Just as it was a century ago, Ireland is a country in search of a national myth.
The old epics of nationalist self-assertion and Catholic triumphalism have worn out, and have yet to be replaced. And just as it did a century ago, the theatre is turning to the ancient Irish epics, if not quite for inspiration, then at least for a sense of location.
Paul Mercier's Homeland, which uses the framework of Oisín's return to Ireland from the enchanted land of Tír na nÓg, follows, in the past few months alone, Vincent Woods's version of the Deirdre myth in A Cry from Heaven and Michael Keegan-Dolan's take on the Táin, The Story of the Bull. Like those other plays, it marks both a kind of continuity with the early Abbey of WB Yeats and Lady Gregory, and a vast distance in tone, as the heroic becomes mock-heroic and the epic becomes ironic.
The difficulty for this whole enterprise is its fundamental ambiguity. On the one hand, the desire to draw on myth suggests that we need it. On the other, we are all now too self-aware not to sense that the difference between mythology and bullshit can be narrow. The absurdity of myth-making is itself at the heart of Mercier's story. His Oisín is Liam Carney's bumptious, bragging chancer, whose role as "communications consultant" to property developers has been compounded from psychobabble and bribery.
He is a kind of exaggerated version of Frank Dunlop, half PR-man, half bagman, who has fled to a Mediterranean villa after giving evidence at a tribunal and is now returning for one last, quick exercise in political plumbing. He had made himself a giant of 1980s Ireland by creating a story of progress through development and helping to fix the politicians who can make the story a reality. When he boasts that "I put people in touch with their archetype and then I guide them on their true narrative", Mercier's scepticism is explicit.
Homeland, as it is staged by Mercier and designer Paul Keogan, is thus two things at once: a vivid, breathless updating and re-enactment of the mythic story of Oisin's return, and a sardonic reflection on the emptiness of such stories. Mercier is eating his mythic cake while declaring out of the side of his mouth that it is probably junk food. He is simultaneously telling and questioning a story. The approach is as honest as it is ambitious, but it is hardly surprising that one side of the play tends to undercut the other.
On the basic narrative level, Homeland works well, even, at times, brilliantly. Mercier occupies the stage with brisk confidence, using his familiar techniques of fast pace, fluid ensemble playing, improvised scenery and an almost cinematic succession of vignettes.
Keogan's inventiveness and Mercier's suppleness do generate a momentum that easily drives the action through its 90 minutes (without an interval). Some of the mythic parallels are beautifully realised as, for example, when Oisín's encounter with Saint Patrick becomes Carney's programming by the cult-like Church of God's Gospel.
In a sense, this re-telling works too well for its own good. Because the myth acquires such a compelling impetus, it generates expectations that Homeland can't fulfil.
On the one hand, the fast pace and concentrated narrative leave areas of the action looking uncomfortably sketchy, and a key strand of the story, in which Carney joins Gabrielle Reidy's Niamh, a drug-addled prostitute whose golden hair is a cheap wig, in a search for her daughter, never gets beyond the surface.
But the constant reminders that myths are lies - at one stage, contemporary Ireland is described as a "living myth" seem to ask the audience to pull back from the story even as the thrust of the action is inviting us to be swept along with it.
This is an honest dilemma, and an accurate reflection of a culture that is highly ambivalent about the whole notion of governing narratives, knowing that they can give a shape to experience but also set oppressive limits. Homeland works better as a diagnosis of this condition than as a cure for it, an energetic, intelligent probe into a terrain whose heart it never quite reaches. - Fintan O'Toole
Runs until Feb 18
Super Night Shot Project, Dublin
Even in a city of more than a million people, everyone is the hero of their own movie. The Berlin-based Gob Squad, who occupy the wittier spectrum of live art, have declared a war against anonymity. Their weapons are their video cameras. Super Night Shot begins with an ending; four guerrilla film-makers hurtling past the audience as they return to the theatre. Over the next hour, we discover where they've been.
Across four screens, the performers synchronise their watches, their cameras running while they outline their objectives with as much whimsy as zeal. The hero (Simon Will) will kiss a stranger, the casting director (Sarah Thom) will procure that stranger, the PR officer (Laura Tonke) will publicise the hero, and the location scout (Johanna Freiburg) will find a perfect setting.
It sounds like a recipe for disaster - a race against the clock which could either fail to involve strangers when filmed, or fail to involve a theatre audience when screened. In fact, the live challenge makes for riveting viewing, each journey unfurling in real time, side by side - like a no-budget mesh of 24 and the title sequence of Dallas.
Nor is it as chaotic as you might imagine. Partly because there are enchanting and unexpected set-pieces (at any given point, all four will begin a rap, a dance sequence, or a twirling panorama) and partly because random strangers do come up with great dialogue.
When the hero persuades a woman into his arms, she lets him down easy: "You're handsome, you're gorgeous but . . . you're not the only one."
Gob Squad don't battle anonymity so much as the guarded seclusion of the passer-by. They attempt to contort the anomie of city life into a storyline. The city may not exactly play to the camera, but it does yield something to this quixotic charm. And Gob Squad know that a million more stories are possible. This has been just one take. - Peter Crawley
