Choosing to premiere his Playboy in the same theatre where Garry Hynes opened her superb staging of it less than four months ago is only the first of several bizarre choices made by Abbey Theatre artistic director Ben Barnes around this centenary-year touring production. Perhaps to differentiate his from Hynes's gritty heightened-realism, Barnes has opted for pointed stylisation. The action is controlled by a narrator (Simon O'Gorman) dressed like a clownish vagabond, who opens with a seemingly un-ironic delivery of Synge's preface to the Playboy, which argues for writing that captures the "fiery and magnificent" Irish popular imagination.
Conflicting information already: does Barnes intend this production as an endorsement of Synge's viewpoint? Or, by using the preface as a Brechtian framing device and literally framing the production in Guido Tondino's set of moving walls, is he querying the play's relevance to contemporary, globalised Ireland? Monica Frawley's costumes indicate that we are in the 1940s or 1950s; the actors deliver the material to signal its familiarity, striking poses and staying there. Tom Vaughan Lawlor's Christy is so fey, and Olwen Fouere's cowgirl Widow Quin so butch, that one wonders if Barnes is queering the play. Christy's final confrontation at the centre of a tug-of-war with the other four male characters is straight out of Niall Henry's excellent experimental version three years ago. This is a confused and reckless postmodern pastiche that defies even the radiant Cathy Belton, as Pegeen Mike, to bring it to life. What possible sense will US audiences make of it when it tours there later this year?
· Until Saturday. Box office: 00-353-91 569 777. Then touring.
