First it is necessary to give the lie to the notion that the National Theatre production of Frank McGuinness's adaptation of Ramon Maria del ValleInclan's trilogy is indecent or sexually titillating. It is a serious-minded and major dramatic achievement of significant moral stature, in which some incidents, many words and certain images will cause offence to some people. But rape is offensive (and nothing to do with sexuality, being all about criminal power) and a Roman Catholic Abbot praying to Satan is offensive, and the author and his adaptor and director fully intended to demonstrate these and other offences for what they are. Valle Inclan's cruelly satirical style simultaneously enlarged the offences to grotesqueries, which may be why some commentators have chosen to identify him as a harbinger of the theatre of the absurd.
In the Barbaric Comedies, as brilliantly directed here by Calixto Bieito, it seems more like the theatre of chaos. The lines between good and evil are irretrievably blurred, as are usually absolute distinctions between spiritual conscience and physical power, between spirituality and animism between anarchy and order, even between life and death. Here is moral chaos which the audience is invited to sort out for itself. Demonstrably, society is absurd (and worse) and we must try to put some moral order on it.
This is some challenge, and some audiences will choose not to confront it or even rise to it, even if only because this seems too much like hard work in an evening at the theatre.
Frank McGuinness's adaptation of the original author's three plays into one four-hour epic offers a sense of linguistic familiarity to an Irish audience, but does not attempt otherwise to transpose the work to any other than its Spanish original. It demands the closest attention from its audience (and, in its opening on Sunday evening, seemed to achieve this) but it offers no easy escape from the original author's angry and difficult communication techniques, so that, ultimately, the closest of attention is not fully or dramatically rewarding.
A great deal of the close attention it requires of its audience is rewarded here by the huge creative energy, commitment and even bravery of the consummate acting of the players. Mark Lambert, as the profligate Don Juan Manuel de Montenegro, exhausts our admiration in his untiring excellence, and there is almost equally riveting energy in Joan O'Hara's hard-done-by Dona Maria, Karl Shiels's macho Don Migualito, Des Cave's robustly corrupt Abbot of Lantanon, Owen Sharpe's slimy Don Farruquino, Janet Moran's forlorn Dona Sabelito, Cathy White's sinuously sexual Pichona, Kate O'Toole's forthright Dona Jeromita and Eleanor Methven's sturdy sacristan's wife, with special notice for Eamon Morrissey's lapdog Don Gallant, Garrett Keogh's venal Fuso Negro and Lalor Roddy's evil Sacristan for the injection of some particularly wicked comedy.
They, and all their colleagues, should emphatically be seen for the gallery of genuinely grotesque performances they provide, and the whole production should be seen because it is a significant, serious and rare piece of theatre.
Runs until October 21st, 7 p.m. Booking at (01) 878 7222. Reviews of the Dublin Theatre Festival are available this year on the website of The Irish Times, ireland.com
