Brilliant evocation of a tortured genius

The Galway-based company Macnas is better known for its colourful outdoor pageants, but it has come indoors with a triumphant vengeance to grace the Dublin Theatre Festival with the premiere of Diamonds in the Soil. Sculptor Patrick O'Reilly devised and designed this impressionistic distillation of the life of Vincent Van Gogh, and his ideas have been brought to flowering life in some 80 minutes of pure theatre.

It goes off like a rocket. An announcement of the artist's birth is followed by a firecracker sequence of scenes and tableaux; life in the country, vainly chasing the girls, growing up, starting to draw. Uncomprehending parents forcing him from home, a job selling works of art, brotherly love, the decision for a life of poverty and painting. The story continues with a move to Paris to learn, to gain control over pencil and brush; a friendship formed with Paul Gauguin; the move to the south and a consequent storm of creativity. But the dark clouds gather for Vincent, a schizophrenic naked to the world, and insanity descends. Ahead lie the asylum, more introspective torture and death.

This is not a detailed biography, and its points of emphasis are its own. In my view, they are brilliantly chosen to create a portrait of this tortured genius, beautifully realised here by Antonio Gil-Martinez.

Few words are used, and then only as a link between scenes. But the images, music, costumes, masks and swirling movement seethe with meaning and communication.

One scene, chosen at random, typifies the whole. As madness overtakes the artist, the routine objects of his daily world change; the furniture moves to menace him, and his people are suddenly masked and sinister. It is a psychological transformation, a visual allegory of the mind in disarray, disturbing and persuasive.

Mikel Murfi directs this pyrotechnical creation with the surest of hands, shaping scenes of great beauty in the process. His cast give him, and his author, full value for their ideas and work. For something different, creative and shaded with brilliance, this is one to savour.

Runs until Saturday