As you take your seat for Sean O'Casey's famous tenement tragedy, you are confronted by a downstage barricade of junk furniture. This instantly tells you two things about Ben Barnes's Abbey Theatre production: that it will be as much about poverty as nationalism, and will lean towards expressionism rather than realism. Both promises are made good in this innovative Irish import.
O'Casey was a pioneer in that he showed the 1916 Easter Rising from the vantage point of low-life Dubliners. Here, Barnes, right from the start, plays down O'Casey's comic gusto to show how public events shadow private lives. The air crackles with sexual tension as the harassed Nora Clitheroe desperately tries to snatch a moment of peace with her husband, Jack; as they are about to make love, a fateful knock at the door summons Jack to the Irish Citizen Army. It's a shocking moment, confirming Jack's view that "Ireland is greater than a wife".
While Barnes acknowledges O'Casey's political critique, he puts equal stress on his fascination with economics and expressionism. In the second-act pub scene, Amelia Crowley's outstanding Rosie Redmond is not some comic prostitute but a desperately hard-pressed working girl. And, as the barflies bicker, we see the shadow of a nationalist orator looming over Francis O'Connor's windowed set like some demonic monster, as he proclaims:"Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing." By the end, Dublin has become a flame-lit hell evoking the carnage simultaneously taking place in Flanders.
Barnes, in short, implies that O'Casey's play is closer to The Silver Tassie, which followed it, than to Juno and the Paycock, which preceded it. Inevitably, this exacts a certain price. The comedy, out of which the tragedy grows, gets largely lost and certain key roles are underplayed: Bessie Burgess, a choric Protestant termagant whose face is supposedly "hardened by toil and a little coarsened by drink", is inexplicably played by the beautiful Catherine Byrne.
However, Cathy Belton admirably suggests there is something both understandable and excessive in Nora's demand that Jack abandon a dying comrade. Olwen Fouere's death-fixated Mrs Gogan has the right gloomy severity, and Eamon Morrissey turns Fluther Good from a star turn into a pocket- sized bundle of decency. This, in the end, is the production's overwhelming strength. It reminds us that O'Casey was always on the side of Dublin's impoverished people and against heroic abstractions.
· Until January 29. Box office: 0845 120 7515.
