How many people walked into The Making of Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford expecting a behind-the-scenes dramatization of an obscure film by the director of The Quiet Man? I’ll sheepishly raise my own hand. The John Ford that has tantalised the imagination of Siren Productions artistic director Selina Cartmell is actually the 17th century English playwright – but, as it turns out, this mistake was a helpful avenue into this engrossing and at times captivating piece of theatre, obsessed as it is with the complicated relationship between celluloid and the stage.

Audiences will have been cushioned by familiarity when confronting the dark matter of some of Siren’s previous productions – Medea, Macbeth – but Cartmell has approached her adaptation of Ford’s less well-known 1633 play by embedding it deeply, and quite literally, within the language of cinema. It’s a fascinating strategy, since it’s hard to imagine anyone in Hollywood daring to produce the incestuous bloodbath that Ford has concocted. It seems there are still some themes that only theatre will dare to touch.

Despite the hurricane to come, the performance opens with a teasing slowness. Louis Lovett walks on stage, twirling a yo-yo, and takes a seat before a typewriter. As he punches his keys, his bleak musings (the first lines of Act I, Scene III) are projected onto a screen above the stage. Lovett then pauses, seemingly suffering from a moment of writer’s block. And then faster than you can say ‘action’, the cast and an entire film crew, pounce on stage, surrounding Lovett and clamouring about him. They disappear almost as quickly, and Lovett is left with a cup of coffee.

For the majority of the performance, Sabine Dargent's functionally grandiose set is essentially a hyperactive film studio, manned with clapper loaders and boom operators and walls lined with props and costumes. Lovett as the Director is ostensibly making a movie called ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, in which he’s cast himself as Giovanni, a broken man in love with his sister Annabella (Kate Stanley Brennan), though his affections for Stanley Brennan extend beyond the film's scipt. The action flips breathlessly between scenes from the text, filmed snippets, screen tests and line readings. Still, Cartmell’s preoccupations are not solely with exposing what happens beyond the fourth wall. About ten minutes into the performance, the entire cast and crew participate in an elaborate dance routine. The grunt work of creating a film has rarely seemed as animated.

The Making of… often feels like a live negotiation between the dramatic potentials of film and theatre, whether it’s two members of the crew (Ian Kinane, Manus Halligan) performing a knife fight in slow motion or the hilarious contributions of Bergetto (Simon Delaney) and Poggio (Paul Reid) that are filmed in black and white. Yet for all its multimedia fidgeting, the heart of this production remains Ford’s morbid, sex-filled text, and the cast are equal to the potent rawness of the playwright’s poetry. Incest remains a taboo topic five-hundred years after Ford walked the earth, but Cartmell puts the erotic affair between the brother and sister front and centre. On a moveable bed in the centre of the stage, Giovanni and Annabella proclaim their affections into a Super 8 camera and all but consummate their forbidden love. Lovett is more convincing as a stark-raving mad lunatic, though, especially during the final scenes where he’s covered in blood and clutching a human heart.

Cathy Belton is powerful as mourning diva Hippolita. She is both sultry and lost in mourning, and the tears she cries when she describes her murdered husband are an intriguing contrast to the eye drops offered to the glum Giovanni by a stage hand earlier in the performance. Barbara Brennan is brilliant as Annabella’s tastefully lecherous guardian Putana before she suffers death by yo-yo. The bedroom scene between the recently married Soranzo (Phelim Drew) and Annabella might be the most compelling in the performance. Soranzo, in only a string vest and red Y-fronts, demands to know who has deflowered his new bride, and the scene, in which Stanley Brennan is extremely convincing, ticks off a checklist of extreme emotion: lust, guilt, longing, murderous rage.

Cartmell seems intent on bringing as much of cinema's fading epic quality to the stage. Gaby Rooney’s vintage costumes, full of velvet and lace, elucidated this sort of nostalgia while Conor Linehan's score jazzy score – rollicking during the dance scene and full of low bass notes during dark passages – was instrumental in establishing mood.

While the Director, and perhaps we can read Cartmell, seems to vent some frustration with the original text by liberally altering the plot (killing Putana with yoyo, say, or writing his own death out of the performance) the mad intensity of Ford's writing is viciously obvious. Interestingly, all of the paternal roles – father of Giovanni and Anabella, Florio (Lorcan Cranitch), Friar (Tom Hickey) and Cardinal (John Kavanagh) – are performed via video projection, which subtly solidifies Ford’s portrayal of an absent social order. And though it's never entirely clear whether which of the two characters Lovett plays is behind the outburst of violence at the end, this adaptation provides a graphic glimpse into the imagination of a seventeenth century man who would conjure a depravity that is, daresay, cinematic.

Donald Mahoney