By John Pancake
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 26, 2007
We were numb.
My daughter and I had been mesmerized by a play at Dublin's Peacock Theatre. Ninety-five minutes. Bare stage. Three characters. Dark, hilarious, grotesque, violent, poetic, surreal, passionate, horrifying. Written and directed by the brilliant young Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe, "Terminus" weaves together the stories of a young woman, her estranged mother and a serial killer all coming to the end of the line, not one in a nice way.
After the lights came up, we wobbled to the nearest pub, the Flowing Tide.
The barman took in our glassy-eyed expressions.
"Ah," he said, "we've been to the Peacock tonight, have we?"
* * *
This city doesn't have the arrogant majesty of London or New York or the crenulated grandeur of Venice or St. Petersburg. But few cities can match Dublin in one department: spellbinding new plays. The settings may be Irish, but the themes -- love, hate, dreams, the inescapable past, fear of the future -- are universal. It's wildly original stuff:
* A murderer too crazy for the Irish Republican Army finds his favorite cat has been murdered.
* A traveling faith healer wrestles with the notion that he may not be phony.
* A tragedy that is set near something called the Bog of Cats.
Though Ireland has only 4 million people, fewer than greater Washington, it has spawned some of the theater's giants: Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. But never mind history; there are more than a dozen Irish writers creating new plays right now. Six or eight of them are among the finest dramatists in the world.
American theatergoers know that. They regularly stumble across smart Irish plays in theaters on this side of the Atlantic. But stalking these dramas in their native habitat requires a trip to Dublin. And this is the perfect time to make a plan.
The reason is the Dublin Theatre Festival. The theater scene here is normally small but intense. On a weekend in the fall or winter, there may be no more than four or five plays worth seeing.
That changes during the festival. This year 33 productions take the stage between Sept. 27 and Oct. 14. This is the 50th anniversary of the festival -- which claims to be the oldest in the English-speaking world -- and the pickings are particularly rich, says Artistic Director Loughlin Deegan.
'Sense of Danger'What is it about Irish plays?
"We are part of an oral tradition where the poet was part of any local community," says Fiach Mac Conghail, director of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theater. "We look to writers to make sense of what is happening."
The Abbey, founded in 1904 by the poet and playwright W.B. Yeats and others, has been wrapped up in the republic's identity since the beginning. Seven actors from the Abbey participated in the famous Easter uprising against British rule in 1916; one was killed.
Fintan O'Toole, the sharp-tongued culture critic at the Irish Times, notes that quite a number of the leaders of the uprising had written plays ("usually pretty bad") themselves.
"Theater became the form of expression in which, for good and ill, the nation debated itself. Ireland needed this public forum in which it could play with what Ireland meant. It was central to the public world, not just a form of entertainment."
In 1907, for example, John Millington Synge staged his "The Playboy of the Western World" at the Abbey. Young Christy Mahon wanders into Flaherty's tavern and tells how he killed his tyrant dad by driving a spade into his skull. Christy's an instant hero. The barmaid falls for him. It was a savagely funny takedown of rural Catholic morality.
Dublin's response? Riots.
Folks here are serious about theater, even comedy. No moon-June-swoon musicals. O'Toole, previously theater critic at the New York Daily News for three years, thinks you are more likely to encounter plays trying to address public questions in Dublin than in New York, even though the Manhattan scene is exponentially bigger.
"In New York, the plays are either meant as private entertainment or they're very sexual," he says. "Dublin theater has a very communal urge. The other thing that's quite different is the extent of new work. In three years in New York I saw half a dozen significant new plays. The role of the new play here is extraordinarily important."
All that experimentation gives Irish theater a certain "sense of danger," he says. What Dublin doesn't have, he admits, is the depth of acting talent you find in New York. Although the best actors are as good as any in the world, those playing the middle roles are not as good as the actors in those roles in the United States. Still, Irish actors have a lot of character.
"Their very specific personality hasn't been trained out of them" at acting schools, O'Toole says.
A Recent InventionDublin has two famous theater companies, the Abbey and the Gate. The Abbey's second, smaller theater, the Peacock, often stages experimental plays such as "Terminus." For the theater festival, it is presenting the Irish premiere of Marina Carr's "The Woman and the Scarecrow," in which a dying mother of eight looks back on her life. It includes the very Irish line: "Happiness! Everyone thinks they have a God-given right to it. Sure it's only a recent invention of the Sunday papers."
The Gate has a reputation as the more cosmopolitan of the two, though the distinction is blurring. For the festival, it's doing Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," adapted by Irish playwright Brian Friel.
A number of promising smaller companies -- Rough Magic, Corn Exchange, Pan Pan, Bedrock and CoisCeim Dance Theatre -- perform at various spaces around town. (All have Web sites.)
These days, what may be the country's most remarkable theater is not in Dublin. It's Galway's tiny Druid Theatre. Getting there means a three-hour drive or a four-hour train ride. But visiting the country's rugged west coast can be an adventure. And plenty of hotels and guesthouses will put you up for a night. Regulars say there's always some fun -- "a bit of craic" (say "crack") -- at the Galway pubs after a Druid show.
The Druid's director is highly regarded Garry Hynes, who collected a Tony for the Broadway production of Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane." During the theater festival, the Druid is coming to Dublin. Hynes is staging Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night." James Cromwell ("The Queen," "Babe," "L.A. Confidential") takes on the monumental role of James Tyrone in this story of the sodden wreckage of an Irish American family.
Dramatic TigerFor a long time, the stereotypical Irish script simmered with people hating each other in the kitchen.
And when you think about it, why shouldn't these plays sop up the country's bile? After all, aren't the Irish working in a tongue forced down their throats on the tip of an English bayonet?
But the rural character of Irish drama is changing, because Irish society itself has jackknifed. For years, poverty and famine ruled. People couldn't wait to leave. But in the past two decades, tech companies have flourished and the economy has metamorphosed into the "Celtic Tiger."
It's one of the fastest-growing countries in Europe, full of Indian IT workers, Polish plumbers, Turkish laborers, Spanish telemarketers and African traders.
Now that's part of the theater, too. For the festival, the Abbey is reimagining Synge's "Playboy" retooled by Irish writer Roddy Doyle (the 1991 film "The Commitments" is based on his novel) and Nigerian-born Bisi Adigun, who founded an African theater company here.
This time it's set in a Dublin pub, not a rural tavern. And Christy Mahon has morphed into Nigerian refugee Christopher Malomo, who whacked his old man not with a spade but with a pestle used for pounding yams.
Actors in PotsMark O'Rowe also probes the entrails of the Celtic Tiger.
His is a dysfunctional, urban Ireland. Two scenes in "Terminus" involve people having sex (after a fashion) on the arm of a construction crane high above Dublin. Before things sort themselves out, you've experienced two homicides, a fatal accident, a worm-riddled antihero and a man who sells his soul so that he can sing "Wind Beneath My Wings" and hit the high note just like Bette Midler.
It's a series of interlocking monologues written in a shuddering, syncopated, loose-limbed rhyming verse. (Critic O'Toole rates the playwright's linguistic skills "astounding.") The characters stay put, each in a pool of spotlight on a bare stage facing the audience, spinning a tale of flying demons, gyrating angels, a bloody bar fight and a plunge from a 25-story crane.
Irish playwrights have been using monologues to tell their stories for more than 100 years. It's a tradition that goes back to W.B. Yeats and Beckett, who joked that he'd like to put the actors in pots so they wouldn't dash about and detract from the exquisitely crafted words.
"A lot of people complain about the monologue form, saying it isn't really theater," O'Rowe says. "And maybe they're right. There's an element of stand-up there and maybe a literary novelistic thing going on, too. For me, I just like the immediacy and connection of actors speaking directly to an audience. Also, specifically with 'Terminus,' there was so much story to tell and so much fantastical stuff going on, that performing it simply through language seemed like the logical choice. Which might beg the question, why didn't I write it as a book? The only answer I can give to that one is that I like seeing my stuff performed on the stage."
His rationale may come as close as anything else to explaining why so many brilliant Irish writers are writing plays.
John Pancake is arts editor of The Washington Post.
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