Under Brain Brady's direction, the new production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's late 18th-century comedy classic is probably the most stylish ever seen in Dublin.
Conor Murphy has provided a vast empty grey-floored stage, the wings masked by, on stage right, bleak square pillars and, on stage left, similar taller pillars curved vault-like at the top. Screens are lowered and raised to demarcate playing areas for various scenes and entrances are almost as often made from trapdoors in the floor as from the wings. This is a Spartan grandiloquence of 20th-century design. Mr Murphy's costumes and props, while containing multitudinous carefully-placed anachronisms from this century, are colourful and funny and much in keeping with the excessive spirit of the author's own time, a spirit echoed again in the exaggerated acting style of the actors.
Is this conscious conflict of styles within the production an attempt to underline the belief that this old play has modern resonances in its convoluted tale of love lost and finally (in some instances) regained? If so, the stylistic contradictions, which can scarcely have been accidental, given the resolutely 20th-century musical score, create an unnecessary conflict within the integral theatricality of Sheridan's original, and an uncertainty not consonant with the author's purpose of sheer entertainment - an uncertainty which too often leaves the actors at a loss, too spaced out on their sticks of furniture to allow of much direct contact, yet without the artificial privacy with which Sheridan thought to allow them their asides to the audience. Worse, some good laughs flounder in the same uncertainty.
To a significant extent, however, the evening is saved by some grand performances. Jane Brennan's Julia carries great intelligent weight as the bespectacled Julia, constantly tried almost beyond endurance by the neurotic uncertainties of her would-be lover Faulkland - another characterisation by Phelim Drew with the ring of human truth inside its comic exaggeration. And Pat Kinevane makes a truthfully fearful and frequently very funny Acres while Anita Reeves's Mrs Malaprop is a miracle of precise incomprehension. The rest do their level best within the realms of the central uncertainty, and each has his or her moments.
