John B Keane's first play, written in 1959, has become a favourite on the Irish amateur drama circuit, and this new staging by Druid theatre company was initially received on opening night as a jokey crowd-pleaser. But the laughs died out as the utter seriousness of purpose behind Garry Hynes's stunning production emerged.
Hynes has mined the play for its roots in folk tradition and the tragedy at its core. When pretty schoolgirl Sive first enters, she is a Red Riding Hood in brown gabardine and scarlet headscarf. The wolf, it seems, is her bitter aunt Mena, who resents that she and her husband have "to work ourselves to the marrow of the bones" to maintain Sive and her grandmother. Mena plans to marry Sive off to a wealthy old farmer, but Sive resists because she is in love with the handsome carpenter, Liam.
That this is more than melodrama becomes clear with the entrance of the minstrel singers, Pats Bocock and Carthalawn. With their wild appearance, ritualised gestures and foreboding songs and curses, they embody the deeper, pagan traditions that are being subverted in an Ireland racked by change and greed - which, Keane movingly argues, are the real villains here. There are some creaky plot points where the play's age shows (the crucial delivery of a secret letter, for example), but Pats's final proclamation about the perils facing the nation is perhaps more prescient than ever in contemporary, post-boom Ireland: "The face of the country is changing; God help the land!"
Hynes's superb cast and creative team help to build a unified vision of rural deprivation and struggle. Some of Ireland's finest actors - Derbhle Crotty, Anna Manahan, Eamonn Morrissey, Gary Lydon - blend into an ensemble with an equal number of lesser-known talents. Fine attention to heightened detail - the exaggerated perspective and low-slung roof of Francis O'Connor's dirty white box of a set; Noel O'Donovan's desperate leer as Sive's stooped suitor - creates an atmosphere that suggests the grotesqueness of the situation without making light of it.
Hynes's choice to have the minstrels break the fourth wall for their last slow march is her chilling masterstroke. In its dark beauty, this production does great honour to the enduring vision of Keane, who died earlier this year.
· Until September 21. Box office: 00 353 91 568 617. Then at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin (00 353 1 817 3333), from October 8-26.
