Put the name "Barabbas" into your local Internet search engine and you'll get a wondrous selection of results, some slightly scary, some plain bizarre. The old B-movie biblical character (remember him? "Whom will ye that I release unto you? Christ or Barabbas?" - P. Pilate) appears to have turned into a 21st-century fisher of men, a magnet for some of the weirdest webmasters ever to be caught in that Great Net in the Sky. Say "Barabbas" to an Irish theatregoer, however, and you'll get a much more straightforward response, usually involving a great big grin.
Since it began in 1993, this tiny group of players has made impressively big waves in the Irish theatrical scene. Just three names beat at the heart of Barabbas, those of founder-members Veronica Coburn, Raymond Keane and Mikel Murfi, but in less than a decade the company has found one of the most elusive of theatre's holy grails - an instantly recognisable performance style.
What is it exactly, this Barabbas style? Well, it's mime, it's music, it's parody; it's puppetry and clowning and dance. It constantly undercuts the assumptions of the audience and pokes fun at itself - and it's about as far from the traditional, text-dominated Irish notion of "theatre" as it's possible to get.
The name came courtesy of Murfi, who had written a series of children's stories about a super-hero named Barabbas Banana, who liked to hang out with his pals Pontius Pineapple and Mary Mandarin.
"When he suggested the name 'Barabbas Banana', we said we were too sophisticated for the banana thing," says Keane. "Mind you, bananas do seem to appear in our work a lot. But Barabbas was also the one that got away. Initially, I thought, he got away with murder, didn't he? In fact, he was just a thief. But still, he got away."
An early programme note declared that the company's aim was to create a specifically Irish style of theatre using elements which had previously been regarded as "European", and provided helpful definitions: clown ("a profession of faith . . . a taking up of a position against society"); bouffon ("we make fun of the clown while the bouffon makes a mockery of us"); commedia dell'arte ("cruel, now, and without regret").
Looking back at these unabashedly arty statements of intent a decade later, Raymond Keane seems torn between pride and mild embarrassment. "That was our big artistic endeavour at the time. And I suppose it still is, in a way, although we have absorbed our European styles, so it has become a Barabbas thing now," he says. "When we set out to apply for the Arts Council grant, we, well, clown, buffon and commedia dell'arte are sexy names, aren't they? We were influenced by them, of course, and 'clown' is at the absolute core of the company. But every year we seem to drop something of our past - a part of where we came from - and we now think that we're chasing our own form of theatre.
"Take the puppet influence. It's to do with manipulation, manipulating objects, so props are very important. I suppose when you come down to it, it's an inventive sort of theatre. I believe theatre to be really simple. We're really interested in the ordinary. Mundane things."
Puppetry is very much Keane's thing - he also trained in dance and t'ai chi - and when it is combined with Murfi's talents for comedy and physical theatre, honed at the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris, and Veronica Coburn's peculiarly human clowning, Barabbas can rightly claim to encompass a wide range of theatrical disciplines. Their dΘbut show, Come Down From the Mountain, John Clown, John Clown, placed in front of Irish audiences a form of red-nose clowning whic h was, at the time, relatively unfamiliar.
"I hate circus clowns," says Keane firmly. "A lot of the time they're big, loud clowns and they've scared me ever since childhood. But the clown in that show was a character-based clown, the kind of clown who exists in the real world as opposed to the performing clown, you know?"
Putting on the red nose - the smallest mask in the world, as another of those programme notes has it - was a surefire attention-getter, but it was also fraught with pitfalls. "In Ireland in particular, red nose was associated with either circus clown or big, big slapstick or children's theatre," says Keane. "So we steered clear of children's theatre at first. Then Martin Drury came to us with a proposition we couldn't refuse, which was, basically, free rein to make a show for the Ark, for eight to 12-year-olds. We came up with a show that was quite out there, quite surreal. We got into great trouble over it, too. Some of the schools complained that we had spitting and stuff. But most of the kids had never seen a non-verbal piece before, and their reaction was fantastic. Like, we'd be sitting at the table, jiggling, the way kids do - then we'd turn the table upside down, or Veronica would take up one of the plates and eat it. After the show they'd come up and they'd be tasting the plates, very cautiously, you know? That was great."
Keane also singles out Half-Eight Mass of a Tuesday as important in the development of the Barabbas identity. "I suppose, in a funny way, I'm closer to the work that we've devised ourselves, as opposed to the pieces we've commissioned or our takes on classical theatre pieces.
"Half-Eight Mass of a Tuesday was about just that - early-morning Mass in a small village in Ireland. Everybody has great stories about Mass and what you got up to, wondering what your soul looks like when you take Communion, things like that, so we had great fun with that, too. We planned to go down the country and research it, sit in churches in the middle of nowhere. We never did. We went across the road to Gardiner Street Church and it was exactly the same; the country in the city. We toured that show to Denmark, to Lutheran audiences, and they loved it. Churches are churches, I suppose."
Working with like-minded designers, writers and directors has also been part of the Barabbas ethic. "Our first commission was from Charlie O'Neill. We asked him to write a play in the style of Barabbas, and he came up with Hupnouse, which was so much in the style of Barabbas it was unbelievable. It featured people living, not only on the edge of society, but also on the edge of our psyche, on the edge of nowhere. Charlie comes from a very issue-based background, and that study of people who were being pushed ever further out by the sprawling town encroaching on their space was the most straight-up political comment we've ever made."
Unless, of course, you count a wickedly original Macbeth, directed by Gerard Stembridge, which put the witches at the centre of the drama, with Shakespeare's human characters as mere puppets. Strangely, though, the show which really put Barabbas on the theatrical map - certainly on the international theatrical map - was its phenomenally successful production of Lennox Robinson's comedy, The Whiteheaded Boy.
"At the time," says Keane, "we needed to do something to broaden our audience base. When you're doing brand-new work all the time, it's hard to attract an audience. Our board suggested we should do something that would play to our strengths in accessing Irish characters, but also draw a bigger audience. So we did. But we never dreamed it would do what it did."
What it did was play to ecstatic, packed houses, first in Ireland, then in the US, then as far afield as New Zealand. How does Keane account for its popularity? "I think it was just good fun," he says, simply.
In some ways, though, the show's astonishing success was disruptive for Barabbas as a developing company. "We always thought theatre without words would be our international touring thing, because that was what we thought we could do - show Irish theatre to a non-English-speaking audience. And then we ended up doing the old chestnut. After a while we said to ourselves: 'We could be doing this for the rest of our lives.'
"At one stage, we tried to recast it, but people wouldn't accept that, of course. But then we were enjoying it as well - there's nothing an actor enjoys more than people coming up and saying 'you were fantastic'."
As with all major successes, there was also the question of what to do next. Last year, Barabbas produced John Banville's God's Gift, a version of Heinrich von Kleist's Amphitryon, which Keane describes as "a totally different style than we've ever done, a very beautiful piece of theatre". But this month the company will return to its roots by staging, just as it did in 1994, a festival of three plays running back-to-back at the Project. Veronica Coburn's Moby Dan promises a red-nose exploration of the power of the imagination, inspired by Herman Melville's epic novel, Moby Dick, while Dog, written and directed by Keane, will explore the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism - non-verbally. Both plays have a cast of five; Lynn Cahill, Deirdre Molloy, Daniel Guinnana, Ruth Lehane and Eric Lacey. Nightmare on Essex Street, meanwhile, written and directed by Gerard Stembridge, finds two actors (Keane and Coburn) suffering from stage fright in the presence of a fistful of classics.
The first two plays "will be the first time Barabbas has produced a piece of theatre in which none of the original members will be part of the cast", says Keane. "So that's quite a leap. This is also the first time that Gerry has written for us. He says he likes to work with people who invent - and we can't stop inventing. We would be a nightmare in somebody else's rehearsal room. We'd be going, 'ah, we could do it like this . . .' But that's the way Gerry works."
The element of playfulness is, clearly, central to the way Barabbas works, but playfulness unchecked can become self-indulgence, as Keane is only too aware. "We're fairly hard on ourselves about getting it right," he says. He's also aware that as mainstream theatre opens itself more and more to the influence of other disciplines, physical theatre companies such as Barabbas will no longer be seen as automatically "different" - but he sees this as an opportunity, not a problem.
"I think theatre has been searching for this for a while now; looking to reinvent itself into something that can compete with a screen. Theatre seemed to stay in kitchen-sink drama mode for far too long, and it's really not good enough any more, even though there are some fantastic kitchen-sink dramas.
"I think theatre wouldn't survive unless it was going to invent theatricality again. Which is what we're chasing, in the long run. We'd love to make huge, big shows one day. Shows that would just blow you away - as well as that very simple little thing, just one person on a stage."
Barabbas: the Festival runs at the Project from November 13th to December 15th (tel: 01-6796622; website: www.barabbas.ie)