Early in the play, Pegeen is being slagged by Philly and Jimmy, two hired hands of her father, who are rarely apart from each other and, at this point, swigging pints together at the bar. She fixes them with a withering stare; there is a pause, and she says two words.

"Brokeback Mountain."

Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun have given us a Playboy for our times. And in doing so, they have returned it to its comic roots.

The history of The Playboy has been one of tension between its comedic and cathartic aspects, and between stylisation and naturalism. Each generation has looked at previous productions and seen them as overwrought and hammy.

There has also been a moral relativism about the productions of the play that saw both the Mahons and the villagers as mired in an insidiously violent culture, and saw this as being an anthropological truth that Synge had uncovered, rather than a value judgement.

To rediscover the comedy in The Playboy, Doyle and Adigun had to lift it from its rural context . . . because Irish theatre has grown up and culchies aren't funny anymore (except in irony, a la Martin McDonagh) and reset it amongst working-class Dubs, who are.

We are in a saloon bar somewhere in west Dublin. Pegeen runs the bar for her small-time crook of a father. Into this arrives a debonair, young Nigerian, with a story of having murdered his father and fleeing Nigeria for Ireland.

Doyle and Adigun give us a Dublin in which there's no longer any honour amongst thieves, in which "things are getting dangerous; there's no respect; the old rules are gone". The only moral order is that of celebrity. "The hard jaws, they want some f***in' journalist to give them a nickname . . . that's fame around here, " says Pegeen. It is a sordid, violent, depressed place. Or it would be, were it not so funny.

Philly and Jimmy, by implication a pair of violent thugs, are played by Phelim Drew and Joe Hanley as a dumb-and-dumber, comic double-act. The playboy's description of murdering his father becomes a comic device to get a laugh out of the fact that none of the Irish people know what a pestle is. ("A kitchen implement, " he eventually explains, exasperated. ) When there's a fight in the bar, the local girls whip out their mobile phones to film it, even as they urge it on. When one of the girls tries to help Christopher escape a lynching at the end, she dresses him in her pink tracksuit with the word "bitch" embroidered across the bottom.

With Doyle's sure hand on the script, this is all very funny . . . it is Dublin through the eyes of Jimmy Rabbitte rather than Paula Spencer. But there is an edge to it as well. It is suggesting something is badly rotten in this shiny new Dublin. Given a choice to follow one of the characters at the end, we'd have no hesitation in joining the Nigerians.

The play could have gone badly wrong here: the announcement that this new playboy was going to be about a Nigerian asylum seeker suggested woolly ideas of social inclusion and heavy-handed comment on racism the lack of justice in our asylum system.

But there is none of that. In fact, Christopher is not an "asylum seeker" in any meaningful way. He is given that label by young Sean (Laurence Kinlan, in fine fettle), who displays a humorously intricate knowledge of the system. But Christopher is simply what the playboy has always been, an outsider, and he is seeking refuge in the most basic sense of a bed for the night and a bit of work. His being Nigerian allows for some comic references to cultural differences (perhaps too many) but ultimately is simply a device to reflect back on the society he enters, a way of making the universal story of The Playboy specific to our times.

The production is superb.

Jimmy Fay does what he does so well: directs for fluid, naturalistic comedy. But when the stage needs to be still, he lets it. During those still moments, the central couple of Pegeen and the playboy shine. Giles Terera, an English actor, gives us a wonderful playboy, slowly discovering his confidence in this most foreign of places. And Eileen Walsh's Pegeen must rank alongside the greats. She is enchanting, a study in sorrow layered on hope layered on sorrow, with a skin-deep shrewness and a wicked wit in a bid to disguise it all.

This Playboy takes its place in the litany of classic stagings. It is wickedly entertaining, loaded with comment on contemporary Ireland and a rich study of Synge's play itself. But its obsession with chronicling the minutiae . . . and not just the guiding passions . . . of contemporary Irish culture will weaken it in time. It is a play for our times, not one that will stand the test of them.

James Son of James DUBLIN has continued to be a rich source for Roddy Doyle, but Michael Keegan Dolan has exhausted the midlands.

James Son of James is something of a counterpoint to The Bull, his production at the festival two years ago. The Bull was all sound and fury: raging invocations, furious coitus, hysterical violence, with a hectic, percussive soundtrack. It was wonderful. James Son of James is calm where The Bull was crazed, gentle where it was aggressive: its passions are more muted, more mundane, less epic. Instead of triumph, fury and despair, it gives us serenity, frustration, disappointment. These make for some beautiful duets between the play's various pairings, dances of delicate hesitancy. But they also make for a play with far less bite than its predecessor.

In The Bull, Michael Keegan Dolan had rich source material, Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Tain, that gave him a story and a structure. In James Son of James, Dolan has simply an idea, and it is an idea very similar to The Playboy: the arrival of a stranger in the small town of Rathmore. In this case, though, the stranger is the Christ.

James, a young black man, arrives in the town for the funeral of his father, whom he never knew. He is both exotic and serene, and this combination captivates the townsfolk, who take him to their heart. But jealousy sets in, and soon James is being held responsible for all that goes amiss . . . a robbery, an unexpected pregnancy. They turn against him and he meets the fate The Playboy narrowly avoids . . . what the old man refers to as "jungle justice" . . . a lynching.

Dolan's objective is also similar to The Playboy, to use this stranger to reflect back, satirically, on the society around him. But Doyle and Adigun had a wellhewn story with which to do this.

Dolan doesn't, and his play flounders in its satirical intent.

The specific references to contemporary Ireland that made The Playboy funny make James bland.

The nadir is an irrelevant scene featuring the local TD canvassing, a pointless and lame satire on parish-pump politics.

This failure is intriguing, if disappointing. Many of the plays on offer in this year's festival namecheck the "issues" of immigration, integration and multiculturalism, but Dolan's approach is radically different.

Other companies look to stage 'issues' plays with parts for foreign actors (this is at least in part the motivation behind The Playboy, though it is done so well the comedy and drama transcends the issues). Dolan, though, chooses to work with foreign performers and then has them play whatever part suits their ability (even if Irish). The result can be alienating at times, but it is a radical and liberating strategy that can pay great dividends in terms of virtuoso performance: he casts by talent, not by type.

There are two great scenes in James Son of James: the beginning and the end. The first is a Buster Keaton-like piece of choreography with carpentry and scaffolding that is more akin to continental circus theatre than anything Irish; the last is an achingly beautiful piece of staging and design that has James trussed up as the walls of the set collapse past him. In between are enough moments of beauty to keep me in my seat, but far too much aimless meandering to keep it compelling.

Dolan hopes to bring his three midlands plays together for a trilogy staging. He should do that . . .

and, in the process, he should work rigorously on this third part and trim from it all that is extraneous and indulgent. And then he should leave the midlands and take his international cast in search of great themes and stage them without concern for parody.

Long Day's Journey into Night IF James Son of James is a play with a beginning and an end, but not much middle, then Long Day's Journey Into Night is a play with a beginning, a middddle, and an ennnnnnnnd. Emboldened by her experience in staging all of Synge's plays together, Garry Hynes has taken on this fourhour masterpiece by Eugene O'Neill. In this era of 90-minute, no-interval theatre, at a point where other plays would be hurtling towards their finale, Long Day's Journey is languorously stretching its legs.

This is a play you have to give yourself over to: like a bottle of whiskey between friends, if you think about reaching the end as you start into it, you'll be overwhelmed. But if you concentrate on the quality of the company and forget about getting home afterwards, the end may come sooner than you wished.

O'Neill's play takes us through one day in the home of the Tyrone family, a family with secrets and suppressed memories they try to keep from each other, but that gradually unravel as night sets in.

Unlike, say, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which closely echoes its focus on a selfdestructing family, O'Neill's play has no recourse to external events to create the drama. The only thing from outside that impinges on the family is the fog that is slowly rolling in. Everything lies in the shared history of the parents and their two sons. It is as deterministic as the Greek plays but the violence is domestic rather than epic.

It is an extraordinary piece of storytelling and Garry Hynes and her cast have risen to the immense task of presenting it both uncut and unhurried. On a beautiful set by Francis O'Connor, the two younger men stand out: Michael Esper and Aidan Kelly are riveting as the brothers floundering for purpose and seeking refuge in whores and whiskey. A bottle shared with them would be a fine thing, albeit one sodden in melancholy. But Marie Mullen and James Cromwell, as their parents, are excellent: he statuesque and severe, she disintegrating and self-deceiving.

This is theatre presented for its universality rather than any specifically contemporary significance. It made for a beautiful counterpoint to a provocative week at the Irish theatre.

'The Playboy of the Western World' is at the Abbey until 24 November.

'James Son of James' is at the Samuel Beckett until 13 October. 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' is at the Gaiety until 13 October