Dublin Theatre Festival: Brian Friel contemplates his art in his new play. Martin McDonagh contemplates violence. Fintan O'Toole and Gerry Colgan report

Performances

Gate Theatre

The extraordinary generation of Irish playwrights that came to prominence between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s seems to be in a retrospective and meditative mode. After Thomas Kilroy's The Shape Of Metal comes Brian Friel's Performances. Both plays are centred on aged artists. Both eschew overt drama in favour of a downbeat, rather abstract contemplation of the relationship between life and art. Both have elements of artistic autobiography. Both are haunted by notions of failure.

In Performances, Friel considers the composer Leos Janacek, particularly his last major work, the string quartet Intimate Letters. Its title refers to the hundreds of love letters he wrote to Kamila Stosslova, a married woman 35 years his junior. On stage a contemporary PhD student questions the long-dead but not at all ghostly Janacek about the relationship between his romantic obsession and the work it inspired. Offstage at first, then directly before us, the Alba String Quartet performs the quartet itself.

The element of self-examination in all of this is unavoidable. It is not just that Janacek, when he wrote Intimate Letters, was 74, the age Friel is now. It is also that the words Friel gives to Janacek suggest writing as much as composition.

When he says, "I remember placing those limpid notes on the page with such care, so delicately, as if they were fragile," it is impossible not to think of Friel's own precise craftsmanship. And when the self-doubting Janacek wonders whether what he achieved in the stripped-down plainness of his last works was not simplicity but just an expression of the truth that "at that point the old composer was finally threadbare", one remembers the fierce self-doubt of another of Friel's alter egos, Frank Hardy in Faith Healer.

This despair about the writer's own achievements is heightened by the playwright's envy of the composer. From céilí bands and Tom Moore to Mendelssohn and Chopin, music has always been immensely important in Friel's work, not least because it gives access to a direct emotional expression that escapes the treachery and inadequacy of words. And here Friel himself allows the composer to dismiss the playwright's own life's work: "The people who huckster in words merely report on feeling. We speak feeling."

If all of this seems extraneous, it has to be said that these parallels are what make Performances moving. Without them it is an interesting, surprisingly Shavian argument, lucidly laid out in Patrick Mason's finely tuned production. The student, vividly played by the wonderfully lively Niamh Linehan, claims for love and Stosslova the primary role in the creation of Janacek's masterpieces. The composer replies that the love affair was simply a transference of his desire to compose the music, that ultimately the love is subordinate to the work it inspired.

The debate is witty and beautifully expressed, and the charismatic Ion Caramitru as Janacek revels in the dry, sardonic humour with which Friel leavens the intellectual contest. But the drama lies elsewhere: in the poignant and elegiac contemplation by a great playwright of what his art amounts to.

If at one level Friel seems to despair of that art by suggesting it is less adequate than music, the paradox is that the bold decision to have a string quartet performed as anintegral part of a play is evidence of the continuing brightness of Friel's innovative spark. The idea is of course problematic, not least because the musicians have speaking parts but can't be expected to perform them with the assurance of actors. But the audacity of making a musical performance the culmination of a play is the best answer to Friel's charge that the ageing imagination might be threadbare.

The one regret is that there has been, in this respect, something of a loss of nerve. The text (just published by Gallery Press) calls for the play to end with a performance of the final two movements of Intimate Letters, which should last about 14 minutes. In fact just the final movement, lasting about five minutes, is performed. As the virtue of the piece is that it shows us a grand old man of the theatre still questioning the boundaries of the form, it seems a pity not to go all the way, even if the journey takes us far beyond what we are used to thinking of as a play. Having taken us so far over half a century, Friel has earned the right to take us, if he chooses, beyond the beyonds.  Fintan O'Toole

Runs until the end of the month

The Lieutenant Of Inishmore

Olympia Theatre

The four plays by Martin McDonagh already seen here have been rib-achingly funny, graphically violent and underpinned with a sadness that lies at humanity's core. This one, hyped for its sanguinary scenes and absence of restraint, matches or exceeds them in all but the latter quality. It remains a creative and hilarious comedy but with a tad less universality than its predecessors.

A dead cat, perhaps killed by a boy (Davey) on his tearaway bike, is brought into the bungalow of Donny, who has been minding it for his son Pádraic, an INLA psychopath away on business. When his father phones to hint at the misfortune, he is engaged in torturing an IRA opponent; a couple of toenails extracted, a nipple sheared off and more to come. But first things first, and Pádraic is away pronto to his Aran Island home to support his cat.

To head him off before all hell breaks loose, Donny and Davey adopt ludicrous stratagems concerning the cat, all in vain. Three IRA terrorists have also arrived on the island to do some terminal business with Pádraic. Davey's sister Máiréad, who worships Pádraic as a patriotic hero, gets into the action, as bloodthirsty as one may imagine and yet laughter-provoking. The jokes rain down in a scarlet spray.

The author's dialogue merges mundane conversation with bizarre events to create something new, a humour that sneaks up and extracts laughter against the conventions of taste or comedy. Here Quentin Tarantino meets John Millington Synge in a stampede of sacred cows over the historic Irish west. Patriotism is derided, family links are a ludicrous affectation, romantic love trails after other attachments, morality is based on received ideas of little substance.

The acting in this Royal Shakespeare Company production, directed by Wilson Milam, fits the author's intentions to something like perfection. Barry Ward's Pádraic, Matthew Dunphy's Davey, Ciaran McIntyre's Donny and Aoife Madden's Máiréad play their lead characters like ordinary people who say and do extraordinary things without recognising their abnormality. Love or hate it - but don't miss it.  Gerry Colgan

Runs until Saturday

Hurl

Tivoli Theatre

In Charlie O'Neill's hurling fantasia for Barabbas, Eamonn Hunt plays a tormented alcoholic former missionary priest who manages the Freetown Slashers, a motley hurling team of asylum-seekers, Irish of mixed ancestry and locals in a western town.

On the one hand there is the fun and fantasy of a hurling team made up of Africans, Latin Americans and Bosnians, the Hollywood-style story of success against the odds. On the other O'Neill is far too politically astute not to insist precisely that this is a fantasy. He wants to show us, too, the real world in which people end up in Ireland because they are fleeing unspeakable horrors and in which, when they get here, they face an often cruel asylum system. It is no damning criticism to say that this makes for a sometimes uncomfortable mix.

What it is reasonable to expect, though, is an inventive, suggestive and enjoyable show, and this is what we get with Hurl. The multi-ethnic team that goes out on the field is backed up by a backroom crew of All-Ireland quality, led by director Raymond Keane.  Fintan O'Toole

A longer version of this review appeared during Galway Arts Festival; runs until Sunday