Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 28 May

Hidden within the circular, story within a story within a story narrative and rich surreality of Flann O’Briens At Swim Two Birds, is a sharp satire of the Irish literary scene of the 1930s. No figure is safe from mockery and everyone from Joyce, Behan, O’Casey to the disciples of Yeats are parodied and have their pomposity and flaws expertly sketched by O’Briens pen. The act of writing itself and the solipsistic world of creation are also taken apart with a brutal eloquence.

With the postwar dominance of Beckett it’s always been easy to dismiss O’Brien as a prototype and a far more whimsical writer than he actually was. But there’s a good deal of the dark and savage about this play and the mocking of the self absorbtion and styles of his literary contemporaries is far from as cosy as it originally seems.

The six performers of Blue Raincoat throw themselves headlong into the author’s absurdist world and Jocelyn Clarke’s adaptation of the text is a merry-go-round of vibrant scenes with actors changing character and costume with head-spinning speed. The staging gives an almost graphic novel-like look to the scenes and with the Celtic knot complexity of O’Brien’s language and story it helps keep the audience on the right path.

O’Brien’s acrobatic dialogue with its penetrating richness and rhythm springs from the stage and with the exception of a few garbled lines lands perfectly on the audiences ears. His skill at picking up the patterns of discourse from the street to the meeting room to the bar and bookies means that there’s always a poetic realism to the words and the actors vividly brought to life the Irish archetypes that populated his world.

The parodying of literary styles O’Brien achieves: the inscrutability of Joyce, the spit and sawdust poetry of O’Casey and the mystical bardic obsessions of Yeats and his followers are more than just an amusing literary joke – but go to the heart of the idea of an authentic Irish voice.

For those unaware of Irish literature this is still an enjoyable experience, akin to a grown up Alice in Wonderland. However those who’ve tried to plough through Ulysses, scratched their heads at Yeats or sat through The Plough and The Stars will probably get the most from this excellent production.