Theatre: McDonagh's genius is laid bare:

A Skull in Connemara by Martin McDonagh

Civic Theatre, Dublin Rating: 4/5 Reviewed by Sara Keating ..... Mick Dowd is a seasonal gravedigger, every year he is charged with exhuming bodies from the local cemetery to make room for more. This is the "murder capital of feckin' Europe after all", so places are at a premium. This year, however, his dead wife's body is on his list, and this gives local policeman Thomas Hanlon an opportunity to reopen an investigation into the circumstances of her death. If the premise of ambiguous motives and murder sounds familiar, it is because Martin McDonagh's play - indeed all the plays of the Leenane Trilogy, of which A Skull in Connemara is the central drama - are indebted to JM Synge, in particular the tragi-comic Playboy of the Western World. The play may take its title from Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but the country-cottage set play is pure popular melodrama. However, Andrew Flynn's new production for Decadent Theatre is not just knockabout farce. John Olohan plays the bereaved and belligerent Mick; a man so shocked by his own abject circumstances that his hair literally stands on end. Olohan brings complexity to a part that - like most of McDonagh's characters - would be easy to turn into caricature. Olohan, however, is both haunted and unhinged. He is world-weary and yet still able to get blind and pleasurably drunk as he is plagued by a stream of unwanted visitors and their long-held suspicions about his guilt. People like Maryjohnny, local gossip and bingo-fiend, who is brought to life by the brilliant Bríd Ní Neachtain, and teenage delinquent Mairtín (Jarlath Tivnan), who literally drinks Mick under the table. Patrick Ryan completes the cast, adding a vindictive streak to Thomas's failures as a detective. Owen Mac Carthaigh's set is graveyard-gray, suggesting a spartan widower's existence. At the end of the first act, however, the cracked cottage walls collapse to reveal a windblown cemetery, which Mick slices into with his spade as he begins the dirty business of disinterment. The sudden transition jolts the audience out of complacency and Mac Carthaigh's vision is genuinely surprising, even for those who are familiar with A Skull in Connemara, one of McDonagh's weakest dramas. Indeed, on many levels Flynn's production is better than the play, finding clues within the text to maintain ambiguity to the final moments. It also proves that the best way to produce McDonagh's plays is to work against their obvious farcical elements. With psychological rigour, his work has the potential to evoke moral questions for the audience as well as laughs. A Skull in Connemara plays Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo (Feb 25-26); Pavilion Theatre,

Dun Laoghaire (Feb 28-March 2); Draiocht, Blanchardstown (March 4-5), Backstage

Theatre, Longford (March 7-9); Glor Theatre, Ennis (March 11-12); Siamsa Tire, Tralee

(March 14-16); Everyman Theatre, Cork (March 19-23)