Theatre review: Gender-bending tweak on The Quare Fellow gives Behan's play new life 

 “Did the Quare Fellow get a reprieve?” goes the quote from this play on the Abbey Theatre’s poster. It’s an interesting question to pose for this play itself. Can Behan’s verbose, baggy play be scrubbed up for a modern audience?

The prospect of sitting through that long-winded first act, where not much happens, and plenty of rather tired wit and cliched banter are heard, is not, on the face of it, a very tempting one. We get it: it’s a play about, among other things, time, and waiting, as the inmates anticipate the next day’s hanging of the unseen, titular condemned. And plenty of playwrights (looking at you Samuel Beckett) have shown you can do a lot with empty words to express emptiness and malaise. 

But the problem with The Quare Fellow is its specificity. It’s very tied to a time and a place. And perhaps 1950s prison was as twee as it’s depicted in this play, with its harmless lags and ordinary decent criminals, and a level of threat that would seem artificially nice in a schoolyard. But whatever the case, it all feels rather too safe, its critique of capital punishment and the newly emerged Irish state lacking vehemence.

At the same time, lines like “Are the Jackeens supposed to put out a red carpet for every barbarian that comes to the place” might invite an attempt to turn the play more towards the present day. After all, this is a production interrupted by the surrounding streets literally being inflamed by xenophobic rioting. But director Tom Creed wisely eschews such a tactic. The play would not support it. And he rises to the challenges presented by Behan’s work brilliantly in this, his first show for the main stage at the Abbey.

Creed’s most obvious bit of ingenuity is to populate the all-male prison with an all-female, or non-binary cast. Not a word or pronoun of Behan’s work is changed to accommodate this. However, the gender swap emphasises a key facet of this microsociety: that masculinity is a role, a performative act. So, even as the excellent cast play their trouser roles straight, there’s an inbuilt irony and a playful theatricality throughout. 

With Gina Moxley and Barbara Brennan to the fore as a pair of capering auld fellas, and Eva-Jane Gaffney and Kate Stanley Brennan nicely delineated as their younger counterparts, and a hilariously pompous Camille Lucy Ross, the drama comes to us in a new key, the voice of Lankum’s Radie Peat drifting in as she sings 'The Auld Triangle'. It should also be noted that seeing such a large cast, 15 in all, from across such an age range, is a rare treat these days, a throwback that is most welcome.

But it’s in the second act where the Cork director's production really excels. As night comes on, and along with it Wren Dennehy’s blustering Hangman, the action moves from the cell landing to the prison yard. There, Stephen Dodd’s shifting, dimming light, the drone of a harmonium, and Paul O’Mahony’s imposing set combine to create something more operatic: stranger, less rooted, expressionistic. These are charged moments in the theatre, rescuing the play from its own safe space, towards something stylish, moving and memorable.

• Until January 27