A Skull In Connemara

What with all the fecks and blood and smashing of skulls, this slice of Irish gothic isn't for the faint-hearted. Martin McDonagh's oeuvre is a heady cocktail shaken together from equal parts of Synge and Tarantino, and the middle (and least celebrated) instalment of the 'Leenane Trilogy' is a play with a 'Hamlet' complex. At its heart stands Dan Mullane's brooding Mick Dowd, a poteen-soaked gravedigger who may or may not have murdered his wife. He may be more likely to take a mallet to a skull than to soliloquise over one, but that doesn't mean he's without emotional depths. Mullane is splendid, but Catriona Craig's production is less successful in exploiting the piece's black comedy and some of the production's more knockabout sequences lack the surreal, almost mechanical ferocity necessary to bring them to life.