Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was a Victorian writer with Greek-Irish roots who built a journalistic career in America before embracing Japanese culture - he died a Japanese citizen in 1904. Storytellers Theatre Company's new collaborative production celebrates his little-known life and work, mingling biographical elements with acted-out versions of his Gothic tales.
Liam Halligan's production is well-conceived and executed. The set, by Marcus Costello, is a curved blue panel that extends from the flies down to the audience's feet: it's as if the action takes place on a wave. The five performers - Aoife Moloney, Colin O'Donoghue, Diane O'Keeffe, Conan Sweeny and Maria Tecce - are superb, playing numerous characters, narrating the action, and adding live singing and instrumentation to Denis Clohessy's recorded soundscape.
Halligan builds on his reputation here as a wonderful creator of stage images: he represents a drowning by having the performer tangle herself in long sheets of sticky cellophane; a long wooden pole becomes everything from a gangplank to metaphorical cross for Hearn to bear.
While it all goes down well on the night, though, there is the lingering sense that the company have not fully succeeded in their ambitious combination of bio-play, storytelling and visual theatre elements. The plot is impressively clear, even as it jumps back and forth in time, but too long is spent on Hearn's young life. This gives the impression that the production's goal is a psychological investigation of his literary obsession with death and the occult, making the enacted stories feel like they're being wielded as proof rather than valued on their own terms.
The final story is a Japanese version of the myth of Niamh and Oisin, implying that Lafcadio found his land of eternal youth in Japan. This creates a pleasing, but too easy, circularity: an investigation of Hearn's exotification of the Orient might have provided more depth.
· Until April 9. Box office: 00 353 1462 7477. Then touring.
