few good laughs, requires only one set and is so mild mannered as to offer no conceivable potential offence.
But this production does not offer a convincing argument that the play deserves reconsideration on the national stage. Though hardly metadramatic in the style of his contemporary Pirandello, Robinson offers a fairly loving account of the transformative power of theatre, how it can change lives and make timid people believe in new possibilities. Jim Nolan's sleepy production, however, has too few airs and graces of its own; it is so flat as to be practically horizontal. The main audience draw is veteran actress Anna Manahan, who incites some pathos as the spinster hotelier Lizzie Twohig, but for the wrong reasons. She comes across as doddery when her character would make more sense as a self-dramatising dreamer. The rest of the cast, across the board, offer excellent character studies - Robert O'Mahoney and Kate O'Toole as the grand theatricals; Tom Hickey, Marion O'Dwyer and John Olohan as the funny, fussy locals; Aaron Monaghan, Pauline Hutton, Michael FitzGerald and Judith Roddy as the younger, more idealistic souls. But the production hits a stultifying rhythm early on, and stays there. Characters arrive on Bláithin Sheehan's strange sitting-room set - murky swaths of brown and blue colours splashed on the walls being the production's only nod to a non-naturalistic approach - say their piece and leave. One hundred and 30 minutes pass slowly.
· Until December 31. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222
