O'Kelly is, at heart, a storyteller, and in many ways Operation Easter is a straightforward recounting of a historical tale, no different than a written record. Of course, what is different is that this is live spectacle, and that history is told through the stories of animated characters. Set in the austere and evocative surroundings of Kilmainham Gaol, the aim of this project is to bring history to life before our eyes, to remind us of the passions and fears and sincerity of desire that lay behind the actions of a group of Irish men and women 90 years ago.

Although there are problems, to a great extent this mission works. In fact, as a piece of theatre, much of Operation Easter is gorgeous stuff indeed. Imbued with O'Kelly's trademark fluidity and imagination, the play moves seamlessly from present day Moore Street, with its mix of nationalities, Japanese tourists, and grasping property developers symbolising current Irish society, back to where it all began, among the violence of Easter week 1916, and an outnumbered rebel army making the agonised decision to surrender.

Much of the success in the staging comes as a result of the working relationship between O'Kelly and director Bairbre Ni Chaoimh. Ni Chaoimh directed Catalpa, O'Kelly's worldwide and award-winning hit, and her intimate understanding of his theatrical priorities mean story and production often fit together like hand in glove: the work is evocative, imaginatively resourceful, accessible, irreverent and very funny.

History is told through the eyewitness accounts of nurses, rebels, activists and ordinary folk caught up in the confusion.

Actors Tom Murphy and Phelim Drew take on the roles of everymen Shin and Brin, innocent bystanders who suffer for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mary Murray plays a range of female characters, and reminds us of the powerful role played by female activists who acted as nurses in the thick of the fighting.

There is a reminder, too, of the suffering of families: Murray plays the girlfriends, wives and mothers left bereft of their menfolk when they were taken away for execution. In this version, those men are flawed but brave, willing to take what comes their way for the noble cause of a free Ireland.

So good is the staging, and the ensemble acting (which also includes Arthur Riordan, Luke Griffin, Ruaidhri Conroy, Gerard Lee, Ronan Phelan, Ermal Hyseni, Solomon Ijigade and O'Kelly himself) that it tends to mask the fact that the play has a certain slightness at its heart.

Although O'Kelly's desire appears to be to go back to the 'roots of the anxiety, the cause of the pain', none of the characters are truly fleshed out into light and shade, nor do we get any sense, from the main players, that they had any real doubt about the legitimacy of the enterprise they were about to undertake. As a result, too often the characters become mouthpieces for ideas, debate and ideology, rather than the flawed human beings they inevitably were.

O'Kelly's difficulty is not a new one, and it is one that has afflicted historical drama in the past . . . Brian Friel's Making History springs automatically to mind.

Here, so much effort has gone into the telling of what happened, and how, that the vital emotional connections an audience needs with onstage characters are largely absent.

In the end, what we do get is a beautifully-realised, vigorously-performed, account of history. O'Kelly and Ni Chaoimh take such pleasure in the possibilities of theatre that one cannot but be entranced by what they place before us on stage. But this whirlwind tour through a pivotal period in Irish life neither answers any questions, nor raises any.

Kilmainham Gaol is the ideal setting for the play, harbouring as it does the ghosts of the Republican past. O'Kelly may have enticed those ghosts into life, but he fails to provide them with real flesh and blood.