Unflinching honesty is what we now associate with Henrik Ibsen, a determination to probe areas of public and private morality and to expose hypocrisy. In The Wild Duck, he created the character, Gregors Werle, who might, at first glance, be an extension of himself. A man with a mission to reveal the truth about the bonds that connect his family and that of his old friend Hjalmar Ekdal, he is guided by his conscience and inability to accept comfortable compromises. When he is revealed to be a misguided and fanatical meddler who destroys everything he hopes to save, we can begin to appreciate the subtleties of Ibsen's thought and writing here.
However, it takes some time for these to emerge from a play that builds slowly, from its conventionally naturalistic opening in the Werle household towards its tragic finale. In Hungarian director Laszlo Marton's production, the pace of the first three acts seems unnecessarily slow and his direction of Frank McCusker as a glacially unsympathetic Werle undermines our sense of the allure he has for Ekdal (Denis Conway). As the tensions rise between the self-pitying Ekdal, his wife Gina and devoted daughter Hedvig, Werle's menacing power is increasingly emphasised.
McCusker's performance builds impressively in the later acts, matching the simmering anger that Andrea Irvine brings to the difficult, ambiguous role of Gina. Each time the door opens on to this household, something threatening intrudes, from the buried past or the unsettling present. The fragility of the domestic cocoon is highlighted in Frank McGuinness's sympathetic, sensitive script. As well as capturing Ibsen's tragicomic tone, it has a mildly Irish flavour: the Ekdals' two lodgers are "a right pair of boyos". One of these, the dissolute, world-weary Dr Rellig (Chris McHallem) becomes the play's moral barometer, and it is he who drives home Ibsen's theme: the difference between the deployment of honesty as a weapon and the pursuit of truth, which, as Rellig points out, can sometimes be found in "the saving lie" that "saves and stimulates us all".
These apparent paradoxes are spelled out a little too directly, and the heavy symbolism of Werle's speeches, especially to Hedvig, clogs the flow, but the play, in this respectful production, lingers in the memory. It continues Ibsen's investigation of moral codes, of the position of women and, through Ekdal's narcissism, it explores the difference between true feeling and sentimentality: in life and in art.
· Until August 16. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
