Sharon's Grave

Shearing John B. Keane's play into a skeletal shape, this Brown Penny presentation of Sharon's Grave offers an almost empty set…

Shearing John B. Keane's play into a skeletal shape, this Brown Penny presentation of Sharon's Grave offers an almost empty set washed with aquamarine and dressed with whites and blues, with the single crimson note of Trassie Conlee's dress. The austere composition asserts the elegaic tenor of the plot, in which forces of evil and of good are realised in terms of landscape and frustrated passion.

In writing a character such as Dinzie Conlee, the sex-crazed cripple, carried like a medieval grotesque on the shoulders of his brother, Keane unbalanced the play both literally and metaphorically. Here Gary Murphy's performance achieves a salacious menace which is not without its pathos, but even Paul Creighton's Pats Bo Bwee - again an extravagant role with an undertow of sympathy - is reduced in comparison, while Edward Power's holy innocent, the obvious focus of the plot's resolution, is not allowed the lurking significance it deserves.

Yet despite a Trassie played by Averyl O'Keefe with a mixture of stolidity and possibly justified hysteria, this production has a dignity which remains undiluted even by director Tim Murphy's use of redundant dancers, whose only real function is to move the furniture about. Once style is established as the defining feature of the production, there's no need to overdo it.

Runs until August 1st.

Mary Leland

Mary Leland is a contributor to The Irish Times specialising in culture