Druid Theatre Company's recent idea of packaging its work together - the McDonagh Trilogy, DruidSynge and now the John B Keane Trilogy - has worn thin. Placing this 1964 play alongside Garry Hynes's superb staging several years ago of Keane's earliest plays, Sive and Sharon's Grave, only shows off its unevenness, and sends Hynes and her creative team in contradictory directions. The Year of the Hiker tells the strange story of a patriarch who, having walked out on his family 20 years ago, reappears on the day of his daughter's wedding, seeking forgiveness.
Hynes and co approach the play in the same grand, expressionistic terms as the previous Keane productions - the exaggerated size of Francis O'Connor's country kitchen underlines the Lacey family's new prosperity, while a horizontal slice taken out of the back wall shows the roiling weather behind. The actors make strong choices that sometimes gravitate towards caricature. Garrett Lombard's arms-folded-over-chest posture accentuates his strapping-lad physique, while Aaron Monaghan's capering ensures we know he's the devilish one - and, in the case of the female leads, Marie Mullen and Catherine Walsh, creates moving portraits of emotional deprivation.
But play and production never quite decide whether Eamon Morrissey's Hiker Lacey is a symbol - of male weakness, irrationality, or resistance to traditional Catholic values - or just one melodramatic character in a play full of them. In fact, playing the melodrama may have been the best strategy. It is as a character study and a portrait of an unconventional 1960s Irish family that the production is most engaging. Until, that is, its final minutes, in which Keane unnecessarily solves the play's central mystery in a series of scenes that leave an unpleasant aftertaste of misogyny - are we really meant to accept that the whole situation was a woman's fault all along?
· Until May 20, then at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, May 22-June 17. Box office: 00353 91 569777.
