Reviewed today are The House of Bernarda Alba at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and the Jerusalem Quartet at the Law Society, Dublin

The House of Bernarda Alba

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Whether looking back to Synge or forwards to John B. Keane, the work of Federico García Lorca never seems quite foreign to the Irish theatrical tradition. It is not hard to see, in Lorca's last play, Pegeen Mike in Adela, the young girl yearning for a sexual escape from a claustrophobic world, or Big Maggie in Bernarda Alba, the iron matriarch who will bend those yearnings to her will.

Yet for all the cross-currents of influence, Lorca is not Irish and Granada is not Mayo. The sexual weather, like the real climate, is hotter. The political resonances are very different, and Lorca's murder by fascists shortly after he completed The House Of Bernarda Alba reminds us of the edge of immediate danger in his writing that was sharpened by time and place. And, while Synge and Keane were playing against a naturalistic tradition, Lorca was a friend and contemporary of Bunuel and Dali.

Any new Irish version of The House Of Bernarda Alba has to balance these realities. It would be silly to ignore the relatively easy access an Irish context gives us to Lorca's imagery of Catholicism, folklore and village life. It would also, however, be reductive simply to treat Lorca as one of our own.

Sebastian Barry's new translation for the Abbey is beautifully poised between these competing impulses. It draws from the deep well of family lore in his own work and from his ability to pitch a story somewhere between the mundane and the legendary.

It also has the lithe and lucid poetry, at once richly textured and immediate, of his own dramatic dialogue. But it retains both the strangeness of Lorca's language and the sense that we are in a world on the margins of modernity. A tiny example is the key moment when Rosaleen Linehan's Bernarda enters, amid the procession of female mourners coming from her husband's funeral. We need to see at once her ineffable authority and her sense of social superiority. One of the mourners rather timidly objects to her characterisation of the poor as animals.

In the standard Penguin translation, Bernarda slaps her down by saying: "I've never taken lessons from anyone." Here, Linehan says: "Don't offer aphorisms to me." The line is at once more poetic and more dramatic. The withering contempt is conveyed all the more clearly for Linehan's acid delivery of the assonance.

This whole first sequence of Martin Drury's production is, indeed, immensely promising. Francis O'Connor's set, at once monumental and realistic, is stupendous. The inward- leaning walls capture the claustrophobia of the house where Bernarda's daughters will be immured in compulsory mourning. The zigzag stairs have the dizzying surrealism of an Escher drawing. The servants, played by Ruth McCabe and Emma Colohan, set the tone with a vivid immediacy. Sile Nugent's gypsy beggar is exotic in her looks but recognisable in her Traveller speech. The formal keening of the mourners nods towards an Irish wake but retains its operatic Latin context.

Above all, Linehan, from the first moment, is Bernarda. She is as stately, as implacable and as cold as a great black iceberg. With supreme dramatic intelligence, Linehan underacts to just the right degree, understanding that true authority doesn't raise its voice. It doesn't have to. Linehan doesn't lower herself to the level of those around her by engaging with them in argument. She assumes obedience.

With this translation, this set, this central performance and fine, sensitive playing from Olwen Fouéré, Justine Mitchell, Joan O'Hara and Gertrude Montgomery, the production ought to be entirely wonderful. Yet, while it never loses its grip, it doesn't reach the promised land either. The problem is not so much with individual performances as with the ensemble playing. The core of the play is family: grandmother, mother, five daughters. They are so intertwined that the unseen force outside the walls, the man who brings lust and hope, affects them all equally. The tragedy stems from the sense that they have been so inescapably locked into each other by Bernarda's rule that they are a single body, stunned and festering in the heat.

Although we know this, we never really feel it. There is too little detail in the interaction of the women. They don't speak in the same way - the wide variety of Irish accents is a real difficulty for women who live in each other's ears - and they don't move in the same way. The warp and weft of their relationships are too thin. Without this weave to bind the action, it doesn't exert the tight tug of tragedy. The climactic scenes, where the action should rush headlong over the edge, feel awkwardly self-conscious.

These gaps may be filled with time, as the production plays itself in. If they are, this will be quite a remarkable piece. As it is, we have fabulous ingredients that have not yet been fully cooked.

Fintan O'Toole

Jerusalem Quartet

Law Society, Dublin

Quartet In G Op 77/1 - Haydn. Quartet No 3 In F Op 73 - Shostakovich. Quartet In F Op 96 - Dvorák

The Jerusalem Quartet played each of the works in the programme with astounding energy, so the jolt as Haydn's 18th-century music gave way to the 20thcentury of Shostakovich was even more violent than expected. After the powerful but genial mixture of country tunes and courtly elaboration in the former, the latter sounded like a new language, invented because the old could no longer express the terrible times in which Shostakovich lived.

So compelling was the performance that one almost imagined the instruments would ooze blood under the strain and that the tunes, becoming more and more distorted, would collapse in chaos, but the finale moved from a welter of sound to a heart-stopping serenity that was yet troubled by all the anguish and anger that preceded it.

Dvorak's so-called American Quartet, written in Iowa but redolent of Bohemia's woods and fields, could have been an anti-climax after Shostakovich; it was a jolt, certainly, this 19th-century evocation of innocent times - composers would not write like that now, even if they could - but the Jerusalem could play it with as much enthusiasm as if they had been its original dedicatees. Of course, its innocent happiness is not untinged with regret and yearning, and the players, while revelling in its tunefulness, hinted at its darker aspects.

Douglas Sealy