Off Plan

Project Arts Centre, Dublin Feb 11-27 8pm €22/€18 www.projectartscentre.ie 01-8819613

Sometimes, in the immediate swirl and pace of tumultuous events, you have to take a step back to see things clearly. That may be the case with the Irish theatre maker Rachel West, who for several years has divided her time and career between Dublin and Berlin and has come to see her country and its theatre with the wider perspective afforded by distance.

As her excellent company RAW turns its attentions to the rise and fall of the nation's prosperity, its avaricious property development and disregard for its landscape, its addiction to easy credit and the identity crisis of its removal, another lens has been added to her telescope: Off Planis an adaptation of Aeschylus's ferocious and spiralling trilogy, The Oresteia.

Rendering our recent national history as an unbreakable cycle of tragedies may not seem like an effort to pour oil on troubled waters. But with its blood-soaked magnifications of universal psychological problems, the story of the House of Atreus has always been an effective way of exorcising demons and calming furies. Besides, the writer Simon Doyle, whose previous work once gave us a blinded Oedipus manning a family barbecue, ought to find arresting ways of reviving a classic and putting things in startling perspective.

Can't see that? Catch this

The Party Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin