Pan Pan Theatre's production for the Dublin theatre festival is confrontational from its opening moments. Transposing Lars von Trier's Dogme film, The Idiots, to suburban Dublin, the effects it creates are somewhere between reality TV and a psychological experiment. Performed unevenly by a cast of 36 - of whom only eight are professional actors - a series of short scenes traces the attempts of a group of twentysomethings to defy convention and challenge social prejudice. Andrew Clancy's coolly abstract set with steel doors and adaptable walls suggests a laboratory, heightened by Aedin Cosgrove's clinically bright lighting.
Pretending to be intellectually disabled, the group form a commune, squatting in a relative's house, which remains unsold due to their off-putting presence. Getting in touch with their "inner idiot" involves lots of uninhibited movement, nudity and sexual experimentation, culminating in an orgy. While the film's emotional detail is missed, the sense of exposure and risk is much greater here. When the group's angry, self-appointed leader (Dylan Tighe) freely refers to them as "retards" or "spas", the words elicit some winces from the audience.
While Gavin Quinn's production is often difficult to watch, it seems sincerely experimental rather than exploitative. In the spirit of radical psychologist RD Laing, it questions the repressive ways people react to difference. As the Idiots' behaviour exposes class prejudices and snobbery, a far-from-subtle critique emerges, in which the middle-class life from which they try to escape is depicted as a living death.
The group's disintegration is marked by the rancour of a political or social movement that hasn't lived up to its original radicalism. In the closing image of them staring through a glass screen into a suburban sitting-room, the pathos of lost idealism hangs in the air.
· Until October 13. Box office: 003531 6778899.
