The recent plethora of dramatic monologues in our major theatres signals an attempt by our young playwrights to wrestle with form, and exert control over the theatrical process. Eugene O'Brien's Eden (premiered at the Peacock in January), and Conor McPherson's Port Authority (which just finished a run at the New Ambassadors, London and transfers to the Gate from tonight), both directed by McPherson, reveal an anxiety about theatre as a medium for communication. Together with another current monologic drama (Neil LaBute's bash trilogy which has just finished at the Gate), a trend of uncommunicability, isolation, and the unaware self emerges.
This, of course, is far from new. The father of modern Irish drama, Brian Friel, already has supplied a template for these new writers. Molly Sweeney (1994) acts as a point of comparison, with its three characters, oblivious to one another, recounting the same event from their own subjectively blind perspective, the form mirroring the subject. Eden, Port Authority, and the disturbing third section of bash's triptych, A Gaggle of Saints, all use the onstage presence of the other silent and seemingly un-present characters to act poignantly as referents to the spoken text. No one character can hear or see the other and each is called into play either by a controlling exegetic light or sound. The interest lies primarily in the divergence in the stories told by each, making meaning unstable, and forcing spectators to either thread them together or side with a particular version of events. The "drama" lies at the points of divergence.
When in real life do we ever use the monologue form? Publicly in the performing professions (law, politics, religion, education), and privately in the psychiatrist's chair. In the latter, we are accorded the privilege of the unbroken narrative denied us in the public sphere of sociability where we are trained to contribute rather than hold forth. Our narratives to the psychiatrist are supposed to reveal damaged thought patterns which the doctor then tries to challenge and correct. The listener to the narrative is imperative in the contract of psychiatry, as is, more importantly, the intervention. The monologue thus comes to be associated with psychological distress, attenuated first by the telling of it, and then by the reprogramming of the damaged thought pattern by an external authority.
O'Brien, LaBute and McPherson deny their characters any reprogramming, any compassionate or even dispassionate listener. No one but the spectator listens, and since a darkened auditorium is imposed on the spectator, the characters remain isolated and inviolable. Eden charts the turning point in the lives of husband and wife, Billy and Breda, in a Midlands town. The wife mistakenly and myopically sees an improvement in the relationship while the husband continues his philandering. Each monologue retraces the final events of the previous monologue and corrects the vision of the other before moving the story on. A Gaggle of Saints presents the interweaving narratives of an evening in the lives of American Mormon college sweethearts, John and Sue (superbly performed by Jason O'Mara and Justine Mitchell) with a dark secret and a blind devotion as motivators for their diverging accounts. Port Authority features three generations of men in the one North Dublin family (Kevin, Dermot and Joe) recounting their pathetic existence characterised by hopeful dreaming and dashed by inevitable failure. The three broken monologues intersect, almost innocuously, but helping us to establish the three characters in a time-space continuum in the narrative which the isolation of the staging denies.
In all the plays, men are portrayed as alcoholic and pathetic failures, or violent, sexist homophobes. Women are represented with a lack of self-esteem. Characters are trapped by the narratives in the past tense, and trapped physically by the stage directions. No one can escape, no one learns, no one seeks redemption. More importantly, there is no one or no space provided by the form chosen to challenge such damaged thinking. That all three monologues are written by men is no surprise, as all three works are finite and closed; self-awareness is replaced by self-obsession. Abetted by the monologue form, Woman, with whom these characters are preoccupied, is rendered mute and denied self-determination.
Theatre writing, form and process are all under the spotlight in these monologues. It is almost an embryonic form of writing, as indeed in most playwriting courses the first exercise for writers is to write monologues in order to get to know their characters better. The monologue always traps the characters in the field of memory; they never do anything in the present. Thus, there is the impression that these characters have lived, that they live no more and are trapped in torment. Indeed, the tolling bell which initiates the monologues in Port Authority signals another round in a boxing match in which the characters bash themselves up. LaBute's title (bash) is unnervingly apt. The chosen form gets the writer right up close with the actor, eliminating the role of the director (to the point where McPherson and LaBute direct their own work). The variables of the directing process are thus dispatched from the stage as this becomes a writing-and-acting exercise. It also points to an attempt to turn theatre into a purely literary medium; since relatively little happens on the stage, the focus is on the writer's storytelling abilities, and the actor's ability to serve the writing.
Nevertheless, all three plays are vehicles for some superlative acting, and some very clever, sharply observed and poignant characterisation. The staging of Port Authority, in particular, features a disturbing bell-sound which helps move the play out of its realistic trap and into some metaphorical purgatory, and the lighting design, most interestingly, has a language of its own. A Gaggle of Saints's spotlight freeze-frames an almost unpalatable story, adding a chilling aura of calculation to the motivation behind the violence recounted in the narrative. Pain and suffering, attenuated at times by the sharp observation of life's absurdities, is achingly palpable, and thus these authors provide for a protean form of catharsis at a remove. But since the action has already happened, the characters are unaware of each other, and their narratives are unchallenged, the drama is removed from embodiment and re-enactment and relocated in the gaps in the characters' perceptions and in the tensions between the multiple truths.
Brian Singleton is Senior Lecturer in the School of Drama, Trinity College, Dublin.