Simmering menace of Home

The opening scene of Brian Friel's compelling new play, set in Donegal during the summer of 1878, is deceptively bathed in rural peace. The mood is faintly redolent of Chekhov.

Early-morning sun glows in a garden where only the trunks of tall trees are visible. A young housekeeper folds linen while the sound of a choir in wistful unison floats upon the air. The song, though, is a plea for Irish nationalism. The sound of birds is interrupted by a falcon's menacing cry.

The Home Place deals with the shattering of this apparent idyll and an impending crisis for the Anglo-Irish gentry. In the style of his famous play Translations, with its mapping of Ireland's contours, Friel takes an oblique, symbolic approach to Anglo-Irish politics.

He suggests how, after Darwin, the newly fashionable study of anthropometrics and its relation, the sinister eugenics movement, were intended to assist in the business of bringing genetic imperialism to Ireland.

It takes too long for Friel to come to grips with this fascinating thesis. The first half lingers and languishes in a sub-romantic domestic haze far from the world of the famine-reduced peasantry.

Tom Courtenay's displaced and widowed Anglo-Irish landlord, Reverend Christopher Gore, long exiled from the English Home Counties, aspires to the unwilling hand of Derbhle Crotty's sympathetic housekeeper, Margaret, who is already committed to Gore's smitten son David.

Only the recent murder of a tyrannical English landlord disturbs the torpid atmosphere until the arrival of Christopher's doctor-cousin Richard (Nick Dunning), who believes anthropometrics will assist in controlling the Irish natives and establishing races in hierarchical order.

The awful scene in which dirty, impoverished, starving peasants are summoned to the estate to have their heads and bodies measured by Dunning's bullying, inhumane Richard is akin to an eerie premonition of the Nazi's medical experimentation.

The Anglo-Irish stand condemned. When force, in the shape of armed radicals, appears to drive Richard from Donegal, you sense the beginning of the end for the Anglo-Irish.

Adrian Noble's fine production captures all the simmering menace of the freshly polarised situation. He does not, sadly, dissuade Courtenay, once such a truthful, rawly poignant actor, from arch, incessant theatricality, his voice weirdly characterised by eccentric cadences and odd inflections. It is a performance lacking any emotional authenticity.

Booking to 27 August. Information: 0870 060 6637.

The Home Place