With one production at London's Bush, another heading for the Abbey Theatre's main stage, and an armload of 2004 Irish Theatre Awards, Rough Magic are on a roll. But the flatness of this staging of Brecht's 1943 script raises suspicions that the company might be overcommitted.
One looks in vain for any on-stage evidence of marketing claims that the story will be set "in the context of contemporary global politics". Rather, this is a straightforward, period-set telling of Brecht's very long play about Galileo's travails pioneering modern physics in the face of the Roman Inquisition.
In the half-century since he wrote, Brecht's staging innovations (scene titles, direct narration, interspersed songs and carnival scenes) have been integrated into the language of contemporary theatre. The challenge for a company today, surely, is to find new ways to jolt and politicise audiences. Projecting scene titles on a backing video screen has rather the opposite effect here; screens are so much a part of contemporary life that this lulls and feels overly familiar. The problem is extended because cast members also speak the projected words; by the time the much-advertised action actually happens on stage, it feels like an echo.
One assumed early on that Stephen Brennan was keeping his performance low key to conserve energy for the marathon ahead, but he never approached the heights of anger and passion the script calls for; he is at his most convincing in curmudgeonly-but-crafty mode in the final scenes. There is some nice character work from Sam Peter Corry, Robert O'Mahoney, and the indispensable David Pearse; but all of these actors have been, and can be, much better.
It is exciting to see Project Arts Centre packed out on a Monday night for the smart, well-produced theatre that Rough Magic usually promises, but what we got this time was soft-centred and (Bertolt, wherever you are, cover your ears!) more than a tad bourgeois.
· Until March 5. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
