The Birds

Gate Theatre, Dublin Until Nov 21 8pm €27-€35 01-8744045

In 1952, Daphne du Maurier wrote a chilling and ambiguous short story in which a Cornish farmhand and his family are terrorised by seagulls, before Britain itself is besieged by birds. In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock depicted another community facing avian attack in northern California in a film adaptation just as chilling, but whose medium made things infinitely more literal – audiences departing the premiere were assailed by amplified bird shrieks.

Conor McPherson’s theatre adaptation, set in Ireland, is somewhere between the two; thick with suggestion, but so bound up with naturalistic staging that it betrays no clear metaphorical purpose.

What are we to make of periodic voice-overs, for instance, which accompany Sinéad Cusack’s novelist protagonist (above), scratching her confessions in a journal? Such film techniques find little purchase on the stage, but suggest that she is the play’s consciousness, and that this natural disorder is something of her own creation. Or maybe this is a hell that the characters deserve – where troubled survivors Nat (Ciaran Hinds) and an arrestingly gauche young woman (Denise Gough) share a purgatorial confinement?

Sadly little else taxes the mind in a staid, meandering production where even the foreboding tone is strangled by sound effects, surprise appearances and a depthless final, feathery stunt that can only be called a coop de theatre.

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