So what's it to be? The Gaiety or the Donmar? Only 10 days after Garry Hynes's production of Sean O'Casey's play opens in Dublin, John Crowley's revival bows in in London. The strange thing is, they complement each other perfectly: Hynes's version plays up the laughs, while Crowley offers a sombre, tragic reading of the play. I'd say the clear winner is O'Casey, whose multi-hued masterpiece can yield such wildly variant readings.
Crowley's version never lets you forget that O'Casey's play takes place during the bitter Civil War: personal dramas are always shadowed by national traumas. You notice it in the panic-stricken reaction to every knock at the door, in the vainglorious "Captain" Boyle's determination to establish a domestic republic in which "Juno'll have to take an oath of allegiance" and in the way ideological and sexual puritanism chillingly combine. Boyle's pregnant daughter, Mary, is rejected both by her lover and by her crippled IRA brother, Johnny, even as his own death beckons. Crowley constantly reminds you that life in the Boyles' flat is shaped by events outside.
The price you pay for this is a diminution of the comedy. In the Dublin version Michael Gambon's "Captain" Boyle is a Foley's bar Falstaff, but in London Colm Meaney presents him as a rather dour braggart: symbolically, Gambon backs off in terror from his threatening one-armed son, while Meaney stands up to him. But although Meaney could do with a touch more of the strutting "paycock", he admirably suggests the moral shiftiness of a man who is a Fenian when poor and a Free Stater when he thinks he's rich. Even if it's not a wildly funny reading, the laughs are amply provided by Ron Cook's brilliant Joxer, a scuttling chancer whose eyes light up as he spies an unclaimed bottle of stout.
In Crowley's production the tragedy is also implicit. Dearbhla Molloy's Juno may lack the look of "harassed anxiety" that O'Casey specifies but she lays the ground for her final earth-shattering outburst. This is a family-centred woman confronted by the disintegration of her dreams and, as she gathers up her dead son's rosary, her appeal to the Blessed Virgin becomes a terrifying wail of despair rather than a piece of rhetoric. William Ash's Johnny, forever hunched up on his bed, and Renee Weldon's Mary, casually discarding her unionist admirer for a fly smoothie, also seem marked from the start for destruction. It's a fine production in which the Boyles become a potent symbol of Ireland's own fractious civil war.
• Till November 6. Box office: 0171-369 1732.
