Culture Shock: Reality check at Dublin Theatre Festival

There is a line in Mark O'Rowe's new play, Our Few and Evil Days, at the Abbey Theatre, that is so obedient to the rhythm of reported speech, and nearly radiant with needless detail, that it rests in my mind like poetry.

Adele, the adult daughter of two suburban parents, has just been asked about the night she first met Dennis, her new boyfriend. Who else was she with? “Niamh . . . a couple of others. Emma from work, Suzy . . . It was Suzy’s birthday, actually.” It’s hardly a quote for the annals, and those characters never trouble us again, but in performance this patter is so intricate with the brisk patterns of human thought, a hesitant trawl through memory with omissions and elaborations, that when you stop to consider it, it’s almost mesmerising.

Not that it is supposed to be. The actors in the scene, Sinéad Cusack, Ciarán Hinds, Charlie Murphy and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, are batting back details and banalities, with the stagger and flow of an awkward conversation at a dinner table (which it is), while the audience is working out what's relevant. On the stage, under O'Rowe's direction, it moves like music, but on the page this exchange is a minefield: miss a cue, pause too long, and it all collapses into something artificial. Played out on a domestic set so detailed that it spills several rows into the Abbey auditorium, with a ceiling and a functioning kitchen sink, this is a lesson in persuasion. For a while, at least, the production is as real as it gets.

That's the ruse, anyway. O'Rowe, better known as a maker of exhilarating monologue plays, such as Howie the Rookie and Terminus, or as a cartographer of a nightmarish but recognisable Dublin, in Made in China and Crestfall, has not abandoned the unsettling potency of mythmaking. The trauma and secrets of this family return nightly, until you begin to question the status of everything – even Emma from work – as though the production had sealed itself airtight with plausibility, only to discover that the uncanny always finds a way to seep through.

At this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, always a barometer for the concerns of the art form, it was a play in good company, where every other production provided its own reality check. Druid's revival of Bailegangaire, Tom Murphy's entwining of a family trauma with an endlessly repeated, always unfinished folk tale, found a staging that seemed both earthy and otherworldly, where Marie Mullen's wild-haired Mommo might have been equal parts senile and shamanic. Few shows minded the gap between fiction and life, instead choosing to meld them tight.

The Schaubühne's explosive production of Hamlet allowed the prince to ride roughshod over the play, straying from the stage into the audience to engage us in taunting conversation and turning an unforgiving video camera on the bestial court of Elsinore. If Hamlet himself was caught in an unstable performance, so too were the production and the spectator. You might have loved or loathed the interpretation, but you were made a part of it.

It was an unsettling, bracing technique that marked the point of contact between otherwise different and distant shows, such as Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, by the Australian company Back to Back, and Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, from Untitled Projects, of Scotland.

The first functioned like an artful hall of mirrors, in which the company of performers with intellectual disabilities wrestled with the problems of staging a production about the Hindu deity and Nazi Germany. You could call it metatheatre, a fixation of the festival in recent years, but the layers of Ganesh were more probing, asking the audience to consider what they were watching and how they were watching it. "You've come to see a freak show, haven't you?" a director shouted at the audience in a sequence that made you pine for the protection of a fourth wall.

The imaginative architecture of Paul Bright, introduced to us as a Scottish maverick director of the late 1980s, took another approach, laying bare the artefacts and residue of radical performances long past. What this encouraged was a sense of appreciation for artifice, while urging a distrust of reality.

Is there a political dimension to all this questioning? The philosopher of postmodernism Jean Baudrillard once contended that Disneyland existed, as a demarcated fantasyland, to persuade us that the world beyond its borders was credible, when the opposite was true. When the status of our reality, too, can seem unstable, our fiction may revolt, asserting reality while undermining it, refusing to be a refuge.

It's not for nothing that the production that stretched throughout Dublin Theatre Festival was Anu Productions' Vardo, the concluding part of the company's Monto Cycle, which has always blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction, sending its spectators spinning through the streets. The strangest, most revealing criticism levelled at Vardo was its occasional "staginess", as though it were anticlimactic to consider it theatre at all. Instead its singular achievement, and that of the festival, may have been to frame the city as an expansive stage, to send us back into this altered reality, all of us performers, with new parts to play.

Fintan O’Toole is away