Time and space are the distinguishing qualities of Philip Breen's staging of the Sean O'Casey classic. He takes two diversions from the traditional presentation of the Dublin tenement tragedy; both are risky, and both pay off. The first is to play the two-act drama without an interval; the second is to break the mood of naturalism with a set without walls, the furniture of Seumas Shields' rented room fronting an open stage.
By dropping the interval, the director intensifies the play's day-in-the-life trajectory. We move seamlessly from the banter of the early scenes between salesman Shields and his room-mate Donal Davoren - the poet mistaken for an IRA fighter - passing through Donal's flirtation with Minnie Powell, the Republican romantic from upstairs, and on to the midnight conversation interrupted by a blast of gunfire and a British army raid.
It means that, instead of kicking off act two with a blast of energy, Breen takes the pace down to a soporific night-time whisper. In doing so, he risks lulling us into sleepy indifference as Michael Glenn Murphy's self-contained Donal and Ciaran McIntyre's blustering Seumas mutter to each other across the bedroom. The strategy pays dividends, however, as the gunfire erupts, forcing us to sit up and confront the unpredictable terror of life during wartime.
Soon after the arrival of the army auxiliaries, the spaciousness of Colin Richmond's set also begins to make sense. Initially it is in the long sprints the terrified neighbours must make to reach the apartment, underscoring their sense of panic. Most powerfully, it is in the soldiers' upturning of the flat, leaving a desolate landscape backed by a defiant slogan on the back wall - "We serve neither king nor Kaiser, but Ireland" - and emphasising O'Casey's continued political relevance.
· Until November 18. Box office: 0141-429 0022.
