Passion Machine's 'Diarmuid and Gráinne' has more in common with 'The Sopranos' than previous versions of the tale. Patsy McGarry watches rehearsals at their Mountjoy Square base and director Paul Mercier tells him about a modern gangster story.
Such a fine old house. And since 1798. They say it is the biggest on Dublin's Mountjoy Square. Built at a time of wine and poses, with its broad stairways, Millennium Spire-high windows, and ceilings above the snow line, number 27 seems more suited to rehearsals of foppish Restoration drama than the more gritty realism of the Passion Machine's work.
Built when the Great Streets of the few kept the Little Streets of the many in their place, it is now a shadow of its former glory. But that glory still peeks through a penumbra stained by age, enhanced here and there by the loving care of the Passion Machine and its Pioneer Club owners.
That the Heritage Council recently refused a grant to assist with the meagre cost of paint for its elegant old walls, or the preservation of its frilly, frivolous plasterwork seems unbelievable. But it did. Leaving it to The Passion Machine and the Pioneer Club to continue to do what they can from resources they do not have.
The weather was such as met O'Neill, O'Donnell and their doomed warriors en route to defeat at Kinsale in 1603. By Mountjoy. Its "steely, arrowy speary sleet pierceth one through and through. Pierceth one to the very bone". The Passion Machine general manager, Anne Gately, stood on the steps of number 27 , as exposed to the merciless elements as Lear on the heath.
Up the airy stairway we went and arrived at a lofty room with a mantelpiece full of trophies, memories of Passion Machine triumphs past. From 1985, '86, '92, '94, '97, '98, '98, '98, '99, Cork, Edinburgh, and Dublin have they come, trailing clouds of glory.
All tributes to that distinctive brand of robust dialogue, gritty wit, and exhuberant physicality which has always marked the Passion Machine as utterly unique and true.
They have brought us Drowning, Wasters, Studs, Brownbread, Home, War, Buddleia, Kitchensink, Massive Damages, We Ourselves - and now Diarmuid and Gráinne. They have also brought us Roddy Doyle, Brendan Gleeson, and Paul Mercier, to name a few. No mean Machine.
In a large room downstairs Paul Mercier directes the rehearsal of Diarmuid and Gráinne. A troubled Fionn (MacCumhaill) swung a golf club with an artlessness that suggested he was not to the manner born, as he pondered on the emptiness of "power without class". And "class" is what this most successful gangster/outsider craves, like most gurriers-made-good-through-bad. And indeed just plain gurriers-made-good too.
He is in "the pharmaceutical business" but, despite his great wealth, has come to realise there are things, such as respectability, that money cannot buy.
So he decides to marry it, moving "from outlaw to in-law", through wedlock to Gráinne, daughter of Mr King (Cormac) Mac Airt.
It is clear this is no ordinary interpretation of Diarmuid and Gráinne. It has more in common with Bonnie and Clyde, The Sporanos, The Godfather - with its strong resonances of the modern urban/Dublin gangster world - than with the heroic tales of old mythologies. It may be the Fianna, but not as we knew them, Jim.
The pace is furious, the words - though vernacular - are frequently neither of the first or second official languages, and this inventiveness is expressed with superb wit and imagination. So much so that, despite their intimate familiarity with the content, the cast members still cackle at lines. That and the fact that it was a nominee for Best Production in the recent ESB/Irish Times Theatre Awards.
Like most good things in Ireland, it has arrived via the West. An unusual move for the Passion Machine, which has been so identified with Dublin and in particular with the city's Northside. Remember The Commitments and that line - "the Irish are the blacks of Europe and the Northsiders are the blacks of Dublin"? It was a question of "soul". And pride.
Lines such as that brought people into Dublin's theatres in the Passion Machine's heyday who had probably never been to plays or places like the SFX before. A whole new audience, boldly going where few northsiders of their generation had gone before.
For a time there that crackling fizz, that laughter-to-the-point-of-exhaustion, seemed to have disappeared from Passion Machine productions. But it's back with a bang in Diarmuid and Gráinne. And there is also a revival of Studs to look forward to. It opens at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on May 22nd.
Diarmuid and Gráinne began its young life last November at Taidhbhearc na Gaillimhe which, by coincidence, was opened in the 1920s by a Mícheál Mac Liammóir production of the same work, as Gaeilge.
It would be safe to say that language is not the only difference between the two. The nearest the Passion Machine production comes to the high artifice of the drawingroom style so favoured by Micheál is the room in which the it was being rehearsed. The Importance of Being Oscar this is not. More Reservoir Dogs.
But, as Paul Mercier insisted, it is "a truthful re-telling of the story, transposed to the present". It is not a send-up. He pointed out that the Fianna of old were tough guys on the margins of a society "obsessed with violence" and who had "a bizarre morality". All of which was later made respectable by the Christianisation of these old myths, which versions had Oisín meet St Patrick and King Conor Mac Nessa die in an earthquake caused by the death of Christ on the cross.
Some 20 years ago, the notion - what if this was a gangster story, maybe even the first road movie? - crossed Paul Mercier's mind. With Fionn as a gangster and Gráinne as a latter-day femme fatale.
In writing Diarmuid and Gráinne, he has followed the original narrative closely, placing at its centre the struggle within gangster Fionn between a hunger for respectability and an irresistible tendency to fall into old ways. Add in Gráinne, with her wicked charms and power over men, and you have a mix that promises combustion.
The production has already been to Ennis, Enniskillen, Armagh, Cork, Newbridge, entertaining all with some new mythologies of today's Ireland - in general the mythologies of recognisable Dublin gangsters trying to live up to their mythic nicknames. And all the while the line between crime and myth thins into a virtual reality which becomes, for them, a glamourous ongoing entertainment.
The production has been financially supported by Baileys and John McColgan of Abhann/Riverdance.
"If we opened in Dublin something would have happened to it. We would lose the wider constituency," said Paul Mercier, again pursuing a new audience. So it has arrived in the capital seasoned on good country air, and as solid and shiny, it seems, as a blackthorn stick.
Paul Mercier used to teach Irish, as well as English, in Kilbarrack. His affection for the first official language is reflected in his respect for the integrity of the original Diarmuid agus Gráinne story. He refused to even consider changing its title to the more colloquial Dermo and Gráinne. He even insists on the fada over the 'a' in Gráinne.
He laments the unpopularity of the language with so many, especially his former pupils, one of whom has since rediscovered it and now sends his own children to a Gaelscoil. This resistance among pupils to an Gaeilge he attributes to what they perceive as the lack of relevance of the language. And, though the hated compulsory element had been removed, a certain imperative still remained because of the higher points allowed for Irish in exams, which sustained a force-fed mentality.
It was an attitude which he felt could be summed up in the one word: "Peig". A poor woman "who never harmed anyone" yet who was "damned by a generation" because of their attitude to Irish, was how he described her.
He recalled a school trip to Dún Chaoin in Kerry where Peig is buried and how "there was nothing but derision and scorn". She was Kathleen Ní Houlihán become old hag.
Not so Gráinne, the would-be "star" who, like Helen of Troy, was another beauty destined to place men faoi dheasa and became in the process a vehicle for the destruction of a world. While poor Peig's only crime was to live long and die with one.
Diarmuid and Gráinne opens tonight at Dublin's Olympia Theatre, for 18 performances. Studs is at the Gaiety Theatre from May 21st to June 22nd