The feeling was of a culture searching for its bearings at a time of change, using old landmarks to map the terrain we now inhabit, writes Fintan O'Toole
If one show was emblematic of the year in Irish theatre it was Mark Doherty's Trad, commissioned by Galway Arts Festival and later staged at Dublin Theatre Festival. Doherty's deftly-told tale of an ancient man and his very old son looking for the latter's lost boy, himself now 70, is, as the title suggests, a fable about tradition in a mad place, the fractured shards of memory and invention that nevertheless give some meaning to who we are.
As a metaphor for where Irish theatre is now, trying to make sense of the present with the help of a past that is just as disturbed, it couldn't have been better placed than up against the Abbey's centenary.
Although my own engagement with the theatrical year was itself somewhat fragmentary (I was away for much of it, writing a book), it did seem obvious that this was a time of retrospection. Whether by design or, more probably, by serendipity, the backward glance was much more common than the steady engagement with contemporary realities. The common feeling was that of a culture searching for its bearings at a time of change, trying to look again at the old landmarks in the hope that they might help us to map the strange terrain we now inhabit. The hopeful sign was that what might have been a collective exercise in nostalgia instead produced a lively quest for new forms.
If we were told, in the abstract, that a whole year would pass without a single significant new Irish play set in the present, the conclusion would be that Irish theatre has become a museum of dead exhibits with little to say to contemporary audiences. It might seem that, a century after the foundation of the Abbey, with its high ambition to reflect a vigorous and distinctive national life, the time had come to write its epitaph. Yet it didn't feel like that. Paradoxically, there is nothing more up to the moment in Irish life than the need to look back and try to take stock of where we are and how we've got here. In its current obsession with history, Irish theatre is being strangely contemporary.
There was something almost thrilling, for example, in sitting in the Peacock watching Beauty In A Broken Place, Colm Tóibín's witty, engaging and oddly moving reflection on the passionate conflict generated by Sean O'Casey's The Plough And The Stars in 1926, knowing that upstairs, in the National Theatre boardroom, another crisis was unfolding in the institution. There may have been an element of the mock-heroic about the connection. The desultory attempt of the likes of Ulick O'Connor to generate a row about Tóibín's play may have brought to mind Marx's dictum about everything in history happening twice, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. But there was also a peculiar reassurance that the legacy of Lady Gregory and her friends still has the capacity to generate arguments.
There were, too, some powerful theatrical reminders that the energies that gathered around the early Abbey were not the stuff of conservative traditions. To see Garry Hynes's splendid Druid productions of The Tinker's Wedding and The Well Of The Saints, and Marie Mullen's superb performances in both, was to be forced to confront the sheer wildness of Synge's imagination. Conall Morrison's brilliant freeing from oblivion of George Fitzmaurice's The Dandy Dolls, at the Abbey, had a similar effect. A short, intense, fabulously deranged play about a man obsessed with making dolls and devouring live poultry, it suggested, in Morrison's richly inventive production, that the 21st-century avant-garde is a lot more timid than that of the early 20th.
This sense that the past is not so much another country as a parallel and rather loopy universe was also enacted in two of the most enjoyable new plays of the year. In Rough Magic's delightful and amazingly adept venture into the musical, Improbable Frequency, Arthur Riordan's cool wit and shapely lyrics put manners on a madcap plot about British and German spies in wartime Dublin and imagined the city as a rogue atom in which the unlikely particles of history, sex and physics spun and collided.
Michael West's often exhilarating collaboration with Corn Exchange, Dublin By Lamplight, conceived an alternative 1904 in which elements of the imaginations of Yeats, Maud Gonne, Wilde, Joyce, O'Flaherty and O'Casey are stillborn amid a chaos of calamities. It may not be accidental that both shows had trouble finding an ending, as if their authors couldn't quite figure out where the Irish past leads, but the skill and fun of the journeys were remarkably cheering.
History, after all, still overlaps with current affairs and thus shares the uncertainties of the present moment. It was significant that two plays that might be called socially realistic, Dermot Bolger's From These Green Heights, at Axis, and Jim O'Hanlon's Pilgrims In The Park, were measuring the distance between the past and the present, in the first case through a dramatic history of Ballymun and in the second through a look back at the papal visit of 1979.
It was striking that two of the best new plays dealt with the Northern Ireland conflict in a manner that suggested a kind of delayed shock. The banal and terrifying intimacies of the IRA were exposed in both Defender Of The Faith, Stuart Carolan's powerful family drama, at the Peacock, and Macdara Vallely's Peacefire, a fierce, funny and ultimately devastating one-man play about a Craigavon joyrider.
Gerard Mannix Flynn's cool, controlled and monumentally brave James X project, which reached its culmination in a multimedia show for Dublin Theatre Festival, deals with a different manifestation of organised violence - the abuse of a child by the Church and the State - but it had a similar sense of a past that remains alive because it has not been confronted and acknowledged.
It may be that Irish theatre, as much as Irish society, has to sort out its relationship to history before it can move on. In showing that it can do so with intelligence, imagination and courage, it suggested that, for all its focus on the past, 2004 might be a good year for the future.
