Fintan O'Toole reviews I, Keano in the Olympia Theatre, Dublin.

The dancing has all the grace of a chorus of drunken uncles practising The Chicken Song in a bog. Some of the singing wouldn't make the grade on the terraces at Tolka Park on a wet Wednesday night. The songs are both good and original, but the original ones aren't good and the good ones aren't original. It has all the subtlety of a head-butt and all the sophistication of a late-night phone-in show on Yob FM. And

I, Keano is a scream. At its best, the self-styled "musical epic" on the clash between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy on Saipan before the 2002 World Cup is sublimely ridiculous.

It is not, of course, the first dramatisation of the story. Sophocles got there first in 409 BC, with his play Philoctetes, in which the Greek army's preparations for the world mass-murder championships at Troy come to grief on a remote island when its greatest archer goes into a huff and refuses to take part in the coming battles. The writers of I, Keano - Arthur Mathews, Michael Nugent and Paul Woodfull - have taken their cue, however, from another classic, Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It is a smart choice. The mock-heroic, cod-Roman setting captures perfectly the inflated egos and delusions of grandeur that saturate contemporary soccer. And given that the Saipan episode was already a mock-heroic episode in which an essentially trivial affair was given epic importance, it makes sense that I, Keano is a parody of a parody.

This doesn't mean that it could not be much better than it is. It draws together much of the best comic talent from Irish broadcasting: Mathews, co-writer of Father Ted; Gary Cooke and Risteárd Cooper from Après Match; Mario Rosenstock from Today FM's Gift Grub; and Joe Taylor from numerous RTÉ shows. Radio and TV comedy demand brilliant moments and there are many of them here.

But the architecture of a musical - even a musical parody - is very different. I, Keano suffers from problems of structure that even Peter Sheridan's adept production can't solve. Most obviously, the writers fail to deal with the problem that almost all the drama lies in the build-up to Keane's explosive outburst against McCarthy and that the rest is anti-climax. Thus, we get a seriously unbalanced show, with most of the hilarity packed into a joyous first half and the second act moving forward with a slow puncture.

Paul Woodfull's songs will also come as a bit of a let-down to fans of his savagely accomplished Wolfe Tones parody, Ding Dong Denny O'Reilly. There are some inspired moments here, where musical parody chimes perfectly with the broader caricatures: Cooper's Niall Quinn as a soppy Michael Jackson singing of his love for all the children of the world, or Paul McGlinchey's Packie Bonner as a saccharine Daniel O'Donnell sing-alike. But too many of the tunes are just Broadway boilerplate that remind us that the best send-ups come from people who really know the stuff they're setting out to parody.

All of this matters much less than it ought to, however. The atmosphere of I, Keano is a bit like that among the home crowd at a football match. If your team pops up from time to time to score a great goal, who cares that there are passages of scrappy football in between? There are enough goals scored here to keep a partisan crowd happy. Cooper and Tara Flynn as Surfia, wife of the saintly Quinness, engage in unmercifully entertaining slagging that reminds us how no good deed goes unpunished. Cooke adds a very funny piss-take of Alex Ferguson (here conceived as Fergi the Dolphin God) to his familiar caricature of Eamon Dunphy. Dessie Gallagher's Macartacus manages to be both an uncannily accurate depiction and a wild send-up of the hapless manager.

And, in a clear case of art imitating life, it is Keano who takes a talented but limited outfit and drags it towards moments of greatness. Rosenstock is the show's midfield general, taking it by the scruff of the neck and driving it forward. He is so funny here because he is so serious, his fixed gaze, furrowed brow and simmering intensity clashing with his clownish surroundings to hysterical effect. The way he sings Keane's famously foul-mouthed tirade against McCarthy is itself worth the price of admission.

The pin that bursts a balloon doesn't need to be especially sharp. Crude though it may be,

I, Keano tears a mighty hole in the nation's ridiculous over-hyping of the Keane/McCarthy wars, and lets the bad air escape in the form of a laughter directed more at ourselves than at the protagonists in that over-inflated drama.

Runs until March 5th