Fifty-year-old Raymond Keane, father of two, has in recent days found himself, on more than one occasion, suspended in the air a few metres off the ground, spinning on a rope.

Keane is relatively new to the deviant arts of circus, and the exposure has clearly titillated him.

"I shouldn't be doing it, but I have," he says. "I can't stop myself. It's quite a thrill to go up there and be spun around."

His excuse is a good one. Keane is directing a new show for Barabbas theatre company, titled Circus -- running in Dublin's Project until November 10 - involving three professional circus performers.

It is perhaps a gratuitous observation that Keane's thrills don't tend to be of the conventional sort. In a previous life, as a hairdresser, it wasn't enough for him to do a good back-and-sides, but he had to hang around the Grapevine Arts Centre (later the City Arts Centre) and give free haircuts to broke bohemians and arty types.

He subsequently worked in young people's television for seven years, but left that well-paid work to set up a theatre company that produced nothing for its entire first year.

"That was when I really found my true clown," he says.

Keane joined Mikel Murfi and Veronica Coburn in 1993 to set up Barabbas as a company dedicated the theatre of the clown in particular, and to physical and visual theatre in general.

"We worked for a whole year without showing any work. We spent months and months playing around with each other."

Keane had just had his first child when he took this on.

"I think I must have been a bit mad."

He christened his clown Raymond Clown, and found that Raymond Clown was "very much based in my failures, my stupidity, my joy, my gullibility, my vulnerability ... all those but with the gas mark turned up on them". His clown was funny, but could "also be very sad" and was, above all, "very truthful".

From clown to circus doesn't seem like a long journey: in some ways, Keane has come full circle, in others he has moved significantly on. Keane says he was never particularly interested in the circus, and, in fact Barabbas wanted to liberate the clown from the common idea of the circus clown.

"In Ireland, most people think of clown as circus or as children's theatre. The clown for me is more character based." He disavows the big, brash costumes, the oversize shoes and bright wigs of the circus -- though the art of clown, crucially, "takes a bow to the red nose".

It's not just, or simply, about jokes -- and when it is funny, it should be humour that comes from within, rather than from a punch line. "It's more akin to a character in a play," he says, then takes that further: "A clown is a state rather than a character. I am very much a clown. Everybody has a clown within them."

Barabbas used its study of clown, and its own very funny, very distinct clowns, to make a series of productions through the 1990s that helped created a space for physical theatre in Ireland. It had a popular breakthrough in 1997 with its reinterrogation of The Whiteheaded Boy by Lennox Robinson.

With success came opportunities and distractions. As Keane says, "We went off in many different directions. For a time, we were coming to look like every other company."

As Barabbas experimented mixing clown with other genres of performance, other companies were taking on board the physical and visual precepts that had inspired them. The result was a raft of companies doing "cross-disciplinary" work, and a less defined niche for Barabbas.

Mikel Murfi and Veronica Coburn have since left -- Murfi currently has a show on national tour as director, Falling Out of Love by John Breen, author of the glorious Alone It Stands. Keane, who says he sees himself as "a theatre maker, not a theatre writer", has sought to refocus Barabbas on its core strength: physical theatre.

But where did Circus come from? La Strada, the 1954 classic Italian circus film by Fellini, is the precise answer. Keane saw it years ago, at the Milky Way Club in Amsterdam to be precise; he was "blown away by it".

He started thinking of a possible adaptation a few years ago and went through a few drafts of a script. Then he brought drama critic-turned- dramaturg Jocelyn Clarke on board, and invited the men of Irish circus troupe Tumble Circus to workshop it with them.

"I wasn't that fond of circus," Keane says. "Now I'm enthralled by it."

Rather than a simple demonstration of circus, they are "using the circus to tell a story ... It's not a play about circus, it's a play about love, about winning and losing in love."

For all that, Circus is entirely non-verbal -- only one word is spoken in it (and that's 'No', apparently). There's juggling, trapeze, silk work, comedy, magic, clowns and, of course, acrobatics.

It does sound like something new in Irish theatre. And that is what Barabbas was formed for. It sounds like quite a thrill.

- Colin Murphy