BWW Reviews: Yeats Revived in SAINTS & SINNERS

"Do you think is he a man that has friends among the Sidhe?" asks Sibby Coneely, the selfish farmer of W.B. Yeats's The Pot of Broth, suspecting the tramp that has stumbled into her kitchen to be associated with the Irish fairies of lore. It's worth welcoming the return of these folksy high jinks, not only on this week's 150th anniversary of the playwright's birth, but in a theatre scene where his work has mostly gone unproduced for two decades.

Mouth on Fire's evening of revivals entitled 'Saints and Sinners' begins with the Irish-ballad singing of robed musician Macdara Yeates, his sweet airs setting a traditional tone for the comic opener. The Broth farce has little meat on its bones, and so a sly turn such as that of Rory Corcoran as the tramp might prefer the higher register of Deborah Wiseman's bold-accented, furious farmer.

The scene change then for The Cat and the Moon, or rather An Cat agus an Ghealach - an Irish-language translation by Gabriel Rosenstock - attempts to mask itself with lines of song but the players, rigid under Sue Mythen's movement direction, can't sustain atmosphere during these intervals. Zia Holly's set smartly allows for the transformation of a cottage interior into a roadside well but you can't help but feel that the stage is a bit crowded.

The adaptation will no doubt add stock to the Irish language theatre, and while a comprehensive synopsis in the programme can keep us appraised, the robust performances of Donnacha Crowley and Micheál Ó Gruagáin need little translation. This tale of two beggars - one blind, the other crippled - on their search for a holy well rings through with the actors' energy.

More problematic is the performance of the late play Purgatory, a dark drama about a man and his son visiting the burnt house of his parents on their wedding anniversary. The old man's powerful lines convey the fall of the Anglo-Irish ascendency, the playwright's own social class, but in Neil Fleming's hands the effect is rushed, blasting the poetry to pieces. Corcoran doesn't sell the young man's convictions either. The staging seems to turn a blind eye to the fact that history has beleaguered the old man and turned its back on him forever, a discovery that should in the least be elegiac.

It's surprising that director Cathal Quinn doesn't bring the neat or painterly qualities that have made his stagings of Samuel Beckett resonate. Instead, a production so self-consciously playing as 'traditional theatre', with Rowena Cunningham's sometimes-eccentric costumes and Holly's boldly artificial set, contributes to a twee and marketable peasant drama devoid of the soulful dimension suggested by its title.

The evening's selection of plays indicates the playwright's range from idealism and morality (The Pot of Broth and An Cat agus an Ghealach) to cynicism in later years (Purgatory) but they also have in common a shared representation of the supernatural, and the suspenseful wait for magic to strike. It is these mythic and spiritual elements of the legendary dramatist that might have urgency if resurfaced now, to engage an increasingly secular Irish society on the cusp of commemorating its revolutionary past.

Saints and Sinners runs at The New Theatre until 20 June. For more information and tickets, see thenewtheatre.com.

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