Fintan O'Toole reviews a new production of  Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars at the  Abbey Theatre

To a casual observer, it might seem that the Abbey is always doing The Plough and the Stars, and that Sean O'Casey's masterpiece has the same place in the National Theatre's staple diet as the potato has in the typical Irish meal: boring but reliable. In fact, it is well over a decade since the Abbey last presented the play, and then it was in Garry Hynes's ground-breaking, highly controversial production.

That production was itself a response to something the casual observer may not have noticed about O'Casey: that his reputation was in deep decline. From the late 1970s onwards, the once-revered Dublin theatrical icon was a prime target for rotten tomatoes. Gary O'Connor's standard biography was a hatchet job. Critics such as James Simmons and Seamus Deane, coming from very different political perspectives, lashed into the Dublin trilogy. The attacks were at least in part a response to too many bland, sentimental productions. O'Casey's Plough had been so blunted by whimsical charm that it barely scratched the surface of living humanity. For all the howls of protest from traditionalists, Hynes's stark, expressionistic Abbey production of 1991 was actually a bold salvage operation. If it delivered a shock, it was to remind us that this was always meant to be a shocking play.

Eleven years on, Ben Barnes's new production for the Abbey thus assumes a special importance. Will he retreat into the old pieties, and pretend that Hynes's production never happened? Or will he take up where she left off? The answer that Barnes's highly accomplished staging delivers is rather equivocal. He does retreat, but not all the way. The revelation of The Plough as a strange, expressionistic play is accepted. But its sharpness is softened somewhat by a return to relatively familiar characterisations.

It is obvious even from Francis O'Connor's austere, relatively minimalist and largely abstract sets that there is not going to be any return to naturalism. The designs are self-consciously artificial, as they ought to be in a play that has an extraordinarily dynamic and sophisticated sense of space. O'Casey's genius here is most evident in the way he plays with inside and outside, with the relationship between private and public spaces, and O'Connor makes this logic powerfully explicit.

Within these settings, Barnes creates a consistently energetic flow of action. The movement is not just briskly efficient, it has that sense that O'Casey wants to create of events hurtling down on top of this powerless community. You do feeling watching the play that this is the way history really looks from the bottom up.

There is one big failure of nerve, however. The play demands the texture of real poverty: hunger, disease, dirt. Here, everyone looks well-fed and well-dressed. Even the dwindling spectre of the consumptive Mollser (Laura Murphy) looks far healthier than most supermodels.

At times, the unwillingness to allow things look ugly can make a nonsense of the lines. In the second act, for example, the prostitute Rosie Redmond says that her business might pick up "if I could only put by a couple of quid for a swankier outfit". What we are seeing, however, is the otherwise impressive Cathy Belton, in a perfectly swanky and silky dress.

This is a serious absence, but not one that gets in the way of the excellent cast. There are no radical re-interpretations of roles that are by now familiar to most Irish theatre-goers. But those roles are fully inhabited by a company that recreates many of the best things about the traditional Abbey ensemble. There is the collective feeling that this community, for all its diversity and mutual hostility, is a single living organism. Yet there are also vivid individual portrayals.

For the men, the job is essentially a matter of keeping one foot in flamboyant stereotype and one in downtrodden humanity. Mark O'Regan's Uncle Peter and Anthony Brophy's Young Covey manage to balance some depth with the music hall double-act that O'Casey has written. Aidan Kelly, in the thankless role of Jack, plays down the strutting and plays up the dignity. Owen Roe's rotund, bellowing Fluther is a nice mixture of Oliver Hardy and Leopold Bloom.

It is the women who get to think and feel, however. Derbhle Crotty's Ginnie Gogan is the most original portrayal, for if Cuchulain came to represent the Rising, she is the crow on his shoulder - morbid, relentless, strangely exhilarated by disaster.

Marion O'Dwyer takes the ball of animosity and compassion that is Bessie Burgess and hurls it at us with a potent force and a true aim. And Tina Kellegher handles the role of Nora, made almost impossible by the shift of taste away from the grand histrionics that O'Casey gives her, with great finesse, making it moving rather than maudlin.

All in all, this is a forceful, persuasive mainstream production of a great play that reminds us how much the mainstream has changed course in the last decade.