Shakespeare's history plays are very rarely performed in Ireland, and for that reason alone it is a treat to see one of the Henry plays on the national stage. Even better, it is well and cleanly spoken by a skilled cast, who use the words to advance action rather than standing and declaiming - a huge step forward for Irish Shakespeare. Director Jimmy Fay and set designer Ferdia Murphy's engaging reconfiguration of the space has the audience sitting in two banks watching activity that whirls through the playing area and up the aisles: there is a sense that we are in the middle of a much larger ongoing situation, which is exactly where the play sits in the Wars of the Roses series.
But the evening doesn't add up to much intellectually or morally. The problem doesn't lie with playwright Mark O'Rowe's cleanly executed edit of the text; most of what he has pared away is political subplots and arcane wordplay. Rather it is the shape of the original play, and place of the main character in it that provide the challenges. Once he has established his difficulties with his son's errant behaviour and his worries about the rebel Percies, Henry (Nick Dunning) fades from the action in the first act, leaving the focus on Hotspur's scheming and Hal and Falstaff's antics. This is particularly disappointing, as Dunning is the finest speaker of verse on the cast. Any significant debate about honour and legitimacy, as embodied by Henry's debatable claim to the throne in the first place, doesn't really start to happen until midway through, and by that point the focus has already begun to shift to the battle scenes.
A lighter touch may have livened things up here, but a ponderous seriousness pervades. A little metatheatrical insouciance would have helped ease some jarring choices: while we accept the convention that five of the nine-strong cast are going to double and treble up, that the only female actor (the excellent Niamh Linehan) appears as a man in act two feels a step too far. The outrageousness of David Pearse's Welsh accent as Glendower comes out of nowhere. And Declan Conlon just doesn't feel right as Hotspur - he is patently older than the actor playing his uncle, and his intelligent, potent presence gives us a lot of brain but not enough fire.
· Until January 11: Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
