Despair at 'Dorian', feast on 'Famine'

CULTURE SHOCK:PERHAPS WE'VE been spoiled. For well over a century, it has seemed normal to look to the theatre as a space in which the country's big, dark passions can be played out in public.

It was a space in which both the romantic dreams and the dirty realities of nationalism could be tested; in which postrevolutionary disillusionment could be turned into bitter humour; in which the pain of mass emigration could be probed; in which the clash between tradition and modernity could be dramatised and the illusions of modernity itself mocked. But maybe it was pure dumb luck – a succession of strange, fierce visionaries – that made all of this possible. And maybe that luck is running out.

The huge, angry, wildly imaginative and ferociously engaged presence of Tom Murphy looms over this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival, serving both as a beacon and as a rebuke. The sheer power of DruidMurphy, Garry Hynes’s relentless excavation of three Murphy plays, Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark and Famine, threatens to overwhelm everything else, to make much of it seem small and unambitious. It is a great celebration of that old-fashioned thing the play, and a reminder of the capacity of drama to embody in ordinary characters a whole nation’s inner history. But even in that celebration there is a nagging question: will we see its like again?

DruidMurphy is built on three things that are rooted in the Irish theatre of a century ago. One is the now-unfashionable belief in the integrity of a written text, and thus of highly wrought verbal language, that was established here by Yeats and Synge. This is not a preciousness oblivious to the demands of real theatrical production; on the contrary, there is a very substantial – and, to me at least, somewhat regrettable – rewrite of the opening of A Whistle in the Dark in Druid’s cycle. But it is a notion that theatrical dialogue should hang halfway between poetry and music, that it should be shaped with a precision of both sound and sense.

The second is ensemble acting. Hynes’s company for this project has rightly been recognised internationally as one of the most extraordinary exemplars of ensemble playing seen anywhere in recent years. There’s a speed and clarity and intuitive intelligence to the playing that is as mesmerising to watch as Barcelona’s tiki-taka at its most fluent. And the third old-fashioned element is a sense that it all matters very much. The cycle is not political in the narrow sense, though there is much of politics in it. It is even bigger than that. It delves right down into the dark subsoil of the Irish psyche. It seeks nothing less than an explanation of why an entire culture is the way it is.

Perhaps it’s unfair to use DruidMurphy as a benchmark; it draws on decades of work by a great playwright and decades of engagement by Hynes with that work. But there is nonetheless a statement here. Irish theatre has been capable of creating drama that is, on the one hand, passionately engaged with the social and psychological life of the nation and, on the other, of a very high aesthetic order. This drama is one of the glories of modern Irish culture; we have done it as well as, and often better than, anyone else in the world. I’m not suggesting that this passion and ambition and brilliance can’t be manifested in other theatrical forms: Louise Lowe’s Monto Cycle has all the signs of a similar sense of purpose. But the literary play has one advantage that Lowe’s work does not. It can be seen by a lot of people; it can address a collective audience.

Before we dispense with the Irish dramatic tradition, we might ask, what can take its place? For me at least, Dublin Theatre Festival’s tentative answers, The Boys of Foley Street apart, are unconvincing. Too often, what we’re offered are not plays about a country; they’re plays about books, plays about plays, plays about the theatre.

IT IS, FORa start, simply strange that the big festival showpiece from the national theatre of an imploding nation is yet another version of a novel first published in 1890. Neil Bartlett's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is, so far as I know, the sixth Irish theatrical staging of the novel. (The previous five were put on between 1956, when Micheál MacLiammóir did it at the Gate, and 2010, when Alice Coghlan did a slimmed-down staging at Bewley's.)

Wilde’s text is itself hardly unknown; it was the One City/One Book choice for Dublin just two years ago.

The urgency of revisiting it right now is far from obvious. One can imagine that, in 1956, the book’s gay subtext would have given it a real edge for MacLiammóir. Now there’s no subtext. The Abbey’s version is indeed very deftly and lavishly done. Bartlett’s own direction plays up the gothic, even Grand Guignol elements of Wilde’s fable, glorying, with its footlights and red curtain, in the luridly melodramatic nature of the action. There’s much to admire in the stagecraft and spectacle, even when the one-dimensional nature of the protagonist – What comes after decadence? How about a spot of depravity? – takes on an air of tedium that Tom Canton in the title role cannot quite dissipate.

But if there’s no obvious answer to the “Why now?” question, it’s also hard to say why it’s all happening here. The adapter and director; the set, costume and lighting designers; and two lead actors, Canton and, as Lord Henry, Jasper Britton, are all English. Apart from Gerard Byrne’s intriguingly sinister butler/MC, which becomes easily the most interesting thing on stage, there’s not much that would be very different if we were in Bristol or Bath.

THE SENSE OFa theatre that is at two removes from life – the proper remove of art and the dangerous remove of theatre that explores other people's art – is not confined to the Abbey nor, indeed, to Ireland. The festival exemplifies, for instance, a strong international trend in Shakespeare production: you don't do King Lear or Hamlet, you stage a mediation on the meaning of King Lear or Hamlet. The things the plays deal with – language, power and violence – are secondary. The plays, rather, are to be taken, quite literally, as read. You couldn't begin to follow either the Wooster Group's Hamlet or Pan Pan's Everyone Is King Lear in His Own Home unless you already know the plays. We are in the realms of metatheatre: theatre about theatre. It's all in the concept.

With Elizabeth LeCompte’s version of Hamlet, the concept is complex and initially intriguing. The stage is dominated by a large screen. On it plays an edited, distorted and muted film of John Gielgud’s 1964 Broadway production of the play, which was captured live and then screened in cinemas across the US. The idea, as Scott Shepherd’s matter-of-fact Hamlet explains to us, is to reverse the process, turning the film back into live performance. So the company plays out the action in front of the screen, mimicking the movements, gestures and intonations of the original actors.

Intellectually, the idea is captivating: the play is, of course, dominated by a ghost and LeCompte’s trick is an attempt to make ghosts come alive.

Technically, the effects are often superb. But theatrically the whole thing becomes boring. Once you get the idea, you get the idea. There are arresting moments when the visuals and the actions suddenly come into an interesting relationship. But the actors, who are shadows and puppets, are not free actually to act. It all feels very like those late 19th-century symbolist dramas in which actors are mere ciphers whose meaning has already been determined. It’s a technical coup but a bloodless one.

The problem with much of this kind of work is that of realism. Theatre has to move beyond the mere aping of “real life”, whatever that is, beyond the conventions of impersonation and imitation. But if it breaks entirely loose from its anchoring in the everyday, in the here and now, it becomes merely arbitrary.

THIS DIFFICULTYis evident in Pan Pan's version of King Lear, directed by Gavin Quinn. The play – or rather, essentially, two parts of the play: the mad Lear on the heath and Lear's direct encounters with Cordelia – is reconceived as a set of exchanges between a confused man (Andrew Bennett) and his daughter-carer (Judith Roddy). Lines and speeches are ripped from their context and repurposed. The politics of state and family are left aside in order to concentrate on Lear's terrified vision of "unaccommodated man", humanity stripped of all social meaning and reduced to "a poor, bare forked animal".

There are moments when the wires touch and the connection between the original play and the new situation sparks into life and light. Lear’s simple line “Come, unbutton me here” is given immense pathos when spoken by a man needing to be undressed by his carer. The Fool’s “’Tis a naughty night to swim in” is strikingly embodied. Quinn’s own visual inventions sometimes chime in strange but effective ways with the text. But, too often, choices seem entirely arbitrary. Why does Bennett turn into a yogic swami? Why are Velvet Underground songs given such prominence? The thought process is mysterious because the gaze is internal.

At some point Irish theatre has to find another way of turning outwards again, to face what’s going on around it. It doesn’t seem to me – nor, I suspect, to many people knocked sideways by the force of Tom Murphy’s courage and artistry – that the traditional play is yet exhausted as a source of engagement. But those who are bored by its strictures still have to come up with a good answer to the question: how else can theatre take a large audience on a journey into their collective soul?