Phaedra's Loveby the late Sarah Kane, reviewed by Hilary Fannin.

Phaedra's Love

Project, Dublin

It has been almost a decade since young British playwright Sarah Kane's death by suicide, and 12 years since the first performance of Phaedra's Love, her compact, witty and satirical play based on the classical story of Phaedra by Seneca. In her short but intense career, and in posthumous productions of her work, Kane became famous for her raw and unflinching excavation of her characters' capacity for violence and brutality, mining cruelties and obsessions, in search of love maybe, or some kind of purity.

Her work, as in this production by Loose Canon Theatre Company, under the direction of artistic director Jason Byrne, is always bracing, often shocking, and invariably memorable.

Byrne's atmospheric production is set in a creamy-sheeted cube, the audience seated on small benches and foam cushions, clinging to the perimeter of the playing area like a bunch of 21st-century groundlings, whose jaws collectively clenched in a rictus of self-conscious theatrical sophistication as the world-weary, gonorrhoeal prince, Hippolytus, kicked off proceedings by masturbating into his sock.

Then, as the royal household continues to consume itself, his stiletto-heeled stepmother, Phaedra, falls to her knees, amid the detritus of her stepson's slovenly and dissolute life, to perform an act of oral sex which results in bloody and torturous deaths for them both. We are in a psychological abattoir, and 50 minutes later, as the play draws to its grim conclusion, the ensemble unrolls plastic sheeting across the stage to deal with the blood flow.

Phaedra's Loveis absorbing theatre, delicately choreographed and boldly designed. There are problems, however: the cast's overt naturalism and almost casual realism seem to dampen the play's content, somehow smothering the drama, which we can clearly see but which is harder to feel. In the years since this play's inception, our lexicon of images of brutality and despair has continued to expand, and Kane's theatrical territory has been invaded. Without the shock of the new, this exigent piece of work can leave one feeling oddly disengaged. A brave production nonetheless, and at less than an hour, a palatable challenge to one's evening.

Runs until July 17

Hilary Fannin