It may not be altogether fair to new Irish productions of Euripides' Medea that they should be staged within what is still the vivid memory of Brendan Kennelly's verbally muscular and dramatically powerful version presented some years ago in the RDS. Certainly, in the Threshold Theatre Company's production last night, the young actors had to work with a significantly poorer text from Kenneth McLeish, and Paul Meade's direction, while respectful of both text and drama, never quite catches the enormity of the tragedy.

In part, this is because the piece is played almost on a small domestic scale. Cathy Ryan's chorus is chattily interactive with the main players and the audience rather than objectively providing a doom-laden narrative or commentary, and the final chilling lines are virtually thrown away. Medea herself never establishes the real depth of her former psychological or sexual dependency on Jason, the husband who left her for another despite her best efforts to further his career, and Catherine Walsh spits her hatred out without ever allowing it to consume her. Paul Donoghue's Jason contains no macho echoes of the captain of the Argo or the hero of the golden fleece: rather than the self-seeking male, here is a nice soft-spoken man in a state of bewilderment. The motive force of the tragedy is missing. Only Sharon O'Doherty's nurse is left to persuade us of the horror and to try to create the dramatic tension required.

Threshold is a talented and committed young company, but its actors need to extend the range of their expressive abilities, and its director needs to be a bit bolder and braver. Time is clearly on their side.

Nightly except Sunday until September 20th. Sign-language interpretation for deaf audiences on Thursday 11th and Wednesday 17th.