This production launches the Druid theatre company's long-mooted plan to stage all of JM Synge's plays in two years. Here, as with her recent productions of John B Keane's plays, Garry Hynes achieves an aesthetic equilibrium that Syngecalled "transfigured realism": heightened stylisation depicting social reality.
The setting bluntly presents the deprivation of the characters' conditions: there is nothing pretty about Michael James Flaherty's grubby shebeen. The locals are a hirsute bunch of gawkers, but Anne-Marie Duff's quietly exasperated reaction to them as Pegeen Mike reminds us that she fears she is stuck with them for life. When Cillian Murphy enters as Christy Mahon, his abjection is palpable: weedy, filthy and cowering, his pivotal lie about parricide comes across as the act of a desperate man.
Brilliantly realised by the design and production team, the play is sustained by superb ensemble acting. Duff and Murphy are glowingly awkward in their mounting attraction to each other. Aisling O'Sullivan's timing is dead-on as widow Quin, her exchanges with old Mahon (Frank O'Sullivan) a delight. The final scenes are so highly choreographed as to approach parody, were it not for the emotional complicity the actors have achieved with the audience. This brings home the ambiguity of the final reversal: is Christy's departure, and the loss of love and potential it represents, due to the characters' situations?
That we leave wondering suggests this production has found new life in a well-known play. Diction and audibility were problems; in all other ways this is an earthy, provocative and inspiring production.
· Until February 21. Box office: 00 353 91 569 777. Then touring.
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