Stage Struck

How far can you push an audience before the audience pushes back? Or, to put it another way, what will it take to make the theatre outrageous again?, asks Peter Crawley.

One hundred years since The Playboy of The Western World, a play so incendiary it had to be performed under police protection, the only thing riotous about Bisi Adibgun and Roddy Doyle's new version at The Abbey is its comedy.

What was truly dangerous about JM Synge's play was not so much its grinning view of patricide as a heroic little jape, or even its reckless references to underwear. What was really subversive was its understanding of where its audience's sensitivities were most raw. Actually, the riots were a slow burner, at first a disappointing and hissing end to a fractious opening night, which, over the course of a week of flame-stoking, turned into one of the most hilarious confrontations in theatre history.

Between the less-than-ideological fisticuffs and the phalanx of pissed Trinity students singing God Save The King, the whole affair sounds a hair's breadth from self-parody. When Yeats made an impassioned plea from the stage that the play should be at least heard, someone in the audience began to play a bugle. Now that's entertainment.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that, during a lengthy period of the nation's history, rioting was as essential to theatre-going as coughing up a lung during the quiet bits. The riots that met Seán O'Casey's The Plough and The Stars, where the stage was pelted with pennies and coal, also took a while to brew. (Who sets out to a show with a lump of coal?)

They were so much an act of political pageantry that O'Casey even wrote about watching two shows: "One on the stage, the other in the auditorium". Yeats even addressed the thing as a regular occurrence: "I thought you had tired of this, but you have disgraced yourselves again."

Flash-forward to this year and disgrace is much more muted and a lot less fun. You can never recreate the conditions of 1907 or 1926, when Ireland was hyper-sensitive to any perceived slights to vulnerable ideals, or when theatre was a popular entertainment for all classes, who did not automatically hush when the lights came down.

Recently the biggest kerfuffle over a stage show came with BLACKland, from Hungary's Kretakor theatre company, a production that featured nudity, simulated sexual humiliation and onstage urination.

"Obviously it was a commentary on torture and a reference to Abu Ghraib," reported one disgruntled audience member who was compelled to share her unhappiness with Joe Duffy, "but I just felt it didn't need to be quite so graphic and degrading." I agreed completely: that's exactly how I feel about Abu Ghraib.

But there's a sad retreat in these predictable, middle-class tut-tuts at bodily functions and "private parts". Because if theatre doesn't properly outrage an audience, can it even hope to engage it? I don't predict a riot in The Abbey anytime soon. But is it too much to ask that the next time someone is truly miffed by what happens onstage, they return the next day with a bugle?