Even without the threatened picket by burn-again Christians from the Rev Paisley's Free Presbyterian church, outraged at the "grave slander" of having a man "and a southern Papist at that" play Elizabeth I as a bed-hopping bint more concerned with sexual conquests than with those on the battlefield, this was an event.
The 10th birthday of Kabosh, Northern Ireland's most consistently experimental theatre company, is cause for celebration in a province through which tumbleweeds still blow despite peace. And for an hour of Dario Fo's little-performed satire on power and paranoia we saw Kabosh at its brilliant best, wringing the blackest of belly-laughs from the not-so-virginal queen's maniacal though strangely convincing theory that Shakespeare's Hamlet was a coded attack on her as a part of a wider conspiracy to prise her from the throne.
Patrick Moy endows his Beth with the same lonely delusions of power that now seem to haunt the house of Blair, as they did Thatcher before him, with brilliant ensemble support from John Paul Hurley and Paul Hamilton as Dame Gross Lady.
But then, just as we were about to acclaim another triumph for director Rachel O'Riordan, who brought Hurricane to the West End, the whole edifice collapsed in a second act so confused it left you doubting what you had just seen. We staggered out into the drizzle like survivors of a bomb blast, grasping for an explanation that will probably never come.
· At Market Place Theatre, Armagh, tonight. Box office: 028-3752 1821. Then touring.
