Take a landmark Russian verse novel, a Fair City actor and a year's worth of research, and what do you get? Peter Crawley goes to Bray to find out
The next time you decide to fight a pistol duel - particularly if you are following early 19th-century Russian convention - please heed this modest advice. Although the rules clearly state that whoever fires first must not change his position (and it's always "his"), thus becoming a sitting duck, your chances are still far, far better if you shoot first.
Take the example of Eugene Onegin, jaded fop and philanderer, womaniser and charlatan, and, as luck would have it, the fictitious central character in the first great work of Russian literature. Drawn reluctantly into just such a duel (through an unfortunate series of misunderstandings), Onegin and his best friend met one day for a lyrical showdown: "A span of five more steps they went, slow-gaited, and Lensky, left eye closing. Aimed - but just then Eugene's pistol flamed . . . The clock of doom had struck as fated; and the poet, without a sound, let fall his pistol on the ground." Such was the sad fate of made-up poet Vladimir Lensky; the first person ever to die in Russian iambic tetrameter.
Now consider the fate of his creator, the poet, novelist, playwright and revolutionary, Aleksandr Pushkin, who fought a real-life duel to defend his wife's virtue - although historians surmise that his wife's virtue had long since surrendered.
Pushkin did manage to shoot, but not before he had been mortally wounded. He died two days later, a cuckold, a fool, and a laughing stock. Events repeat themselves, to paraphrase his countryman, Karl Marx; the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But while Pushkin's death lacked rhyme and reason, his legacy lives on with a small Wicklow theatre group who, quite similarly, just can't resist a challenge.
In a wide, open rehearsal space on the second floor of Bray's Town Council offices, Aleksandr Pushkin is preparing to fight another duel - this time with his erstwhile comrade and poet Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, who has dared to criticise Pushkin's work.
This, however, is Eugene Onegin: The Roadshow, Martin Murphy's exhaustive literary-adaptation-cum-biographical drama of Pushkin's tortuous life story, funnelled into the shape of his most famous work, for Murphy's new company sOMETHING dIFFERENT. And yes, I'm afraid that's how they write it.
As Pushkin, Seamus Moran seems a world away from Mike, the long-suffering, tousle-haired heart-throb he plays on Fair City. Today, for instance, his smile comes easily, his gestures are loose-limbed and expansive, and he preens his newly sprouted mutton chops whenever Pushkin is basking in the glow of his self-regard. Which, in this scene, is a lot.
As rehearsals continue in a circle marked out on the floor with red tape, Moran asks a question about the text: is Pushkin's poem entitled Liberty, An Ode or An Ode to Liberty? Actually, depending on which version you read, answers his co-performer, producer, playwright and director, Martin Murphy, it's both.
IT'S TEMPTING TO see Eugene Onegin: The Roadshow as Martin Murphy's own ode to liberty. An unapologetically obscure subject for a play, delivered in an unconventional, gameshow-themed style of performance, it frees Murphy from the audience-tailored demands of educational theatre - a field he had worked in as artistic director of TEAM theatre for seven years.
"I read Eugene Onegin about five years ago," he says, "and quite soon I thought it would be very interesting and very challenging to try it as a piece for the theatre."
Murphy, a resident of Bray for the past five years, was inspired to undertake the production to furnish a local community with original and ambitious theatre. Why go to the city, he reasoned, when there was a perfectly good theatre and a perfectly good audience at his doorstep?
"It was only when I started looking into Pushkin's life that whole parallels between his life and the people in Eugene Onegin became apparent," says Murphy, "and not just because he was using people from his own life, but because, to a certain extent, there was spooky prefiguring of stuff that would later happen to him."
This is less about Pushkin's ill-fated pursuits as a duellist and more about his artistic pursuits as a dualist. Pushkin may have embedded himself in the rhythmic folds of Onegin as the poem's narrator, but it is an idealised self-portrait. In Murphy's voluminous adaptation, he has united the two Pushkins: the self-serving narrator and the thornier reality. The result is that the play - in his estimation - is 30 per cent Onegin and 70 per cent Pushkin.
It is, Murphy accepts, a particularly demanding balance for an audience. "It's about a Russian writer that people wouldn't know of," he reasons, "and it's talking very much about concepts. It's not just about a family in dispute or about a lost love or something like that. It's about asking what is the role of an artist in society?"
Murphy probes that concept in two ways; on one hand the limits of free artistic expression in a global culture - where reprinting Danish cartoons can lead to fatal Muslim riots - and, on the other, the pressure to dumb down challenging content to make it more broadly accessible.
The gameshow format, however, is about as dumb as you can down, and Murphy admits it is designed to let more people engage with such ideas. "It's trying to do that in as playful a way as possible," he says. "It's also, dramaturgically, a satisfactory way of melding Eugene Onegin and Pushkin's life, because, eventually, it's all about entertainment."
PUSHKIN'S PROBLEM, AS Murphy sees it, is that eventually his persona became bigger than his art, making Pushkin the first victim of a tsarist celebrity culture. "In the same way that reality TV becomes personality-driven," Murphy notes ruefully, "all the promotion around art revolves around the personal side of it." Not that Murphy was shy to court Fair City's Seamus Moran for the lead role, nor has he proven slow to advertise the fact.
"I guess I just got lured into it," Moran, a gently spoken and unceasingly honest actor, half sighs. "But I fought against it." Having just finished playing Sir Toby Belch for Classic Stage Ireland while also filming his soap opera, Moran shied from the play, intimating that there were certain suggested dates when he wouldn't be available. Murphy decided that he wasn't too keen on those dates either. Moran said his schedule was tight. Murphy said they could work around it. Eventually Murphy said it came down to whether Moran was committed and energetic enough to take on the challenge.
"That was like throwing down a gauntlet," smiles Moran. He agreed to duel. And though Moran - like pretty much everybody - had never read Eugene Onegin, he was better equipped to play the part of Pushkin than most. Because for all its misunderstandings, rebukes, affairs and duels to the death, Pushkin's love life is only about 30 per cent as complicated as Mike Gleeson's.
Pushkin, Moran and Murphy agree, is not a sympathetic character. "On one level he really didn't care about anybody," says Moran. "Except himself and his art. Possibly. But there was no real malice in anything he did. He had that artistic temperament; he didn't have the time to get involved with the complicated side of human relationships."
"Poetry is above morality," Pushkin announces in Murphy's play, and it becomes his dubious character note. Having spent about a year writing his adaptation, Murphy had few qualms about putting such words in Pushkin's mouth. In fact, as he considers the role of the artist through Pushkin ("Being an artist means never having to say you're sorry," goes one line, with more than a hint of irony) Murphy talks of the Russian romantic as though he was a friend, or a sparring partner.
"I do feel I know the writer," Murphy admits. "I don't feel that I necessarily agree with him." Pushkin, get your gun.
Eugene Onegin: the Roadshow previews Fri May 5 and runs from Sat May 6 to Sat May 13 at The Mermaid Theatre, Bray, Co Wicklow