THE Quare Fellow of the title awaits execution in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, in 1949. Trained as a butcher, he has cut up and minced his own brother, and on the morrow he will hang.

Irritable warders, boozing hangman and boisterous inmates alike have no expectation of a reprieve for the condemned man in this all-male cage where not even gallows' humour or a lone, doleful voice singing The Auld Triangle can numb the reality of facing up to mortality. This is Brendan Behan's stark prison play, written by the hard-drinking Irish republican with first-hand research: he had done time in the very same prison.

It is an unsentimental, raw piece of comic and serious writing, at once scatty in its warm yet Guinness-black Irish humour, but considered in its polemic against capital punishment.

First staged in London and Dublin in 1954, The Quare Fellow is being revived for the first time in nearly 20 years for a 50th anniversary production by Oxford Stage Company. If the play and title - "Quare" means happy, not queer - are not a box-office draw, then Kathy Burke's involvement certainly is.

She has foregone acting to concentrate on directing for the Royal Court, Hampstead, and Bush theatres for the past two years, and here her directing of a 17-strong ensemble favours teamwork and concise detail in its powerful characterisation, but is more erratic in tone in individual scenes.

It would be all too easy to say that it touches the opposite extremes of her Harry Enfield sketches and the ferocity of her best film performance in Gary Oldman's Nil By Mouth. Better instead to say that there are moments, notably in the first half set in a prison wing, when The Quare Fellow is an Irish version of Porridge, but the sense of claustrophobic turmoil, even horror gradually pervades.

The performances of Sean Campion's compassionate and troubled warder, Regan, and Ciaran McIntyre's curmudgeonly Dunlavin best capture the contrasting ways men respond to the constraints and pressure points of prison.

Elsewhere, self-deprecating humour helps make life inside more bearable, and Behan's lust for life breaks through the prison boundaries.

David Roger's design of a raised stage in the bite-sized first half and a narrow prison yard, overlooking Dublin beyond, in the second has the effect of squeezing and intensifying the drama, emphasising the claustrophobia and Burke's predilection for ensemble performance.

However, such tight focus leaves no place for prison's other forces of emptiness and solitude and renders the cast distant figures when Behan wants a documentary proximity.

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Updated: 09:58 Wednesday, April 07, 2004