O’Casey at the Abbey, the Magdalene laundries revisited, an astonishing show in an inner-city B&B, and live chickens. Here is our critical take on the first, packed night of the 2011 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival

Juno and the Paycock ***

Abbey Theatre

Fortunes are won and lost in the blink of an eye in Sean O’Casey’s 1924 play, where the squalor of a tenement slum nestles into the lofty reaches of a once-beautiful Georgian building, a drunken charlatan poses as an aristocrat, the high principles of a civil war yield to grubby consequences, and even the wealth of language is routinely plundered. Or, as Ciarán Hinds’s Captain Boyle puts it: “Th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis.”

The theatrical frame and dramatic engine of O’Casey’s enduring play – the state of its chassis, if you will – are more provocative than is usually recognised. Touching on the vicious events of only two years before it premiered, it is a tragicomedy. It’s a wonder that it never provoked a riot. Lurching from the vivid description of young Mary (Clare Dunne) of the “bathered” remains of one of the Boyle’s neighbours (an executed republican) to an intoxicated music-hall double act of Ciarán Hinds’s excellent Captain Boyle (artlessly self-serving and somehow sympathetic), and Risteárd Cooper’s loose-limbed, morally taut Joxer, it spins between merriment and pathos so abruptly it ought to give you vertigo.

Thick with social and domestic detail, it is a play that interrupts a giddy singsong with the sudden stab of tragedy, its sternest criticism reserved for those who revel in diverting moments while ignoring what’s happening around them. That criticism could be levelled at this coproduction between the Abbey and the National Theatre of Great Britain, which so busies itself in an exquisitely beautiful and expensively realised depiction of abject poverty (streaming James Farncombe’s diffuse naturalistic light across Bob Crowley’s towering, ceilinged set) and the reassuring aura of consummate performances that it sands down O’Casey’s edges. It means that you admire the emotional shifts of Sinéad Cusack’s Juno without properly reeling from them, as though the contradictory O’Casey, an Irish nationalist who would make his home in England, had comfortably entered his marble-bust period.

The consequence of Howard Davies's polite direction is to seal Juno into a period drama, tastefully covering his set changes with the swoosh of a curtain and Anna Rice's grating, sub-Clannad score, and thus distancing our involvement. There are still moments in this raw play that break free from the production's lacquer: the steel of Clare Dunne's Mary, a "fallen" woman who will not bow to the disapproval of Tom Vaughan Lawlor's Jerry, and the daring lick of absurdism that concludes the play. That is the fitting roughness that better honours a play of dissent and discord, one that resists the state o' classic. PETER CRAWLEY

Runs until November 5th

Donka: A Letter to Chekhov ****

Gaiety Theatre

This imagined theatrical letter of homage to the Russian playwright and writer is fashioned not from words and conventional acting but from the essence of performance and theatrical illusion in which he was so immersed. This show uses a series of often cinematic vignettes to glimpse the parallel lives of Chekhov: playwright and doctor; fisherman and writer; lover and census gatherer; traveller and observer of the human heart as it soars and falls.

Through the mesmerising skill of the bodies and voices of the Company Finzi Pasca, we are immersed as Chekhov was in the world of performance and entranced by its transformative possibilities. We see how it can be drawn from without and within the human body, as with shadow play, circus and commedia dell’arte, with attendant juggling, clowning and aerial dances. We are taken on a journey of visual and choreographic elegance and playful humour, which is created with a dazzling lightness, colour and musicality.

There is childish glee, awed silence, witty physical turns, freakshow spectacle and a carnival of visual delight and magic, and, although they are a little slow to engage, these eight charming performers soon subtly lure us into their world. The surreal and the fanciful are given free rein with a bow to the daydreaming of the characters in his plays, submerged selves waiting to be liberated – Chekhov has written that life should be represented not as it is or should be but as it appears in dreams.

The ordinary is now exotic or fun, skating now an occasion for clowning, a fishing trip cascades into a dance of silver ribboned fishing lines swirling and arcing around the stage. A wedding feast dissolves into a surreal riot as a dangling woman in voluminous white dress swoops around the assembled guests and a glittering ice chandelier splinters and melts. The circle of life is a delicate balancing act effortlessly danced within the frame of a spokeless wheel that skitters and spins through a shower of rose petals. Even Chekhov's own hospital deathbed is a last excuse for an exuberant sequence that fades away. The theatrical lights still blaze. All the world's a stage. SEONA Mac RÉAMOINN

Ends Sunday

Trade ****

Meeting point: O’Reilly Theatre

There is nothing more poignant than a glimpse of lives only half-lived. Played out in the half-light of an inner-city bed and breakfast, a closeted gay man and a rent boy conduct a transaction, exchanging money for company, and their respective jacket and baseball cap suggest two souls that can never make themselves at home. Such is the fine detail of Mark O’Halloran’s new play, delivered at breathtaking proximity, an understated lament for a nation’s social and sexual history.

O'Halloran's style, in this, his first play for 10 years, owes much to his film writing, which, taken with the elegiac portrait of Garage, should cement his reputation as a poet of the isolated, the marginalised. It is a play of almost photorealistic detail, which director Tom Creed's production for Thisispopbaby has matched with a meditation on intimacy – or at least its facsimile. Its grim look at the business of company and connection has sly implications for a theatre audience. All of us are paying for a service.

If we are cast in the role of voyeurs, it is to look through a peephole straight into a frustrated psychology, where Philip Judge’s older man has contorted his sexuality into marriage and family, a dockworker steeped in denial and unease. “I’m not one of those, you know,” he tells Ciarán McCabe’s chewed-up, sclerotic rent boy – by which he could mean a confirmed homosexual or simply a confident human being. Neither is the young man, a teenage father, whose own brush with intolerance has split himself from his sexuality, toughened him up, numbed his feeling.

These are hard things to express in dialogue of monosyllables, but McCabe, who at times seems to be acting with just his pulse, gives a masterful performance in a production where just a snort or a hard swallow can be a potent part of the text. O'Halloran builds his story with uncommon stealth, like a writer trying to disappear, but Judge's character, estranged from his son and alienated by his own father, is railing against a society, a suffocating religion and a concealed history when he confronts all the certainties betrayed by his old man. "Left me complicated, he did. Like this. Confused." In this place at this time, we know the feeling, and in this brief encounter with two damaged, lost men, it closes around your heart like a fist. PETER CRAWLEY

Runs until October 16th

Laundry ****

Magdalene laundry,

Sean MacDermott Street

The performance seems to begin before we realise it – if, indeed, Laundry starts at all. Stepping into the Magdalene laundry on Sean MacDermott Street, which finally closed in 1996 and now stands as a shrine to a national shame, is to step into a continuous flow, where the present is saturated with the past, where reality and fiction blur, and where neither the narrative of Anu Productions’s extraordinary new work nor its effect has an end.

Without wearing its heart or its research on its sleeve, Louise Lowe’s production plunges us deep into an experience, at first opaque and seemingly disjointed, ceding to a journey in which its considered logic becomes vividly clear. Inspired by the history of the laundries – which sundered its women from their given names, their hair, their liberty and, most awfully, their children – the production has two imperatives that are not easily reconciled: to bear witness to hidden tragedies and societal complicity; and to transform it into art.

Pursuing the same structure and method as the magnificent World’s End Lane (currently in revival and best seen in tandem with Laundry), Lowe begins with a series of one-on-one performances and installations: the aggressive dance of frustration of a young man (Robbie O’Connor) in a claustrophobic vestibule; a filing cabinet filled with hair clippings and pungent carbolic soap; a woman stripped and bathing under supervision; a dance of flagellation and solidarity over a recitation of human rights. It’s not all successful: the demands of timing exhaust the meaning of certain sequences long before they finish, and reciting the names of the laundries’ inhabitants as a litany risks turning individual tragedies into a statistic.

Where it transcends such concerns is in the eloquence of symbolism – look at the raw, reddened hands of each woman you encounter – and the astonishing charge of its intimacy: an institutionalised woman (Bairbre Ní Chaoimh) shares confidences while anxiously holding your hand; an indomitable rebel (Niamh McCann) makes a transfixing, sensuous confession; and the history of enforced, unpaid labour, State acquiescence and human resilience is breezily reported in conversation with a taxi driver (Peter O’Byrne).

These stories connect in surprising, subtly devastating ways, bending time into an uninterrupted blend of past and present, living and dead, enmeshing performance with reality. It is theatre that takes you by the hand, leads you to places never seen, refuses to let go. PETER CRAWLEY

Runs until October 15th

The Animals and Children Took to the Streets ****

Cube, Project Arts Centre

The Animals and Children Took to the Streetsis cabaret with a social conscience. It uses a playful musical format to deliver a subtle parody of class hysteria, which resonates deeply in the aftermath of the London riots.

The setting is the enigmatic Bayou Mansions, the underworld of an unnamed city where feral children run wild around the streets and “there is always somebody else’s skeleton in the closet.” Led by the Marx-inspired piratical Zelda, the children break out into the city proper, unwilling to accept their seemingly predetermined fate: that “those who live in the Bayou die in the Bayou.”

The shape-shifting cast of three – Suzanne Andrade, Esme Appleton and Lillian Henley – bring life to a variety of memorable characters, most notably the morose caretaker hero, who serves as the performance’s narrator. Paul Barritt’s animation is integral to the grotesque world the performers create. Drawing from the aesthetic of 1920s silent film and Russian formalist typography, Barritt’s design brings such atmosphere to the Bayou that the city becomes a character itself, a corrupting all-consuming environment from which its inhabitants will never escape. It also provides much of the humour, slipping clever optical illusions into the backdrops.

In some ways, The Animals and Childrenfeels overly familiar: Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang, Edward Gorey and Tom Waits are obvious influences. Yet there is much originality to be commended, not least in the story and the way in which the audience becomes complicit in perpetuating the fate of the Bayou. Perhaps we never should have expected that a happy ending was within our grasp. SARA KEATING

Ends Sunday

La Voix Humaine ****

Samuel Beckett Theatre

Given it is a French text performed in Dutch with English surtitles, it would be no shock if Toneelgroep Amsterdam's production of La Voix Humainelost some nuance in translation. But, if anything, the linguistic ambiguity adds to its impact. After all, Jean Cocteau's influential 1930 monologue deals in the difficulties of communicating our deepest feelings. The success of Belgian director Ivo van Hove's starkly captivating version rests on more than the vagaries of differing tongues, however.

The drama revolves around an unnamed woman (Halina Reijn) who stalks around her flat, speaking on the phone to her former lover. As she realises she is now on her own – even the dog has apparently turned against her – she grows frantic, her anxiety increased by her erratic phone line. That this simple premise grips the attention for over an hour is mainly down to Reijn, who brings a harrowing energy to her demanding role. Although her character exudes vulnerability from the moment she appears on stage, Reijn vividly expresses the woman’s growing inner turmoil, by turns nervy, overly eager and silently despairing. The atmosphere of foreboding is enhanced by Jan Versweyveld’s spare but effective set, a simple white room framed by a window: light changes and shifts in ambient sound mirror the dramatic changes in mood, and add to a voyeuristic ambience.

The production also highlights how well Cocteau's text has aged. But ultimately, the whole enterprise rests on Reijn, whose performance is remarkable in any language. MICK HEANEY

Ends Sunday

A Sonatina ***

The Ark

"This is the first time I begin my show with an interval," says Bodil Alling, the energetic and frustrated orchestrator of this doomed performance of Little Red Riding Hood.She is trying to gather together the props for the show to begin, but her fellow performers are thwarting her at every turn. The chicken (live chicken!) hasn't laid her egg, her costars have eaten all the potatoes, and the double-barrelled shotgun she needs to kill the wolf has been confiscated because it's too dangerous.

Teatret Gruppe 38's A Sonatinais a complex piece of metatheatre for children age six and upwards. It is as much about the art of telling a story as the story itself: it is all about using your imagination. The tiny truck-setting unfolds in marvellous and surprising ways, while everyday objects become dangerous wild beasts and key characters in the performance.

Here, A Sonatinaserved as an education in the always surprising nature of live performance too, as the chicken decided to abandon the script entirely and fly into the audience, perching on a very brave young girl's back. The onstage carnival threatened to tip into the carnivalesque, but the children thrilled to the diversion. Either way, the audience will never look at Little Red Riding Hoodin the same way again. SARA KEATING

Ends Monday