Mann Ist Mann

There is reason to be grateful to the Abbey Theatre for bringing to Dublin (with the assistance of the Goethe Institut) the very successful Berlin-based Schaubuhne theatre company to present a production of the Baracke am Deutschen Theater of Bertolt Brecht's early (1926) and little-known farrago about the assimilation of individual man into the mass of mankind, where each individual is a kind of functional unit interchangeable with any other functional unit in the mass.

Written before the author had fully developed his theories about the alienation of the audience, this work has an almost undergraduate feel to it which is fully exploited by Thomas Ostermeier's frenetic direction in a manner which itself provides alienation before Brecht had institutionalised the idea. The energetic, almost acrobatic ensemble of actors uses comic techniques so old that they were almost out of fashion by the end of the era of Victorian music hall. It is as if a sombre reflection of change in human society were being played as a knockabout, farcical comedy. The changing society is not criticised here: it is celebrated in something like the mode of the theatre of the absurd. And if that is not alienating to a 21st century audience, what conceivable drama could be?

The tale is simple. The setting is supposed to be India, yet the hero of this piece is an impoverished Irish porter called Galy Gay, who sets out one evening to buy a small fish for his wife who goes home to put on the water in which to cook it. Meanwhile, one of the four members of a machine gun team from the British army has broken into the treasury of a local pagoda and stolen money from the comically enigmatic Chinese occupants. Poor Galy is set upon by the beer-sodden gunners (aided by the seductive widow Begbick) to replace their errant colleague and goes on almost immediately to become a successful and significantly violent gunner himself, despite the worst efforts of the tyrannical Sergeant Fairchild to untangle the deception.

Ultimately, however, this energetic and purposeful production, using a lively and highly interactive group of musicians, serves mostly to demonstrate why this odd confection by the inexperienced 28-year-old Brecht remains largely unknown: it's a poor play - although the subtitles used to help those who do not understand German suggest that there may also be some problems with translation.

Finishes Saturday, April 28th. Booking: 01-8872200.