The "controversy" which was cooked up over the Abbey's co-production of Valle-Inclan's The Barbaric Comedies with the Edinburgh Festival is almost worthy of a Gothic satire in its own right, with truths being brutally raped on stage, or picked of their flesh in boiling cauldrons. What really set the pot brewing was a huge splash of photographs and an article in the Times by Dalya Alberge which began: "A shockingly lurid production of one of the 20th-century's classic pieces of literature is threatening the future of the official Edinburgh Festival, which until now has studiously avoided the vulgar antics and explicit language of its Fringe event".
This is complete nonsense. The play has always divided critics; indeed, amusingly, its classic status was so far disputed at this outing that the Daily Telegraph called it the work of an "all-but-forgotten playwright", while the Irish Independent called it "tremendously obscure". There was no threat to the future of the festival, which has never avoided what Alberge describes as "vulgar antics". She persevered, avowing that the play "was condemned yesterday as the most shocking piece of drama in the festival's 54-year history". Where and by whom?
"Dozens of people", she averred, walked out on opening night because of the "graphic depictions of rape and copulation and even a scene involving masturbating monks", and half the audience left at the interval. Complete nonsense. The festival reckoned to have lost about 20 people. None of these was asked why he or she left, and Alberge had no way of knowing - because she wasn't there. I can only echo the Sun- day Times's suggestion that "It could have been due to the denseness and sheer length (two and a half hours) of Act 1".
What ensued was what the festival's Jackie Westbrook described as "a media frenzy - it fed on itself". I wrote a piece saying it was all, in the words of the Abbey's director, Ben Barnes, "grossly exaggerated" - but that was only dignifying the story by noticing it. If I'd had more intelligence, I would not have filed at all. That would pose a huge question, however: once a story, no matter how erroneous, has appeared, is it news? Or, if it is erroneous, should it just be ignored? If it were ignored, would readers complain that they weren't being kept in touch with what was happening? The real question is this: if something happens in the media, has it really happened?
Newspaper after newspaper credited the Times's article as being gospel - and then embroidered. Although Irish newspapers, and Irish editions, embroidered hardest, there is no evidence that any other paper sent a journalist to see the show, the biggest in the Abbey's history. "Sex shocker play uncut for Ireland" raves the Sun, which goes on: "Shocked theatre-goers stormed out of the Irish production at the trendy Edinburgh Festival".
It is horrible to see newspaper after newspaper trotting out the line: "the most shocking play in the festival's 54-year history". The Sunday Times even parrots the Evening Herald's description of the play's "shocking" scenes, which is full of the strangest details: "The play contains scenes of a naked man having sex with a prostitute while in the same room his brother, a perverted trainee priest, is boiling the flesh off a female corpse".
Far from being "reviled by the critics", the show genuinely divided them. Cross-cultural barriers seem the best way to explain the chasms between the reviews. A Gallician play, directed by a Catalan and performed by Irish actors, the show started with a cultural war at its heart. Spain is not Ireland, and all attempts to read the play in Irish terms were in vain. As Michael Billington wrote in the Guardian: "Drama is always translatable, but it is not always transposable." Both Spanish and Irish critics found much to praise in the show. Many British critics, however, seemed genuinely baffled. You can hear the shock at the physically expressive world created by Bieito, along the lines of Bunuel and Almodovar, when Benedict Nightingale writes in the Times: "life in rural Galicia was a bit too torrid for everyday belief". In the IT]Observer, Susannah Clapp complains: "Everyone seems to have come out of the stock cupboard of Spanish drama . . . Hardly a minute . . . seems to pass without someone yelling, wailing, falling to the ground or waving their legs in the air."
What is more telling, perhaps, is lead actor Mark Lambert's comment: "the Anglo-Saxon press didn't click into the Catholic imagery". For me, this was where the real horror lay for some writers. Joyce Mc Millan's review in the Scotsman was repeatedly filleted by the shock-tacticians among the journalists. It was she who wrote: "I have never seen a show which contained so many explicit and prolonged rape scenes, or which seemed so perilously close to enjoying them." But the context in which she made this statement, a comparison between the religious corruption in the play and Irish Catholicism, was reported nowhere - and it is genuinely shocking. She wrote that any affinity between Spain and Ireland in the production, "has less to do with a merry pagan irreverence in the culture, and more to do with a nightmare vision of a society twisted by a corrupt and sexually neurotic form of religion, and by the misogyny it breeds". However insulting that comment, it is based on genuine beliefs. What was truly stomach-turning about the "media frenzy" was that it seemed so hypocritical in a society for which no amount of humping and pumping in film, video and TV seems shocking - or even boring. A society for which no gratuitous anti-clericalism seems too low. And that's not Britain I'm talking about. The Abbey is already receiving threatening phone-calls and letters about this show, and no doubt there will be embarrassing moments outside the theatre on opening night. They will be the most depressing scene yet in the horror show of a society dishonestly play-acting at being completely different than it is.
The Barbaric Comedies runs at the Abbey Theatre October 2nd-7th and continues from October 9th, at 7 p.m; it lasts approximately four hours
