Peter Crawleyreviews Who by Fire at the Mill Theatre Dundrum

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, insisted Theodor Adorno. What the philosopher and musicologist would have made of this play, which incorporates the greatest hits of Leonard Cohen as it chronicles the history of the concentration camp, and which encourages the audience to "become part of the Auschwitz experience!" is anyone's guess.

This astonishingly misguided venture, with its heart clearly in the right place but its head somewhere else entirely, treats the Holocaust as a grotesque exercise in audience participation. Before the play begins, we are stamped with serial numbers and forcibly segregated according to our gender, while the fire and safety announcement is barked at us by an SS officer - played by the show's writer and director, John MacKenna. "Jews" or "the shit", as we are referred to, are kindly asked to turn off their mobile phones.

The play itself, an overview of the horrors of Auschwitz seen through the eyes of survivor Anna Borowski (Margaret McBride, who narrates from the edge of the stage), offers little insight into the darkest period in human history, cowed perhaps by its subject, telling its familiar tale lest we forget.

It is harder to find justification for the musical introduction to the camp commandant (Charlie Hughes), a ghoulish spectre in black leather trenchcoat and swastika, swooshing a riding crop through the verses of First We Take Manhattan. With some concession to historical accuracy, presumably, the lyrics have been tweaked: "First we take the Reichstag, then we take Berlin." Delivered without a hint of irony, it's as though Springtime For Hitler never happened.

With the exception of Who By Fire, which MacKenna parallels with the Jewish prayer U'Netaneh Tokef, each Cohen song seems jaw-droppingly inappropriate: the concentration camp guards sing Everybody Knows ("that the war is over . . . that the good guys lost"); the increasingly camp commandant sings I'm Your Man to Anna's mother (Alwyn Lyes) as a method of violent seduction and, worst of all, Hallelujah is shoehorned into the narrative when the commandant begins reading the Hebrew Bible. As a novelist, MacKenna has successfully woven fictions from historical fact; he clearly knows his Cohen (he received an award for his radio series on the songwriter) and the Holocaust statistics lumped into the dialogue affirm his documentarian credentials. His stagecraft, however, is staggeringly risky.

Seemingly suggesting that the enormity of the Holocaust can only be appreciated if we are made to enact it, one scene even has audience members marched from their seats, nervous and giggling, and left to kneel onstage beside the actors.

This, to me, is a wild misjudgment, one that mishandles the gravity of the Holocaust, the power of human empathy and the ability of theatre to affect without coercion. On opening night, however, Who By Fire met with a standing ovation.

Adorno later retracted his famous maxim, writing that, "perennial suffering has just as much right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream". The history of the human suffering is a story that must be retold. Its expression here is simply bewildering.

Until Feb 24. Tours until Mar 13, to Moate, Longford, Portlaoise, Birr, Navan, Drogheda, Mullingar, Newbridge, Wexford, Naas and Tallaght