Audiences are confronted with the savagery of capital punishment, and of war, in the first weekend of the Dublin Theatre Festival

Hedda Gabler

The Abbey Theatre

Hedda Gabler, the terminally bored yet somehow still fascinating heroine of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 masterpiece, is no stranger to compromise - having sold out her ideals, married beneath her station and forsaken her one steady occupation as secret muse to a dissolute writer. In one thing, however, she is consistent. Hedda has never allowed herself to fall out of style.

Whether that is true of Ibsen's 19th-century classic seems redundant beside this coolly ironic and devastatingly effective updating by Berlin's Schaubühne. Thomas Ostermeier is often held up as one of the leading lights of "Director's Theatre", a vague term with connotations of epic stagecraft and textual neglect. That, thankfully, has never been Ostermeier's style: he has remained scrupulously faithful to his writers. In this, his second Ibsen production, he submits fully to the performative strictures of Ibsen's naturalism, matching it with his own brand of photo-realism, while adding one major spin: a revolving stage.

As Katharina Schüttler's casually destructive Hedda emerges to demonstrate her precision aim with an airy insult or her father's pistols, Jan Pappelbaum's modern minimalist design becomes something more subtle. And as soon as we, like Hedda, have admired the raindrops rolling down its huge, sliding glass doors, we become accessories to her self-betrayal.

Ibsen saw his complicated heroine as a victim of late 19th-century society, where, he wrote, "a woman cannot be herself", but here we see a more immediately recognisable contemporary repression. These are characters who have mortgaged away their souls, trading in their ideals for a world of beautiful surfaces - something that the production implicitly condemns, while its handsome design luxuriates in it.

Less equivocally, Ostermeier's production tries to make Hedda as demonic as possible. On page the character pivots between impulsive cruelty and hand-wringing regret, but Schüttler rarely flinches from her malice. Toying with her academic husband, Tesman (Lars Eldinger), mocking every mention of love, or coolly manipulating Annedore Bauer's Mrs Elvsted and Jorg Hartmann's would-be adulterer Judge Brack, she exudes the chilly resolve of a willowy psychopath. And that, in this day and age, is someone we can get behind.

Likewise, Ostermeier has imbued other nooks and crannies of Ibsen's text with an arch relevance: as Lövborg (Tesman's academic rival and Hedda's former lover), Kay Bartholomaus Schulze prowls the space, keeping his ground-breaking new book on a laptop. It becomes his symbolic love child, destroyed by a jealous Hedda with the shattering blows of a hammer.

"Everything I touch becomes ludicrous and trivial," she laments, but these too are the characteristics of the society around her. In this dry, acerbic context, even Hedda's tragic end goes unrecognised, dismissed by the others as a joke. Her final action is denied its power, yet we absorb its tragic impact: Hedda has gone, but the world - and the set - keeps turning. * Run concluded

Peter Crawley

Orestes

Olympia Theatre

A cycle of revenge killings, violence enacted in the name of religion, questions of justice in wartime - it's easy to see what continues to draw theatre-makers and audiences back to the House of Atreus, attempting to rebuild it in contemporary terrain. Reinterpretations of the story of the cursed dynasty of Agamemnon have a long history: in Euripides' versions, written at the close of the fifth century BC, he typically took a considerably less heroic approach to the familiar mythical figures than his predecessors. Produced by Shared Experience theatre company, Helen Edmundson's adaptation of his late play, Orestes, amplifies the ignoble motivations and forces at work.

Presenting the aftermath of the murder by Orestes and Electra of their mother Clytemnestra, in revenge for her killing of their father, Agamemnon, this depiction of brother and sister makes it hard for us to believe that they ever had god (Apollo) on their side. By omitting the balancing figure of their only ally, Orestes' friend Pylades, Edmundson has further stacked the odds against them.

Vilified by her aunt, Helen (Clara Onyemere), in a vicious exchange, Electra (Mairead McKinley) is portrayed as a self-loathing victim. Deprived of her mother's love from childhood, she now dotes on the tormented Orestes (Alex Robertson), goading him into taking the action from which her gender precludes her. Without support, the siblings are cornered. Awaiting punishment from the assembly, they respond with hysteria (Orestes) and spleen (Electra).

Euripides's rhetorical counterpoint, reflecting on the themes of women and war, here becomes a heavy-handed display of histrionics, which on opening night prompted the audience to respond with laughter to some moments of dramatic climax. Under Nancy Meckler's direction, the two central characters are so overwrought that Edmundson's allusive text is swamped, and it's uncertain whether the tone of occasional black comedy is intentional.

The lack of clarity extends to the staging: the chorus, eliminated from the text, is represented by naked dummies, a solution which serves only to highlight what has been lost. There is little illumination either from the Imelda Marcos-style rows of gold stilettos lining the door to Clytemnestra's bedroom, suggesting, like the gilded robes the siblings change into, a flashy, ersatz royalty, but without a context. Floating somewhere between the ancient world and the present, this royal family needs more than a deus ex machina to save it. * Until Oct 7

Helen Meany

The Bonefire

Project Cube

Rosemary Jenkinson's first play, The Bonefire, a self-styled "comedy of manners amongst the sectarian classes" is nothing if not provocative. When even the poster for Rough Magic's production - depicting a glittering Red Hand of Ulster guarding a diva's crotch - seems designed to send up the totems of loyalism, one wonders exactly how mannered this comedy can be.

Set in the living room of one of the Annadale flats (conceived by designer Alan Farquharson as a plush den of defiantly poor taste) as the staunchly loyalist enclave ramps up its celebrations before July 12th, the play is chiefly concerned with the comic bickering between drug-addled UDA man Tommy (Joe Rea) and his neurotic, self-preening and endlessly cleaning sister Leanne (Andrea Irvine).

Trading put-downs as absently as comments on the weather, their McDonaghesque routine is interrupted by Davey (Gerard Jordan), a new recruit from east Belfast, whose money skills and handsome good looks appeal to both siblings. But all is not as it seems. No sooner has Davey infiltrated their affections, bringing along his mysterious civil service colleague Jane (Kathy Kiera Clarke), than trouble and treachery begin to stack up like a pyre.

This plot, of course, is as structurally considered as the conflagration outside Leanne's window, and - with a surprising fidelity to the style-over-substance ethos of a comedy of manners - the play is piled high with incidental gags, word play, mordant rejoinders . . . anything that will make the flames of Jenkinson's comedy climb higher. But such is the relentlessly epigrammatic text that there are few discernible highlights to the bonfire.

No one could doubt Jenkinson's facility with caustic wit. "Uncontrollable violence;" the excellent Irvine swoons, "not everyone sees the discipline in it." But the line might also apply to the uncontrollable mordancy of Jenkinson's play. In fairness, she is satirising a brand of loyalist that is already dangerously close to self-send-up - making Rea's fine turn as a Mad Dog in a red baseball cap all the more laudable. But in the indiscriminate satire, where republicans are dutifully presented as no less debased, we find no firm moral, political or social position. Oddly, the comedy suffers in this apparent vacuum of purpose, acquiring an hysterical edge, while plot details become more grotesque and distended.

It is as much as director Lynne Parker can do to handle the runaway tone, letting the play's initial barbed naturalism career towards the singed and charred horrors of Grand Guignol in its later stages. But, in the few moments where the consequence of violence is invoked, the effect is more confusing than shocking. "This has gone beyond a joke," says Tommy at one pivotal moment - and he's right - but Jenkinson can't resist adding another: "It's like something out of the Telegraph."

In the absence of sympathy, psychological insight or a spark of hope, we are asked to snicker at these increasingly surreal characters. But it is a hollow and ultimately despairing response to the political and sectarian symbol of the 11th night bonfire: a hacking laughter that is all but indistinguishable from gagging on its acrid fumes. * Until Oct 14

Peter Crawley

The Exonerated

Liberty Hall Theatre

The stage is furnished with 10 high chairs, each with a microphone and a lectern. The actors file out, take their places and begin the presentation, not so much a fully developed play as a co-ordinated series of dramatised readings. Its purpose is to confront the audience with the savagery of capital punishment, still widely practised, notably in America.

Authors Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen wisely chose to advance their cause not through the executed, but through six of those who, after long spells - up to 22 years - of incarceration, had their convictions overturned. The work uses only factual material - from interviews, extracts of affidavits and depositions, police interrogations and court transcripts. It is all on the public record.

We hear stories of police incompetence and corruption, where the accused were demoralised to the point where they doubted their own innocence. A man finds his father dead, and then his mother, both with their throats cut. He has no criminal record or motive, but is still charged and found guilty. Years later, two members of a biking gang, for whom violence is a badge of status, confess to the atrocity.

A woman and her family become embroiled with a criminal who shoots two policemen. The killer plea-bargains his way to a custodial sentence, while the woman he betrays faces the electric chair. Sunny Jacobs eventually gets her freedom, but has lost everything - her family and place in society. Extraordinarily, Jacobs was a member of the Dublin cast at the weekend.

It is a recurring pattern that those most oppressed by the American justice system are representative of the poor and underprivileged, although one of those depicted came from a stable background, and was simply a victim of police incompetence.

The suffering of these people did not end on their release from jail. The shadow of the electric chair still darkens their lives, in the shape of society's rejection, an inability to find jobs and haunting nightmares. Incredibly, none of them has received any financial compensation for the lost years.

This production has lit fires wherever it has played, aided by eminent participants from the acting profession - Irish-American film star Aidan Quinn is memorable here. They carry the torch in a cause that clearly unites them with their subjects, and no less with their audiences. * Until Oct 14

Gerry Colgan

There's a Rabbit in the Moon

The Ark

There is an extended preamble to this French production, delivered in accented English. The audience of kids and minders, having forgotten their night costumes, have to be supplied from a large wardrobe. When everyone has struggled into assorted pyjama tops, they are permitted to enter the workshop of Thomas Snout, night collector, through the now empty wardrobe.

Snout is inside to welcome us, a tall, lugubrious figure with top hat and long black coat. His workshop is seated on a crescent moon, and from it our host explores the sky to add to his collection. He has all kinds of nights: a white snowy one, the night that Jack couldn't sleep, a really dark night and many more.

He shows off his latest acquisition - last night. This is stuffed into a big white bag, propped on a tricycle, and Thomas investigates its contents. They include a model Mercedes, two cats' eyes and a dancing doll, and they drive off through the stars. Our host is inventive and hospitable, maybe a little scary, but his watchers soon warm to his eccentric ways. This is underlined towards the end, when he examines his fears with a view to burying them. He offers a similar service to the children, who surprisingly respond with a litany of their own. They fear the dark, spiders, the doctor - all the expected bugaboos together with a few surprises. Thomas accepts and buries the lot, a true friend in need.

His missing helper Nelson turns up at last, a cat black with night-dust, and shows us the way out through the wardrobe. Charlot Lemoine, of Velo Theatre, offers something different, hugely imaginative and clearly acceptable to children. * Until Oct 4

Gerry Colgan