"Irish plays in London," Hugh Leonard wrote in 1971, "are as popular as pork sausages in Tel Aviv." No one could say that today, as proved by this revival of JB Keane's 40-year-old play best known as a Jim Sheridan movie starring Richard Harris. But, while Keane's play still packs a melodramatic punch, I prefer the quiet Chekhovian realism of a Conor McPherson or William Trevor.
Keane's subject is what one character calls "this unappeasable hunger for land". Accordingly, he shows a domineering Irish village patriarch, known as Bull McCabe, using strong-arm tactics to secure ownership of a four-acre field put up for auction by a penurious widow. As the field's tenant, McCabe argues that it is his heifers that have increased the site's value. So he does everything within his power, including bullying, bribery and murder, to ensure the field passes to him.
Keane deals with a vital subject in Irish history: the question of who has the moral right to land and property. But he skews the debate by making McCabe such a loathsome figure. McCabe's argument that he has improved the field and wants to save it from a cement-making outside buyer has much weight. His thuggish behaviour, macho sexuality and maltreatment of animals, however, forestall any real debate. Instead of Brechtian dialectic, what one gets is the modern equivalent of a 19th-century mortgage melodrama.
Along the way, Keane offers some sharp social insights into life in south-west Ireland: the quasi-feudal dominance of figures like McCabe, the collusion between the church and the law in trying to solve crime, and the chattel-like status of the publican's wife who has borne her husband nine children. All this comes across clearly in Roisin McBrinn's lively production. And I have no complaint about Lorcan Cranitch's bullying bravura as McCabe nor about the strong support from Tony Rohr as a weaselly toper, David Ganly as the biddable publican-auctioneer or Rita Hamill as his ceaselessly fertile wife. The play tells some disquieting truths about Irish life: I only wish the intellectual dice weren't so heavily loaded.
· Until July 1. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
