STOCKBRIDGE -- Two Irishmen walk into a jail cell. One comes out bloody.
This could be the beginning of a very bad joke or an even worse play, but in fact it's the setup for a genuinely astonishing night of theater. Passionate, heartbreaking, and funny as only Irish tragedy can be, Ron Hutchinson's ''Rat in the Skull" puts us right in the cell with those guys -- one a suspected IRA bomber, the other a detective -- and breaks open not only their heads but their hearts. And ours, too.
The Berkshire Theatre Festival's production combines all the elements required to make a strong play stronger -- skillful direction, expert design, and above all a set of intensely committed, intelligent, and vividly real performances -- to create a truly rare experience. The word gets thrown around too much, but there are times when nothing less will do. BTF's ''Rat in the Skull" is great.
At the center of its greatness stand the two actors whose powerful connection with each other and with the audience gives the production its force. For more than two hours, Jonathan Epstein and Phil Burke imbue every word, every gesture, every glance and shrug and sigh, with life. Together, they are utterly engaged in the play's slow and deadly dance of fury and fatigue. Burke plays the young IRA radical, Michael Patrick de Valera Demon Bomber Roche, and Epstein the aging cop, Detective Inspector Nelson of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They hate each other; they exhaust each other; they understand each other. By the end, it feels like a strange kind of love.
What makes the evolution of their relationship remarkable is that Hutchinson's language, dense and lyrical and true, holds the love and the hate and the weariness all together, entwined but separate. His story, too, is complex but never muddled. Roche, arrested with bomb-making materials, is being held in a London cell, watched by a young constable (fiercely played by Michael Crane) and then interrogated by Nelson, a seasoned RUC man, in hopes of ''converting" him (the word's religious implications are not accidental) into an informant. Somehow, the constable is persuaded to leave the two men alone, and that's when Nelson, as he freely admits, beats Roche bloody.