The dark side of man

Tom Murphy's A Whistle In The Dark hits the London stage with a devastating punch, or rather a tirade of punches, a few kicks in the stomach and silent, seething belligerence.

I have never seen quite as much violence simulated on stage - all of it perpetrated within the insecurity of just one unhappy family.

In Jacob Murray's fine, edgy production, the remarkable actors behave as if involuntarily pumping out risky excesses of testosterone.

The sensational Patrick O'Kane gives a literally and figuratively knockout performance as the bright Irishman who plays host to his four thuggish brothers and truculent father in Coventry. Sweat soon drips all over his face. He turns actual red with rage and pain as he voices his contempt for their macho brawling, which he despises.

I came away emotionally winded and shocked by the fact that Murphy's drama, with its melodramatic tendencies, looks as young as a middle-aged actress in the first flush of Botox and sounds little older than Robbie Williams.

Yet although A Whistle In The Dark comes at you with all the freshness of a mugging last night in Leicester Square, it actually premiered in London in 1961 when Murphy was only 26.

The play's ageless quality has to do with the way it depicts male violence, that endemic, growing curse of today.

Youngish Michael has emigrated from Ireland to Coventry, that popular settling place for the Irish in the Fifties, and found himself an English wife, Esther Hall's underpowered Betty.

Their home, with its faded wallpaper and dingy brown furnishings, reeks of desolation. Michael's brothers, accompanied by Gary Whelan's impressively swaggering Dada, who masquerades as a hard man, spend their holiday painting the town red while they pick fights in pubs.

Murphy supplies far too little biographical information or pinpointing of Ireland's social problems in the Fifties to help us understand just why these under-characterised, upper-working-class Irishmen feel so angry and alienated, with violence their daily recreation. He also takes too long to come to the dangerous point.