In a sense, Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow is very much a 1950s period piece. The battle against capital punishment, in which it plays a part, has long been won, in the UK and Ireland, at least. The gruesome details of botched hangings, surely partly designed to shock audiences into rethinking their attitudes to the death penalty, now seem rather obviously stitched in to the prisoners' conversations; the characters too seem rather stereotypically aligned: tough screw, decent screw, harmless old crook, dangerous criminal and so on.

And yet the play, in Kathy Burke's powerful production for Oxford Stage Company, still packs a punch. This is partly down to Behan's vigorous, witty writing and fine ear for dialogue, but partly because the piece skilfully demonstrates the brutalising effect of an execution on all around it and that still resonates today.

Set in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison in 1949, the play traces the hours up to and immediately after an execution. There is plenty of banter and gallows humour, and a wealth of funny detail about life inside (for which Behan drew on his own experience), all of it nicely handled in Burke's staging. Most memorable is the delightful scene in which two old-timers, having their legs rubbed with spirit for the rheumatism, take stealthy swigs from the meths bottle while the warder is busy at their shins (a scene played with beautiful comic timing by Ciaran McIntyre, Tony Rohr and Sean Campion).

But underpinning all the knockabout is a grim tension: there is the warder becoming increasingly disturbed by the reality of hangings; the prisoners bribed to dig the dead man's grave; the hangman driven to drink. Above all, there is the "lifer", a murderer set to die along with the condemned man, who has been reprieved at the last minute and who, unable to cope with the arbitrariness of it all, tries to hang himself.

Oxford Stage Company has made it its business to revive significant, rarely performed plays and this is a fine example of the practice.

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