Reviewed today are Trojan Women at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght andA Brief Taste of Lightning at the Factory Performance Space, Sligo

Trojan Women

Civic Theatre, Tallaght

We remember, after the Holocaust and the gulags, after Srebrenica and Rwanda, that the stain of savagery runs deep in our species. It is easy to believe that the capacity for atrocity is the most venerable part of our inheritance, the longest thread that links us to our ancestors. What we sometimes forget is that the capacity for sympathy is no less venerable. This is one reason that, whenever the opportunity arises to see a good production of Euripides's Trojan Women, it should be taken.

Trojan Women was first performed in Athens in 415 BC. It was a shocking play, not just for its confrontation of tribal myth, but for its immediate resonance. It was as contemporary and as daring as a play about Srebrenica being performed in Belgrade a few months after the massacre. Shortly before Trojan Women was first staged, the Athenians had captured the island of Melos, killed its men of fighting age and enslaved its women and children.

It is this combination of universality and immediacy, of formal deconstruction of a myth and urgent reflection of contemporary reality, that make the play so extraordinary. Here we have the mythic figures of The Iliad: the gods Poseidon and Athena, the Trojan queen Hekabe, her daughter Cassandra, her daughters-in-law Helen and Andromache and Helen's original Greek husband Menelaus.

But here, too, we have the sordid reality of conquest: Cassandra preparing to be raped by Agamemnon, the soldiers coming to take Andromache's baby son to smash his head off the city walls. The key to a successful production of the play now is that both the heroic myth and the dirty deeds have to be fully present. The play must be neither blandly universal nor sensationally realistic but held in tension between the two. It is a tall order, but this visiting production from the York-based Actors of Dionysus company rises to it with impressive grace.

Part of what makes David Stuttard's production so confidently coherent is that he is both the director and the translator, so text and presentation work in harmony. Both achieve the contemporary resonance they desire with tact and subtlety.

Physically, Stuttard overcomes the problem that is inherent in modern productions of Greek drama, the tendency to stasis that comes from presenting as wordy drama texts that were originally presented with music, masks and stylised movement. The cast, within which Maria Fierheller's Hekabe forms the steely core, is allowed to express itself through movement and gesture but not to slip into 20th-century characterisation. The notion of the prophetess Cassandra as a kind of shamanistic epileptic is embodied by Sarah Stanley with both conviction and restraint.

Politically, Stuttard neither avoids contemporary references nor does them to death. The wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan are all allowed a glancing presence. So too are the September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers whose imagery provides a natural echo of the mythic war that, in Marlowe's famous words "razed the topless towers" of Troy. Stuttard's image of the Greek's wooden horse as a "new missile packed with men" is a good example of his poise: credible in the original Greek context, rich in its immediate resonance.

This fine production gives voice to a cry so perfectly pitched that it sounds through the mayhem of the millennia, calling humanity back to its better instincts.

Runs until tomorrow. To book: 01-4627477

Fintan O'Toole

A Brief Taste of Lightning

Factory Performance Space, Sligo

Stitched into the flow of Malcolm Hamilton's new play, produced by the Blue Raincoat company, are snippets from an old Rodgers and Hart song, My Funny Valentine. Another of their songs would better describe the effect of the work on this member of the audience - Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.

Each of the three Bs applies with roughly equal force. Starting with the first, the vocal and physical grace of the two actors is enormously impressive. Their stylised movements and eloquent delivery of the words beguile the eye and ear, and if the author's intentions do not emerge clearly from these performances, it is at least clear that they have been facilitated to whatever extent is possible.

Kevin Collins and Sandra O'Malley are Gath and Gertie, an ordinary enough married couple. We first see them, she combing her hair and he reading a newspaper, moving like puppets to the sounds of a violin; an early warning that this will not be a literal version of suburban life. He begins to read an In Memoriam column, and becomes absorbed in its strange mixture of tribute and doggerel. Thoughts of death begin to seize him.

Gertie, on the other hand, is preoccupied with her irritating sister Emily. Her problems are essentially domestic, and she drops hints of an unsatisfactory physical relationship with Garth. He has little direct interest in her meanderings, drifting further into morbidity; he would like Gertie to go to pieces when he dies, as a validation of his life. They end, as they began, in obscurity, and therein lies the genesis of the remaining Bs.

A stage performance is of the moment, and there must be sufficient immediate communication to enable the audience, in the old cliché, to suspend disbelief. Niall Henry's direction manipulates movement brilliantly, but is less successful in projecting the play's inner meaning.

Runs to April 20th. To book: 071-70431

Gerry Colgan