Playboy of the Western World

Lyric Theatre, Belfast, Until Oct 6 7.45pm (Sat mat 2.30pm) £10-£24.50 lyrictheatre.co.uk028-90381081

Here he comes again – Christy Mahon, the alleged parricidal maniac of JM Synge’s classic. Telling a tale that grows ever taller, Christy will find refuge among the bored and sozzled inhabitants of a Mayo shebeen, but eventually realises that familiarity breeds contempt. Both his words and actions require constant improvement and redefinition.

It isn’t a lesson learned by many of the productions in which Christy has found himself. Since his 1907 debut as the accidental instigator of the Abbey riots, he has become something more predictable: an endlessly revived figure enflaming only anxious exam students. Which makes it essential for productions from such companies as Druid, Pan Pan and the Abbey to imagine Christy anew: an unromantic figure of modern allegory, a Nigerian asylum seeker, or even a Chinese fugitive in urban Beijing.

For his second production at the Lyric, following an energetic, respectful re-evaluation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, director Conall Morrison aims to bring Playboy back to its essentials, or as he describes it, “a mad maelstrom of music, drink, mayhem and violence and the playground for some very primal confrontations”.

In that précis of Synge’s poetically heightened lawless West is the trust that attends a true classic: no matter how familiar it seems, it always reveals something new.