Hiss at the Villain, Cheer the Vagabond

The name alone conjures greasepaint and gaslights and the Ghosts of Theater Past. Dion Boucicault, the 19th-century Irish playwright and actor, was popular in Britain and America with melodramas like “The Colleen Bawn,” one of the most successful plays of the time; “The Octoroon”; and “The Shaughraun,” now at the Irish Repertory Theater in a lively, loving production.

“In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved; in the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and claptrap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as the galleries did.”

That’s Edith Wharton, writing in “The Age of Innocence” about “The Shaughraun,” and her assessment stands. Eager to entertain, “The Shaughraun” (1874) is one of those sturdy theatrical vehicles that’s hard to resist.

Set in County Sligo, Ireland, the play has healthy doses of comedy mixed in with the melodrama. There’s also action — fights! a jailbreak! — plenty of romance, a bit of singing and dancing, a dog, plots and counterplots, and characters pulled from the trunk of dramatic types: a dastardly villain, a strapping hero. (This more-is-more aesthetic persists in contemporary Bollywood, where Boucicault could easily find employ.)

The story revolves around a wrongly accused convict, Robert Ffolliott (Kevin O’Donnell), who has escaped from Australia and sneaked back into Ireland. While searching for Robert, the courtly English officer Molineux (Mark Shanahan, an excellent comic) falls for his sister, Claire (Allison Jean White), who is about to be evicted from Robert’s estate, along with Robert’s lady love, Arte (Katie Fabel). The agent of everyone’s distress is Kinchela (Sean Gormley, just right), who holds the lease to the estate and, of course, has designs on Arte.

The Shaughraun of the title — “a fiddlin’, poachin’ vagabond” who likes his whiskey and tall tales — is Conn (Patrick Fitzgerald), Robert’s faithful friend and the play’s wellspring of anarchic, if self-conscious, Irishness. (Boucicault played the role in the original New York production.)

The director, Charlotte Moore, keeps the farcical elements from becoming too broad and stages the crowded plot with practiced economy. Klara Zieglerova’s set, with its brightly painted blues and greens, and a rocky perch or two, locates the play firmly in a kind of fantasy land, where it belongs.

Some elements in “The Shaughraun” creak louder than others: oh, those long, expository riffs and that complicated plot! But these come with the territory, and it’s territory that the Irish Rep, which has staged Boucicault’s “Colleen Bawn” and “The Streets of New York” and first did “The Shaughraun” in 1998, has a clear fondness for. That fondness shines through.