We can't write down Anglo, but we can write a musical about it

A joke about the Fiscal Treaty had all the impact of a damp campaign poster

ONE GREAT THING about adding The Musical to any title is that it can mean firing off the first joke before the show has even been written.

Incongruity helps. Take a famous figure, an event, a historical moment, and add The Musical, and voila! it offers up a whole other vision.

Tribunal! The Musical would work as a line, maybe even a project: the Dublin Castle set, the chorus in the public gallery, the cast of thousands (of lawyers).

With the right idea and writer, the musical could be as good a format as any for us to directly address an Irish crisis in a way that hasn’t been done so far. Making something into a musical simultaneously undercuts and elevates the topic. It adds bathos, but also a higher pitch. Yet this heightened, innately ridiculous genre could be the best way yet to address a real event so enormous that shocked, disbelieving laughter is a predominant reaction.

However, turning anything into a musical makes it a high-wire act. It offers not just a clash of genres and ideas, but the potential of a mess of them, of a decent subject reduced to a chorus line of jazz hands.

The details of Anglo: The Musical were announced this week. It is co-written by Paul Howard and is getting a decent run, during November, in a major Dublin theatre. But the promise – of triumph or disaster – comes through that title. It raises a chuckle. A nervous one, perhaps. Ultimately, the jokes will work only if the audience goes home humming the tunes that went with them.

Howard’s name alone brings enough promise. Ross O’Carroll Kelly has developed into our most reliable chronicler of the boom and bust – and, it seems likely now, will remain so. (Yes, I know he’s sitting above me here in the print edition, and such praise looks incestuous. All I can say in response is that there’s more in-house back-slapping a couple of paragraphs further on, so get used to it.)

There isn’t a great tradition of Irish musical theatre, yet it has crept steadily into the culture in recent years. We’ve had Michael Collins: The Musical, rural electrification (Shay Healy’s The Wiremen) and spies in wartime Ireland (Arthur Riordan’s Improbable Frequency). Only last week, the refreshing, if overly-extended, Alice in Funderland finished its run in the Abbey, the first musical produced there for more than 20 years. While comfortable when referencing Ireland’s gay culture or the Cork/Dublin divide, with the exception of one great joke about emigration it was clumsy when it widened its satire. There was a joke about the fiscal treaty that had all the impact of a damp campaign poster.

Musical theatre isn’t necessarily the only tuneful way to go. Throwing The Opera into a title lends a whole other texture. The point of Jerry Springer: The Opera was that it was a clash of lowest-common-denominator TV entertainment with what is seen as a particularly exalted and exclusive art form. But otherwise, opera lends things a seriousness and integrity that not every subject deserves. It suits tragedy, if the focus is on the wronged. Anglo: The Opera just would not work. Ghost Estate: The Opera, on the other hand . . .

It may yet be that musicals deliver a satirical reaction to the national crisis that has so far been slow in coming. Literature has struggled. Film has offered little of substance. Theatre has been found wanting.

Which is not say that there haven’t been glimpses. In the recent Tiny Plays – very short works commissioned by Fishamble through an Irish Times competition – the best was Colin Murphy’s Guaranteed Irish, in which the minister for finance and the taoiseach were followed over the course of the night of the bank bailout, and depicted as two men comically out of their depth. Its most subtle joke involved a banana, which brought a touch of clowning to a political circus.

While we have yet to sing the Ballad of the Bondholders, music offers the most direct way towards facing the situation. There is already a hint of this in the songs regularly delivered by Mario Rosenstock’s Gift Grub – and he was a star of

that that previous great national-crisis-turned-musical, I, Keano. That, too, showed that the best response to such a high-pitched and overblown story is to just push it further into the ridiculous. And when you’re in that space, you’ll find musical theatre already lives in that space.

They are not the most famous lines of his song, but Irving Berlin gave us a starting point: “Before the fiddlers have fled/ Before they ask us to pay the bill and while we still have the chance/ Let’s face the music and dance.”

It’s the one Berlin we should definitely listen to.

@shanehegarty