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The APA company mercifully makes little effort to brogue O'Casey's lines, with the result that they are much more understandable and astonishing than they would be in an imitation Abbey accent. And in a script where almost every role is a juicy character part, the players have sensibly resisted the temptation to make too much of a good thing. Sydney Walker's superstitious, avaricious old bog farmer is especially well drawn, and Frances Sternhagen manages to be at the same time gay, defiant and pathetic as Loreleen, the physical embodiment of the wild-spinning rooster spirit that is terrorizing the men. The most uninhibitedly theatrical performance, though, is delivered by a thatched cottage, which shakes, rattles, writhes, smokes, flashes, and sheds its vines in one of the most dramatic cases of demonic possession since the Gadarene swine.
