I came, I saw, I laughed my head off. But not everyone will: Arthur Mathews, Michael Nugent, and Paul Woodfull's musical epic about the Ireland football team's travails in the 2002 World Cup, set in the context of Ancient Rome, is one long in-joke for and about Irish culture. It's not just the specific references to local public figures, news stories, and the coarseness of colloquial Irish speech that mark this out as aimed at a complicit audience. It is also the fact that - on the surface at least - it's self-consciously bad. The songs are simple and often don't rhyme. The jokes are broad and crass. The performances seem, at first, as wooden and one-dimensional as the sets.
But this goes to the heart of the conflict between Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane, here represented as General Macarticus and the great warrior Keano. When Keane left the Ireleand team's training ground in Saipan, claiming that McCarthy was unprofessional, a debate opened up about national self-definition: Should Ireland strive for world-class excellence, or is it more important to set modest goals, prioritise loyalty, and have a bit of craic? The conflict, in one of the production's crudely accurate lyrics, "divided the country like a referendum on abortion", and no one side won.
The stroke of genius behind I, Keano is the Roman setting: by being so grandiose it both sends up the silliness and acknowledges the seriousness of the McCarthy/Keane clash. That it seems like tacky nonsense is the paradoxical heart of its satire; it holds a warped mirror up to the conflict and asks us to consider whether it was really that important after all. And it is a vehicle for some real talents under Peter Sheridan's sure directorial hand. The cast's exaggerated vocal and physical imitations of the key players are hilariously dead on, with Gary Cooke particularly brilliant in a series of cameos.
It often goes too far, and there is something to offend everyone (I drew the line at the likening of journalistic obsequiesness to homosexuality). Energy wanes in the second half and, while taking sides would probably have been commercial suicide, it is disappointing that the creators add no new material to the debate. Still, the laughter it provokes is a welcome catharsis.
· Until March 5. Box office: 0870 243 4455.
