Anyone who has been to school will feel a deep complicity in watching The Dead School. There is no better sport than teacher-baiting. They're there to do a job, the teachers, and there is no escape for them. It is a cruel sport, but at the same time great fun. No teacher has ever escaped and no pupil was ever innocent. We've all been there, so expect to feel implicated, expect to feel guilty, if you happen to drop in on the show.

Raphael Bell, the central character of The Dead School, was, at one stage in his life, respected. The 1960s and 1970s put paid to that (bell bottoms, long hair, Horslips, head-shaking and all that).

Teachers didn't look like teachers anymore, and pupils . . . well, they were learning by bad example. And bad example led to teachers losing control.

And so a cultural revolution happened in the classroom. Eventually, crowd control would form a major part of almost every teacher's day, with education often becoming a side issue.

So Raphael Bell's world was in tatters. Nationalism and Catholicism were once the twin pillars of his world; the policies and ideas of Eamon de Valera held sway throughout the land and at school the green book, the Catechism, decided what was what in the spiritual domain - but not any more. And Raphael Bell has found himself on a slippery slope not of his own making, and has ended up spending his days in the Dead School, in the company of eejits, dunces and amadans who bear witness to his disintegration and help him re-live his life and times.

The Dead School is a state of mind, a place beyond reason and harm. It is a place where only teachers may go, a place where Comedy and Tragedy step out together, the Joker and High Priest rolled into one.

I remember lending Pat McCabe a copy of a catalogue of a Rosc exhibition held in the 1970s. He was looking for a photograph of an installation by the Polish theatre practitioner and visual artist, Tadeusz Kantor, entitled The Dead Class, which he had seen, as part of that show, while he was teaching at the time in Dublin. This installation, a dummy sitting at a school desk during a history lesson, was one of the main inspirations of the novel, and since then, I've always thought of it as the Polish Play.

Over the years, I've seen a number of works of Polish theatre, and they have always impressed by their expressive visual power, their beauty and light and image, and by their magic. I always felt they were lacking in humour, however - that is, for an Irish audience. It is, maybe, the peculiarity of Irish theatre that we want a lively mix of humour and seriousness, so in evolving a concept for this production I've always thought of this show as the Polish Play With The Laughs.

The adaptation grew out of trial and error. We wanted it to be distinctive in style and different from the novel - as distinctive and different in style as was Frank Pig Says Hello from The Butcher Boy. We wanted to maintain the principal story, and yet allow space for the piece for be carried by a visual dimension. This requires a particular form of theatre writing, a text that allows space for the image, for the visual. Irish theatre tends to be more well known for the straight play, but it is interesting to note the emergence of many outstanding works in recent years that dare to dare.

The Dead School is being produced by The Galway Arts Festival and Macnas Theatre Company, both of which are at the forefront of the presentation of theatre as a visual medium in this country, and we feel this show has found a fitting home for its launch.

In the rehearsal room, the trial and error goes on as I write, with Tom Conroy, our designer from Macnas, and our cast, headed by Mick Lally. There'll be pupils and teachers and babies and dummies and mammies and hippies and priests and Horslips and dunces and jolly beggarmen and . . .

We promise a lot - and it'll be six of the best on each hand, if we don't deliver.

Anois, suigi suas agus lamha trasna . . .

The Dead School runs from Tuesday, July 21st to Sunday, July 26th at 7.30 p.m., with a matinee on Saturday 25th at 3 p.m.

Joe O'Byrne has written and directed many shows with his company, Co-Motion Theatre, and he co-wrote with Cathal Black the screenplay for the film of John McGahern's Korea. His own film, Meteor, is in post-production.