“Oh, Cathleen ni Houlihan, your way’s a thorny way!” In director Wayne Jordan’s staging of Sean O’Casey’s 1923 tragicomedy, the pedlar Seumas Shields (David Ganly) mentions the mythological figure that traditionally represents Ireland, while at the same time producing a toy monkey from his stock. Replacing the poor old woman with a primate carries alternative allusions – an Ireland uncivilised? Poised to entertain? – as Jordan cranks up O’Casey’s irreverence for Irish nationalism.

For residents of the Dublin tenements during the War of Independence, an I.R.A. gunman on the run is a romantic thought. Seumas’s roommate – the poet Donal Davoren (Mark O’Halloran) – is suspected of being such a figure and plays it up to his advantage, seducing impressionable young Minnie Powell (Amy McAllister) who misjudges his flowers as weeds. “We bow’d as worshippers before the Golden Celandine” he kindles in poetry, as O’Halloran plays the poet with sweet persuasion.

Yet he is also sometimes a creature strangely possessed, unrolling his lines with a snarl, moving in slow and stylised gestures. The limits of the simple realism of O’Casey’s ‘Dublin Trilogy’ will always be cast under suspicion by the expressionistic experiments of the towering WWI drama The Silver Tassie. In 2010, Jordan tried to tap into similar energies when mounting The Plough and the Stars, using enormous flags that the cast controlled in ritualistic military drill-type blocking, unpacking and brandishing the nationalist psyche in similar folds.

In The Shadow of a Gunman, the director is even more resistant to preservation or antiquities. Set designer Sarah Bacon has exchanged squalor for neatness and Georgian windows for perspex glass, propping up the tenement with exposed boards and bold streaks of paint that lift us from historical accuracy. Most interestingly, it alludes to our pop-up practice of constructing and even marketing the Dublin tenement in the present, a domineering image in Irish theatre in the last century.

If O’Casey was set to deflate the romance of Irish republicanism, this staging carries on that cynicism. An artificial moon is forced to withdraw by the sudden arrival of car-lights, swerving alarmingly into view by Sarah Jane Shiels’s lamps. Meanwhile, Bacon’s contemporary costuming of the younger players makes the action seem playable in the present. Opening on the eve of the UK general election, the performance might have us considering the impulse for political violence, as in Lloyd Cooney’s strong turn as the allegiance-making Tommy Owens; or indeed the suffocation through religious ideals, as represented by the bible-thumping Mrs. Henderson, played with full wallop by Catherine Walsh.

For all its contemporary aesthetic, the spirit of the old music hall is still here, especially in Ganly’s excellent showmanship. The voracious ballad-singing of the drunk tenant Adolphus Grigson (Dan Gordon) is in the same strain, although Louise Lewis’s heartfelt turn as Mrs. Grigson brings a sad reality to it.

It’s a significant co-production by the Lyric Theatre and Abbey Theatre, one that adds spark to the drama’s de-valorisation of the War of Independence when the country was on a road toward a destructive Civil War. Therefore, O’Casey’s play is poised right where it should be – in the shadow of glory.

The Shadow of a Gunman is playing at the Lyric Theatre until 6 June, before transferring to the Abbey Theatre until 1 August. For more information and tickets, see the Lyric Theatre website. Photo by Ros Kavanagh.