Abbey Theatre/Fintan O'Toole The first few minutes of Marina Carr's new play Ariel, we know we are in a crumbling world. The very title comes from the feverish vision of the Biblical prophet Isaiah, foreseeing the destruction of a city.
On stage, at the 16th birthday party of the eponymous daughter of a rising Midlands politician, the three pillars of the old Ireland - Church, State and Family - are in an advanced state of decay.
The politician, Mark Lambert's Fermoy Fitzgerald, is a strange beast, driven by dark compulsions and fanatic visions of destiny. His brother Boniface (Barry McGovern) is a monk whose sole remaining duty is the care of his decrepit and demented colleagues. And the wider Fitzgerald family is a cauldron of simmering resentments.
In all of this, Carr is laying out the ground that the best Irish dramatists of the younger generation must now occupy. The society that gave form and meaning to the work of their older contemporaries is in disarray. Playwrights such as Carr and Sebastian Barry, whose recent work, Hinterland, bears many resemblances to Ariel, have to start almost from scratch. They have to find a way to make their own private myths fuse with the public world they now inhabit.
This is a journey into unmapped territory, and when you have no map and no clear sense of a destination, you tend to wander. It may well be that Ariel is the kind of play we will have to get used to: a meander into an unknown landscape where we see some breathtaking views and stumble into some treacherous bogs.
The grand house that the Fitzgeralds have built with the fortune they have made in the cement and gravel business is, we are told, fronted with Greek columns. So is Carr's play. Given her recurrent concern with family dynasties riven by violence, death and inescapable destiny, it was perhaps inevitable that she should seek her public myth in the Greek tragedies.
Ariel is clearly a version of the story of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to appease the gods and gain a fair wind for the voyage to Troy. The Fitzgeralds are a 21st-century Irish House of Atreus, with Fermoy as Agamemnon, Ingrid Craigie's precise, contained Frances as his disaffected wife Clytemnestra and Elske Rahill's Ariel as Iphigenia. There are elements of Electra and Orestes in the Fitzgeralds' other children, Stephen (Dylan Tighe) and Elaine (Eileen Walsh).
This in itself is an enormously ambitious undertaking, but Ariel is also trying to be an Irish version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Carr, too, is trying to fuse an immediate vision of political crisis with a large sweep of religious and Biblical images. She tries this, moreover, over a span of 10 years, with the first act set in the present and the other two in 10 years time.
This is quite simply too much for one play, even for a dramatist of Carr's bold and relentless imagination. Euripides and Aeschylus - no mean playwrights - felt it necessary to unpack the myth in a series of plays. Kushner split Angels in America into two very long epics. By squeezing it all into one evening of conventional length, Carr risks the kind of literal overkill that comes when bodies pile up in a rapid succession of catastrophes.
Nor does she manage to get to the core of the Greek plays: a sense of necessity. In the Greek world, the killing of Iphigenia is as necessary as its terrible consequences are inevitable. Here, Fermoy's sacrifice of his daughter is driven, not by the logic of the story, but by a rhetoric drawn from psychotic visions. We never get a convincing reason why it has to happen.
These are serious problems, all the more so because the play does not pretend to work on the level of social realism. Fermoy is not remotely convincing as a contemporary Irish politician, and his religious ravings in an extended television interview don't sound like the kind of stuff that could make him the next Taoiseach.
What is most remarkable, however, is that with all of these gaping flaws, Ariel is still curiously compelling. This is partly because of the sheer, gutsy integrity with which director Conall Morrison and his cast engage with Carr's quest. Lambert and Craigie in particular don't just push the boat but steer unflinchingly into the uncharted waters.
It is also, though, because of Carr's own courage. It takes vision and generosity to accept the task of trying to find public myths for a society that no longer knows what anything means. If Ariel doesn't find them, there is nevertheless an excitement in the search.
Continues after the festival. Booking on tel: 01-8173333 or 01-8787222
Glengarry Glen Ross
Olympia Theatre
Gerry Colgan
English have a stranglehold on the production of Shakespeare at his best. It is, after all, their ancient language, and no one else has the body of tradition they bring to his wonderful words. Equally, Americans have an icon in David Mamet, the playwright who has given a poetic status to their living language, including its routine profanities.
There is no better example of this than Glengarry Glen Ross, his coruscating look at the underbelly of the real estate business. It opens in a bar, with two cushioned recesses in which three pairs of men set the scene. First, senior salesman Shelley, now in a slump, tries desperately to persuade or bribe office manager John to give him some good "leads" - information on likely prospects.
Next an angry Dave is seen trying to persuade nervous George to break into the office that night and steal the files with the leads data, which they could then sell to a rival firm. Their discussion is left unresolved as we move on to Richard, a handsome, saturnine shark about to move in for the kill on a timid customer he has just met.
The second act takes place the following morning in their ramshackle office, which has been robbed of leads, phones and more. A tough cop is making enquiries, and all hell is breaking loose. Shelley thinks he has made a big sale, but bad news awaits him. Dave takes off for Wisconsin, and George hangs around in shock. Richard's victim comes looking for his money back, while John tries to keep the show on the road.
There is ferocity in the air and the dialogue as the men support, betray and insult each other. Their words crackle with the electricity of their stressed emotions, orchestrated through the direction of Amy Morton for Chicago's famous Steppenwolf Theatre, here individually and collectively brilliant. It is also the author's native city, and there is a pervasive sense of authenticity, real life on the grill. This fine play, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984, is a modern tragedy to savour.
Runs to October 6th; booking on tel: 01-8173333 or 1890-925130. Seats in the "gods" for four performances on Saturday and Sunday will be on sale
Information and booking on tel: 01-8173333, or website: www.dublintheatrefestival.com
