Dublin by Lamplight, Project, Dublin
What if the Abbey Theatre hadn't survived beyond its opening night? In this year of Irish cultural centenaries and celebrations, The Corn Exchange rewrites history and presents an alternative version of 1904, the year in which Joyce's Ulysses is set and the National Theatre was born.
Devised as an ensemble piece with director Annie Ryan, composer Conor Linehan and the company, Michael West's script brilliantly mixes fact and fiction, poetry and politics, creating a cracked mirror through which recognisable truths may be glimpsed.
With its staccato rhythms, and tension between control and revelation, Ryan's distinctive commedia dell'arte performance style is superbly matched in the first half to West's archly comic distortions. Performed with precision by Mike Carbery, Karen Egan, Louis Lovett, Janet Moran, Fergal McElherron and Mark O'Halloran, the play roams widely and knowingly through the works of Wilde, Joyce, Yeats and O'Casey, while also including some real historical events. A playwright and his patrician muse - skewed versions of Yeats and Lady Gregory - attempt to stage a heroic play for the new "Irish national theatre of Ireland" with catastrophic results. This play-within-a-play is a gleeful pastiche of Yeats's mythological dramas, with O'Halloran perfectly pitched as a Wildean actor who can't tell the difference between revolutionary movements and theatrical performances.
Problems arise after the interval, when the tone darkens and the play moves in a much more serious direction, with distinct plot lines emerging from what had been a series of parodic episodes. Betrayed love, thwarted ambitions, broken dreams: these more painful and searching themes are not well served by the highly stylised form, and the result seems melodramatic and shrill rather than affecting. But if this loss of coherence is an almost inevitable consequence of the devising process, so many riches had been dispersed along the way that it was indisputably worth the risk.
· Until November 20. Box office: 00 353 1 8819613.