Review

The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant - Abbey Theatre, Dublin:Why do great Irish writers resonate with great Russian writers? Brian Friel once expressed empathy with characters who "have no expectations whatever from love, but still invest everything in it". But to judge from the Abbey's new theatrical version of Shchedrin's bleakly satirical 19th-century novel, The Golovlyov Family, Tom Murphy's sympathies lie elsewhere.

The inspiration for Murphy’s new play, the “gloomiest novel in all Russian literature”, makes a much heavier investment in moral corrosion, religious hypocrisy and political tyranny. Jettisoning several of Shchedrin’s characters, events and narrative methods, Murphy retains the novel’s sharp cynicism and, more importantly, retains Arina. This cold matriarch, in the indomitable shape of Marie Mullen, has come from servitude, married above her station, revived a family’s ailing fortunes and established an empire.

That empire is represented by a placeless, semi-feudal estate, which designer Tom Piper has realised as a towering, warped-wood cylinder, giving the surreal impression that Arina lives with her scuttling serfs and cowed, unloved children at the bottom of an enormous whiskey barrel.

After the deaths of her reprobate son, Steven (Darragh Kelly), and her crudely debauched husband (Tom Hickey), Arina, having learned nothing from King Lear, divides the estates between her ungrateful offspring, the taciturn frowner, Paul (Frank McCusker), and Peter (Declan Conlon), a man whose fine, strong name masks his abject wickedness.

Shifting his focus from Peter, aka “Little Judas” (Shchedrin’s “hypocrite of a purely Russian sort”), Murphy instead puts Arina centre-stage. Her social climber turned property magnate, handing down spiritual and economic disaster to the next generation, makes this a distinctly new work, and creates a satire of a purely Irish sort.

Although we’ve seen Mullen better, she gives her tyrant some extraordinary characteristics. Standing bolt upright or rolling her head and gnashing her teeth when sitting, she is both icy tactician and rabid brawler.

Conlon, as her opponent, plays squarely against type as an effete poseur, so lacquered with mannerisms that his masquerade never ceases. The hypocrite remains, forever, unknowable.

All this suggests that Murphy and Shchedrin seem to be on the same page. Both are acutely aware of the worth of true spirituality and are affronted by its religious distortion. Each writer recognises the tragedy of those pilloried for daring to cross social barriers, but the Russian and Irish writers often seem to be wrestling each other. Murphy’s Hiberno-Ruthenia is a land of his own invention, a blurred topography of Orthodox shrines and estates named Newbridge, where liberal Irish colloquialisms can allow a delirious, dying McCusker to report that he’s feeling “not too bad”.

Yet too much of the novel’s form remains, signalled by a surfeit of exposition and unwieldy speeches. While Murphy ditches Shchedrin’s dry narrative commentary, he retains too much of his sprawl. The vestiges of the novel are conspicuous within awkward, unexpurgated monologues delivered to silent, nodding extras. And in an over-populated story where we are asked to invest in the plight of minor characters, it is hard to grieve for people we have barely met.

In an important regard Murphy and Shchedrin are perfectly compatible: uninterested in nuance, their satires often dispense with psychological complexity. If a character yelps out the words “property, land, money!” like a fevered plot synopsis, there is every reason to treat the play as a piece of agitprop.

Director Conall Morrison frequently enhances such an aesthetic by using bare-board partitions, shallow playing areas and face-front performances. But he reveals the depths of his stage with more stately grace when Murphy wishes to plumb deeper, inviting lighting designer Ben Ormerod’s beautiful splinters of sunlight into the barrel for emotional effect.

The production hangs somewhere in that uneven balance between blurted Russian polemic and poised Irish suggestion. When Mullen makes an extraordinary final entrance to deliver a defiant extended apologia, it is her declamatory verve that lifts and concludes the play. However, there is nothing reluctant about that tyranny and her bravado eclipses the fact that this is her deathbed speech.

Such is the conundrum of a play, and perhaps a time, that cannot decide whether warning messages are best served by a whisper or a megaphone.

Until July 11