In Frank McGuinness's play about Bloody Sunday, Carthaginians, there is a burlesque of Irish plays about the Troubles. In it, bullets rip through a kitchen and a statue of the Sacred Heart is shattered. The woman of the house turns to her son and laments: "Son, son, where were you when my Sacred Heart was riddled with bullets?"

This is, of course a parody of the most famous lines of Sean

O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, currently to be seen at the Abbey:

"Blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets?"

By sending up these moving lines, Frank McGuinness was acknowledging two things. One is that it is hard to write a play about political violence in Ireland without being aware of the power of Juno and the Paycock. And the other is that it is hard to be aware of Juno and the Paycock without being tempted to make fun of it. Like any venerable institution, it lends itself to mockery, even while demanding respect. The sense of shock that is so evident in early responses to the play has been replaced by over-familiarity. What was once iconoclastic is now itself an icon.

"Faithful" productions of the play, attempting to reproduce it as a piece of the historic repertoire inevitably founder on the fact that the meaning it had for a Dublin audience in 1924, when the civil war that forms its background was barely over, can never be recaptured. The task, instead, is to find ways of giving it the same impact for a contemporary audience - a task, not so much of reproduction, as of translation.

Ben Barnes's production at the Abbey begins as if it is intended as an exhibit in a museum, with a recording of O'Casey's voice describing the initial response to the play. But one look at Monica

Frawley's set makes it obvious that he is aware of the need to vary the angle of approach. Instead of a realistic room, we are looking at an open space dominated by a giant staircase. And in the course of the evening, our attention is often directed to the spaces outside the Boyles' room - the stairs and landing, the rooms above, and the exit to the street below. At one level, this helps to break the familiarity of the action and to add an extra dimension of visual interest to the production. The feeling that is so central to

O'Casey's Dublin plays - of domestic privacy being constantly invaded

- is strongly achieved. And at another level, the device creates a strong sense of the characters existing not so much in a family as in a community. This, too, is important for the texture of the play in which lives seem to seep into each other, so that Mrs Tancred's grief in the first act becomes Mrs Boyle's in the third. The effect is of something monumental and intimate at the same time - a big space in which people nevertheless live both literally and metaphorically on top of each other. And this too chimes well with O'Casey's broad intentions, which are to show the effects of a big historical event on the small intimacies of daily lives.

The set also allows for the boldest and most successful innovation. In the last moments of the play, Juno and Mary are supposed to leave the empty room forever. Then, when they are gone, in O'Casey's most brilliant piece of theatre, the drunken and oblivious Captain Boyle and Joxer stagger in, pie-eyed and blathering. Bravely, Barnes uses the possibilities of the set to create a radical alteration. Ger Ryan's Juno stays in the room, motionless and softly keening. She remains lit, while outside on the stairs the two men play out their final witless dialogue. The sense of a cruel counterpoint heightens and renews the power of the scene.

There are other, smaller innovations. One of the most successful is at the opening of the second act. In the text, the Captain, who thinks he has come into money, is supposed to be stretched on a sofa.

For the play's original audience this was a sign of sensuous indulgence, but a 1990s audience will not immediately identify a sofa as especially luxurious. So Barnes has Vinnie McCabe's Captain lying instead in a beautiful ornate iron bath. This not only captures his new vocation as a voluptuary, but it also makes his interaction with the hovering Joxer much funnier.

WHAT the production does not manage to do, however, is to translate into new terms the awful, grinding poverty that is the presiding spirit of the play. Not only are the people too well dressed, but they never seem to feel the fierce pangs of physical and spiritual hunger that ought to wrack their bodies and minds. What seems to have happened is that in moving away, as he must, from an easy realism, Ben Barnes has sometimes moved away too from a sense of the reality of the world in which the play happens. There is an intellectual coherence to the mixture of styles. The men - Vinnie

McCabe's Captain and Donal O'Kelly's demented, shapethrowing Joxer -

have a cartoon quality. The women - Ger Ryan's tough, angular Juno,

Deirdre O'Kane's Mary and Joan O'Hara's Mrs Tancred - are, meanwhile, drawn as rounded, realistic emotional beings. This makes abstract sense, because it accords with O'Casey's vision of weak, absurd men and brave, active women. But it never quite manages to make dramatic sense, to fuse into a single, compelling movement towards tragedy.

What it does do, though, is to give a consistently intelligent account of the play. By recapturing the sense of surprise essential to all theatre, it banishes, for a while at least, the urge to parody what is still a powerful and humane drama.