Patricide is the order of the day in this classic turn of the century dark comedy. Performed by the legendary Irish theatre company Druid Ireland, it arrived last week in Oxford as part of a national tour, promising to be one of 2009’s theatrical highlights at the Playhouse.

Set somewhere in Western Ireland, it follows the character of Christy Mahon (Aaron Monaghan), a young farm worker who runs away from home, declaring he has killed his father. Instead of being scandalised, the locals in the pub, where he comes to seek refuge, somewhat revel in this violent tale. Whilst there, he also gets romantically involved with the barmaid Pegeen Mike (Clare Dunn), the daughter of the establishment’s owner, Michael James Flaherty (John Olohan). To make things worse, she is, perhaps somewhat unhappily, betrothed to someone else.

Proving highly controversial on its 1907 premiere, J.M. Synge’s play is three acts of bleakly funny misery, complete with a couple of surprising twists in the tale. It’s interesting that such a contentious play was written, and first performed, in such a Catholic country as Ireland. Playwright Synge, however, was a renowned atheist, and the play does mostly seem to be a stinging criticism of the hypocrisy he sees in his apparently good, Christian country. Its bitterer and more gratuitously facetious moments are, however, wisely played down in this production.

Proceedings are played fairly straight; the farcicial elements are played down and are reined in by the squalor of the world the production presents. The play takes place entirely in the same room of the pub; a room which is grimy and shabby, lit harshly from above. The make-up department has clearly worked hard to make the actors as grotesque as possible. Despite layers of face paint and far fewer layers of dirty, threadbare clothing, the cast’s uniformly excellent performances shine through.

Director Garry Hynes’s production is uniformly superb, in fact. And despite some of the slurred, heavily accented, and sometimes quite obscure dialect-infused dialogue, it’s a play that seems simultaneously modern and really quite different.

James Benefield