The Playboy of the Western World at Abbey Theatre is reviewed by Peter Crawley

The Playboy of the Western World

Abbey Theatre

Spot the difference: "Didn't I know rightly I was handsome, though it was the divil's own mirror we had beyond, would twist a squint across an angel's brow".

Now this: "I always knew it - there was something wrong with that mirror back home. It was cursed." The first quote, of course, comes from Christy Mahon, bitterly erasing his past with the intoxication of a new image, created with stories and fine words. The second is Christopher Malomo, a Nigerian asylum seeker in present-day Dublin, whose story and transformation - though relocated from a shebeen in the wilds of Mayo to a grimy gangland pub - are essentially the same, but whose words fall with the dull thud of a literal translation.

Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun's adaptation of JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, energetically directed by Jimmy Fay, makes for a hugely entertaining, often laugh-out-loud funny and superbly acted piece of theatre. I really think you'd like it. And yet it should be more.

The updating, designed one suspects to make the story more accessible, actually makes the play feel less limber. Every new feature comes weighted with explanation: Christopher's refugee status, the political situation of Nigeria, what a pestle is, Michael's criminality, the Widow Quin's mystery, how one buries a story in the age of Google. And such is Playboy's familiarity that this production's emphasis on the alien other and celebrity culture don't compare well to recent investigations by Pan Pan or Druid. The sacrifice of lyricism for funny yet disposable punch lines, however, holds greater consequences.

There is, however, a complete poetry in performance. For all the sweet command of Giles Terera's Christopher, Lawrence Kinlan's timorous Shawneen, the edgy comedy of Liam Carney's Michael (flanked by the excellent Joe Hanley and Phelim Drew), or the shrieking excitement of the girls (Kate Brennan, Aoife Duffin and Charlene Gleeson, whose camera phones supply one of the adaptation's wittiest updates) the play, like Christopher, will always be fought over by Pegeen and the Widow Quin.

Angeline Ball, all hips and lips in a velour tracksuit, plays Quin like a black widow, two parts pin-up to one part Catherine Nevin, and now that she's finally back on the stage, nobody should let her leave it. The peerless Eileen Walsh, with a perfectly horrible dye job, approaches Pegeen with such deft consideration she makes every line sound better than it is.

But, more consumer than commander, her part - and the play - are diminished.

The stunning moment that forces Christopher's parricidal admission is simply missing. Her pivotal, brutal leg-burning attack becomes a cigarette burn to the ass. Her last line is a total cop-out. "Well, the heart's a wonder," she says in one lovely echo of the original, but the writers again lose their nerve: "My granny used to say that." There's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed, as my granny used to say, and without that music we are left with an entertaining and enjoyable story, but one that never grows in the retelling.

Until November 24th