Where history is a series of insistent inventions

WHEN, in the third act of Brian Friel's The Loves of Cass McGuire, one of the residents in an old folk's home asks who General Custer was another, an Englishman, replies "Wasn't he one of the leaders of your Easter Rebellion?" Written at a time when the Republic was wallowing in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the play is, among many other things, an astringent antidote to the historical self congratulation of the time. Its Ireland is a place where history - both personal and collective - is a series of insistent inventions. Watching it 30 years later, on the night that the Orangemen swaggered down the Garvaghy Road, the play's startling freshness and unblunted accuracy was cause for both pleasure and despair.

That it is still so vigorous has a great deal to do with the courage and truthfulness of Friel's vision at the time. In the story of Cass a raucous 70 year old returned Yank, he laid bare the sense of displacement so often at the heart of Irish reality. To an official view of Ireland as a nation on the march, passing down a simple continuity from one generation to the next, he opposed a bleak dissection of a place caught between meaningless memories and banal desires, unable to tell its own story because the beginning, the middle and the end keep slipping out of sequence.

At the start of the play, a senile old woman is rambling through a remote landscape of disjointed memories. Beside her, her grandson is reading out snatches of an American True Detective magazine. One generation is unable to hear anything but its own confused recollections. The other is unable to talk in anything but a borrowed voice. That scathing little vignette sets a tone of disillusionment that gives the play, especially in Garry Hynes's stark and hard edged production for Druid at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, the feel of a piece written much more recently than 1966.

The play is not a great work, but it is manifestly the work of a great writer. Brian Friel has described it as "a concerto in which Cass McGuire is the soloist". The analogy is as accurate as it is problematic: the idea of a soloist and a supporting orchestra sits uncomfortably with 29th century ensemble styles of acting. Cass is a great part for Marie Mullen, and one of the most vividly written characters in modern Irish theatre. The other parts - Cass's brother Harry (Mick Laity), his wife and son (Marion O'Dwyer and Eric Lacey), and her fellow inmates in the old people's home - are brilliantly accurate but rather small and static cameos.

To this limitation is added what is not so much a weakness as a complication. The play betrays an underlying uncertainty about whether or not its overwhelming sense of homelessness is caused by emigration. On one level, Cass's psychic displacement is linked all the time to the physical displacement of 52 years in New York and the power of Marie Mullen's deeply moving performance lies in its embodiment of emigre experience. Her Cass seems to belong almost to a different species than the specimens of Irish humanity around her. Her movements are jagged and sprawling, white theirs are neat and halting. Her voice, foil of decibels and damnations, has an acoustic entirety different to their soft murmurings.

And these differences add a terrible poignancy to the ruins of an old Irish self that stick like bare bones through the thick second skin of her American persona: the Irish country pronunciations that turk behind her New York bawl; the way she sings Oft in the Stilly Night in a raucous Yankee caterwaul in the second act but with a quieter, truer voice in the third.

On another level, though, Friel seems to suggest that homelessness and displacement are parts of the human condition, that we are all exiles from our own imagined selves anyway. Those who have stayed at home ultimately fall victim to the same confusion of fantasy and reality, the same feeling of dizzy weightlessness, as Cass does. Trilbe, Cass's fellow resident at the old folks' home, is terminally homesick even though she has never been out of Ireland.

Garry Hynes's production tackles these difficulties by imagining the play less as a concerto and more as a ghost sonata, tilting it away from a specific social reality and towards an unsettling surrealism. Rob Howell's superb setting of doors and skies, reminiscent of one of those uncanny Magritte paintings of hollow people and fluffy clouds, strips away most of the few naturalistic elements in Friel's stage directions. Against it, all the human figures except Cass become strangely disembodied, making a virtue of the lack of detail in the way they are written.

Rosalind Knight and John Rogan, in superb performances as Trilbe and her sidekick Ingram, achieve an insidiously sinister quality that gives the play an unexpectedly Gothic feel, as if they were undead spirits calling Cass to join them. And in this context, the borders between the real and unreal become so blurred that it becomes possible to believe that even Cass's American history is all in her head. Without losing its robustness and humour, the play gains in poetry, becoming evocative, haunting, and ultimately mesmerising. So much so that, in spite of its absence from the repertoire for so long, it seems sure of a place long after the likes of Cass have faded from memory.