Man Booker Prize 2013 Predictions

So this evening the winner of the 2013 Booker Prize will be announced. I thought I’d take a detour from the theatre-related posts to speculate about who might win. We’ll know tomorrow whether I should stick with writing about Irish drama…

It’s a very strong shortlist this year – I’ve read five of the six books and think any of them could potentially win – and any of them would be a deserving winner too.

The only one I haven’t read yet is We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo. There’s no significant reason for the omission – it’s been difficult to find a copy in an Irish bookstore, and the kindle edition is relatively expensive – so I just haven’t got round to it yet.

The main Irish interest is in Colm Toibin’s Testament of Mary, which was first produced as a play called Testament for Landmark, directed by Garry Hynes and starring Marie Mullen (whose photo from the production I’m pasting below). I admired the performance by Mullen in that production, but came out of the Project thinking that it wasn’t a play – an opinion shared by many who saw it on Broadway when Fiona Shaw took on the role.

The book was far more satisfying. Toibin has created a voice for Mary, the mother of Jesus – and that voice is essentially of one tone throughout the entire novel: she is a woman recounting with horror, despair and rage the death of her son. That tone builds in intensity as the novel progresses but on stage it was a bit, well, monotonous: it offers performers nowhere to come from or go to in delivery. As a novel it is tightly packed, written with discipline and economy, and utterly persuasive. It may be difficult to love it, but it’s certainly difficult to fault it too.

 

I think Toibin could win in much the same way that Julian Barnes won for Sense of an Ending (when he should have won for Arthur and George) or in the way that Ian McEwan won for Amsterdam (when he should have won for Enduring Love) – there is a sense that he’s such a major author that a Booker is now overdue, and could certainly have been justified for The Master and Brooklyn. I don’t mean that to disparage The Testament of Mary in making that statement, but instead am just suggesting that Toibin’s track record may come into play when the judges deliberate.

And the favourite for the prize is Jim Crace’s Harvest, which is similar in some ways to Toibin’s book, in that it’s a first-person narrative from someone who’s recounting horrible events that he witnessed in the past. And it’s also similar in the sense that it’s written by someone who could be awarded a Booker not only on the merits of this novel but also for his career to date.

Harvest reads like a historical novel but could just as easily be set in some sort of dystopian future, exploring what happens when a family of three strangers arrive at a country village at a time when the community’s lifestyle is about to be altered irretrievably. It’s paced like a thriller, but has a sense of inevitability that is also quite tragic. The perspective is decidedly contemporary – it reminded me somewhat of Ronan Bennett’s Havoc In Its Third Year. This is a very good book, but I wonder how the judges will respond to the fact that it’s told only from one perspective – which means that most characters are described only superficially. I thought this added to the sense of looming disaster, but when compared with the other novels, Crace’s can seem slightly more limited in its characterisation.

This is most obviously the case when Harvest is compared with  Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. It’s a very long novel about the New Zealand gold-rush – and again it’s paced quite like a thriller, with a series of mysteries about a murder, an inheritance, a case of fraudulent identities and so on. It reminded me a little of Wilkie Collins, in that it has the tightly-plotted quality of a triple-decker Victorian novel – but it also has an uncanny tone that seems closer to the twentieth century. That said, fans of the TV show Deadwood will also find much here that they enjoy (aside from the bad language, which is absent here). Whereas Crace and Toibin’s novels give us only one perspective, Catton moves through several distinctive characters.  I thought the novel suffered slightly from using a structure based on signs of the zodiac – at times, it felt as though the storytelling was serving the structure rather than the other way around. But it’s a very entertaining book, and would become a popular winner, I think.

I didn’t much enjoy  Ruth Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being. It offers a split narrative, with one part of the story told by a Japanese teenager being bullied in school, and the other about a novelist called Ruth who finds the Japanese teenager’s diary and tries to understand what happened to her. The main story about the teenager is very compelling and it’s written in an appealing, mildly Holden Caulfield-esque tone. But I thought the book was trying a bit too hard to be self-consciously postmodern: we have the fact that Ozeki gives the protagonist her own name, inviting questions about whether the story is true or not – and we also have the fact that the authenticity of the main narrative is always uncertain. There is some interesting material in there about the relationship between Buddhism and postmodernism, both of which are seen as involving the embracing of uncertainty. There is also a nice image of a story being written on blank pages within the cover of one of Proust’s novels. And if you like Murakami, you will probably enjoy this too. But  I was disappointed by it: when I get to the end of a novel I like to feel that the investment was worth something – so if there is to be uncertainty or indeterminacy, that feeling of not knowing needs to matched by a sense that I’ve learned or gained something. Instead I felt slightly like my time had been wasted.

The last book I’ve read is The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. The blurb on the back says this is about two brothers, but that’s only accurate about the first part of the novel. We’re set up with a story of two twins, whose paths diverge – one moves to America for an academic career, and the other becomes involved in radical politics in India. In the second half of the novel, a similar duality is established between a mother and daughter, both living in America and both taking contrasting paths. So that means the book overall is split between two males and two females. Where I would be critical of the structure of The Luminaries and A Tale for the Time Being, I thought this was very finely balanced. Like the Toibin novel, it’s also written with great care and precision, and like the Crace and Catton it’s also a very well paced story.

As I write above, Crace is the favourite for the prize, but I am going to suggest that Lahiri will be the winner. Mainly this is because I think it’s the best novel on the shortlist – it has everything that the other novels have, but is able to make those achievements come together. So I think it should win.

Another context, however, is that the Booker will be open to American authors from now on. Some might see that as a reason to think that Crace will win – since this is the last time there will be no Americans on the list, there might be an impulse to give the award to a Briton. Well, Crace would be a deserving winner, but I think the fact that Lahiri was put on the shortlist in the first place shows that the judges aren’t really thinking too much about nationality (up to now, she’s mainly been seen as an American author).

Overall though the most important thing is that the shortlist is good and that it’s bringing to the public’s attention a number of novelists who are relatively early in their careers. I worry slightly about whether that will continue to happen when the prize is open to American authors –  one of the things I’ve always liked about the Booker is that it gives exposure to authors who might not otherwise have received it. From an Irish point of view, the Booker has had a major impact on the careers of Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright too, and it’s difficult to see whether such successes will continue.

But that’s an argument for next year.

Frank McGuinness’s _The Hanging Gardens_ at Dublin Theatre Festival 2013

Frank McGuinness’s Hanging Gardens at the Abbey is both devastating and elating: it is not so much heart-breaking as heart-battering, but despite its intensity it’s a play that needs to be seen. This would be true if only because it features five of Ireland’s best actors: Cathy Belton, Barbara Brennan, Niall Buggy, Declan Conlon, and Marty Rea. And one of them – Buggy – gives a performance that I know I’m going to remember for a very long time.

As the Abbey’s PR has stated many times, this is McGuinness’s first new play at the Abbey since 1999. It’s also his first premiere in Ireland since Gates of Gold in 2002. And since then all of his original plays have premiered in England, many of them remaining unproduced here in Ireland. There’s been no better example than McGuinness of the serious problem in our theatre at the moment – which is that many of the best Irish plays of the last 15-20 years have premiered in London, and many of them remain completely unknown in this country. McGuinness’s There Came A Gypsy Riding, for example, should be celebrated as a great and important Irish play. But almost no-one here knows it.

So it’s great to see him back on an Irish stage with an original play.

McGuinness’s works often feature a character so well drawn that he or she  threatens to overpower the rest of the play – from  Piper in Observe the Sons of Ulster, to Dido in Carthaginians, to Rima in Dolly West’s Kitchen. Located somewhere between Christy Mahon (the outsider figure who transforms an environment) and Falstaff (a supporting character so vivid that he dwarfs the main protagonists), McGuinness’s unruly strangers are always vulgar, joyous, and disruptive.

There’s another such character here – the figure of Sam Grant, an aging writer who, as the play begins, is a subject of intense concern to his wife and three adult children – all of whom wonder how to cope with Sam’s increasingly uncontrollable dementia.

As played by Buggy, Sam is mischievous and vicious, terrified and childlike, at turns enthralling and appalling. He harasses, bullies and belittles his family – and while some of that behaviour may be explained (but not justified) by his suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, his abuse of his family has clearly been carried on over many years. As a result, none of his children has been able to form a loving relationship; none of them seems able to express the love that they all so palpably feel for their parents.

The performance by Buggy takes these varying and sometimes  contradictory states and makes them cohere. Much of that achievement is possible through his use of voice. At times his lines are delivered with a sing-song quality that contains both swagger and complacency: we sense that this is a man who has a powerful imagination but suspect that there may be an uncertainty or an insecurity in there too. At other times, Buggy’s voice is intense and full-bodied, making clear why his children seem somewhat frightened of him. Yet there is a gentleness too, a kind of mischievous waver that reveals Sam’s enjoyment of his own erudition and imagination.

The performance thus acts as a fascinating counterpoint to Owen Roe’s Lear at the Abbey earlier this year – and indeed to Paul McGann’s Undershaft in Major Barbara. Whether by accident or design, the Abbey has given us three very powerful portraits of flawed but irresistible father figures this year.

As ever with McGuinness, the risk of having such a strong character is that other roles may seem less interesting by comparison. In this play that potential problem is compounded by the fact that the three adult children are trying desperately to restrain themselves: to hold in their shock at their father’s deterioration, to resist the anger that has obviously been stored up over many years, to hold themselves together at a time when the person who has anchored them to life is leaving the world. So these are roles that demand an ability to convey a sense that there is much more going on than is evident on the surface.

That’s why you need excellent actors in the roles, and I was very impressed by the depth that Rea, Belton and Conlon added to their characters. It was fascinating to notice what the children will and won’t look at – the times when they appear to swallow down a thought or feeling – the times when they have no choice but to look away. There’s some lovely, subtle direction here from Patrick Mason.

As the matriarch of the family – and as a successful author in her own right – Barbara Brennan’s character follows in a long tradition of strong McGuinness mother figures. Like her husband, she’s full of contradictions, caring more for her garden than her children, yet appearing willing to sacrifice her own well-being for her husband. Brennan resolves those contradictions well, showing us the tension in her character’s body through a stiffness of movement and a vocal restraint that suggests that she’s only just keeping things together. This results in a very moving performance, and the creation of an intriguingly complex figure.

Becuase the play set in the garden of a Donegal house, it will immediately call to mind Brian Friel’s 1979 Aristocrats – a portrait of a family damaged by an authoritarian father-figure who, like McGuinness’s protagonist, suffers from dementia (though in Aristocrats the father appears on stage only once).

It also seems to draw on other great Irish plays. As a storyteller and beloved tormenter of his family, Sam seems to owe something to Tom Murphy’s Mommo – another artist-figure whose loss of memory drives the play forward. With its clash between two writers – one a populist success and the other a respected author – it reminded me of Friel’s massively underrated Give Me Your Answer Do! With its focus on a flawed artist-figure, it seemed to be drawing on Kilroy’s The Shape of Metal and Friel’s Faith Healer.  And with its characterisation of a family that can express love only by tearing itself apart, it occupies the emotional territory that has been mapped so rigorously by Tom Murphy in Whistle in the Dark,  Famine and The Wake.

All of this might sound as if the play is derivative or unoriginal but, on the contrary, these resemblances suggest that McGuinness is pushing his work to a new level, measuring himself against Murphy and Friel to a far greater extent than he’s ever done before. Watching the play, I felt as I did when I first saw Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce: the excitement of knowing that a writer I’d already admired had developed in a way that built on what had come before, but which was also excitingly new.

Among the things I most admired about the play is its emotional honesty. I found myself thinking several times of Shaw’s response to O’Casey’s Silver Tassie – which GBS had described as a “hell of a play – literally”.  McGuinness gives us a literal hell, unflinchingly exploring what it feels like to know that you are losing your mind, to know that you are dying. He also shows a genuine bravery in representing the attempts of a family to come to terms with the death of one of their own. So many of McGuinness’s observations feel as though they’ve been excavated from  some very personal space in his own imagination: his characters’ emotions are incoherent, chaotic, confused – and for all of those reasons feel absolutely authentic. This made the play – for me, anyway – very difficult viewing: I’ve never been quite so relieved to reach an interval as I was when I saw this. But that was because the play had captured truths that I’ve never seen represented so clearly before. The truths are uncomfortable and undeniable and necessary.

McGuinness has found a way to think about the death of a family member that seems as signficant as Robert Lepage’s Dark Side of the Moon. In that play, Lepage suggested that the loss of a parent is like occupying the far side of the moon: the earth is there but no longer visible to us – and all we see instead is the vastness of an empty, infinite space.  McGuinness does something similar, especially in the play’s final image, when he (and Mason) capture the vertiginous uncertainty that death evokes in all of us.

There’s also an important link with McGuinness’s work on The  Dead, which played at the Abbey last year. One of the ways McGuinness allowed Joyce’s short story to function on the stage was by theatricalising its use of music – and its musicality. He did that by drawing carefully from the works of Thomas Moore.

Here, McGuinness again uses music, this time featuring (of all things) a song from The Mikado half-way through the first act – which is sung by Buggy and Rea.

I’ve written a few times already about the use of music in Irish theatre – something we’ve seen in Shush by Elaine Murphy and The Night Alive by Conor McPherson already in 2013. I worry slightly about the frequency with which this technique is used – often enough now to be called a trend.

But in The Hanging Gardens, McGuinness shows how music offers the only way for father and son to be fully honest with each other. In the beauty and simplicity of the voices, this moment recalls a scene in Juno and the Paycock in which Mary and Juno sing Verdi’s “Home to Our Mountains” together – something they do so beautifully that they transcend the indignity of their environment. We sense from McGuinness’s inclusion of this song that the family have unseen levels of emotional and intellectual depth, that they have an appreciation of beauty, an attachment to each other,  a wicked sense of how to derive humour from the juxtaposition of the serious with the apparently trivial.

This scene doesn’t have the show-stopping impact that the dance in Friel’s Lughnasa had back in 1990. But as a moment that allows for an intensity of focus from the audience, McGuinness’s use of this song bears comparison with Friel’s iconic set-piece.

Both Friel’s play and McGuinness’s were directed by Patrick Mason, of course – and one of the pleasures of seeing The Hanging Gardens is to be reminded of those great nights at the Abbey in the 1990s when Mason produced or revived so many marvelous Irish plays, from Lughnasa to Observe the Sons of Ulster to Constance Wilde and By the Bog of Cats. It’s great to see Mason back directing new writing on the Abbey stage.

And as an aside let me mention that Marty Rea has a very beautiful singing voice.

None of the statements above is intended to suggest that the play is in every respect perfect. I think some viewers may find that the family’s second act resolution of their conflict happens too easily. That scene made emotional sense to me, but I think some may find it too sharp a turn in the play’s direction. And I also suspect that some may have difficulty with a long scene in the first act in which each of the four family members in turns confronts – and is upset by – the father. This sequence feels almost intolerable, not only on the grounds of realism (it eventually feels predictable –  when we see one character appearing on stage we know they are next in line for an abusive confrontation with the father),  but also because these confrontations are so  unrelenting that it becomes difficult to stay with the action. I suspected that we were intended to see the scene as (perhaps) not the real world but as a mixture of reality with Sam’s imagingings. But in any case the scene is emotionally exhausting.

Yet this is indisputably a major new Irish play, and an important moment also for McGuinness’s status within Irish drama – reaffirming  his centrality and importance to our theatre.

The production is also very well designed. Michael Pavelka’s garden set mixes the dark green of the lawn with vivid, bloody reds, producing an atmosphere of calmness that seems ready at any moment to bleed into chaos. He also places a sundial on the back wall, which, under Davy Cunnigham’s lights, causes time to shift confusingly,  adding to the strangeness and intensity of the play.  Finally, I’ve already praised Denis Clohessy’s sound designs in Streetcar Named Desire and Dusk Ahead  but I again must say how good his work  is, both in terms of his presentation of birdsong as well as incidental music.

So far the play has been reviewed once, in the Irish Times, where it received only three stars and a fairly mixed response. Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion, but I hope that such views – and in particular the three stars – don’t discourage people from going to see this. If you value playwriting that is brave and honest – if you appreciate world-class design and courageous acting – if you believe that theatre has to be painful before it can be healing – then you should see this play. Better yet, bring three or four people with you. I think we need to support this kind of work, to make sure that we don’t wait another 14 years to see a new Frank McGuinness play on the Abbey stage.

You can find out more about the play on this interesting Youtube clip from Frank McGuinness.

and this one featuring Patrick Mason

The Abbey website also has interviews with all the cast.

David Greig’s THE EVENTS – Dublin Theatre Festival 2013

In the spring of 1996, I spent a lot of time listening to Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads. I’d been a fan of Cave anyway but that album seemed to push his work on to several entirely new levels. The biblical and southern gothic allusions that had dominated his earlier music (and his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel) were there, as was his characteristically blood-curdling wit. And musically the collection seemed to fuse every genre he’d been working in up to that point, giving us something that was somewhere between folk and punk. But what was striking was the combination of those different elements: it was as if his career had been leading up to this point for years, that he was finally tying together several strands that had previously been developed separately.

The subject matter of the songs was, as the title implies, murder: according to the Wikipedia page, more than 65 killings are described across the album’s 10 tracks. Yet while they were undoubtedly morbid – vicious, in fact – they could also be funny, as in Cave’s fabulously over-the-top rendition of “Stagger Lee”. They were  sometimes beautiful too, as in “Henry Lee”, Cave’s duet with PJ Harvey. And his duet with Kylie Minogue, “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, was revelatory in all sorts of ways, bringing both singers to entirely new audiences.

The mid-1990s was a time when an excessive, even hyperbolic, sense of violence was dominating the culture. Cave’s album came out just after Sarah Kane’s Blasted and McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of Leenane appeared, for example. As a final year student at UCD during that year, I used to find myself regularly going along to see Film Soc screenings of what were then massively popular movies: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and True Romance. These plays and films used violence for a variety of reasons, but Aleks Sierz still puts it best when he describes such work  as ‘in-yer-face’. The idea behind such work was to shock the audience, to force them to pay attention, to shake them out of complacency.

That “in-yer-face” quality was one of the reasons I loved Murder Ballads. It describes the killing of people but it felt that Cave was instead murdering conventions – about what music could and should be, about the barriers between pop and supposedly more serious forms of music, about the relationship between folk traditions and rock. Violence, he showed, is embedded in our culture – not just in Tarantino movies but in everything from the Bible to Milton. He showed us that what we regard as aberrant and dangerous can actually be a lot more familiar than we might wish to acknowledge.

One morning as I was preparing to leave for college, I was listening to Cave’s album while a housemate had the TV on in a different room. I was relaxed, singing along to Cave’s music – but was then  called into the TV room where reports were starting to come in of a school massacre in Dunblane in Scotland. As many people will  remember, on that day a man arrived at a primary school in a Scottish village, carrying his own  handguns. He opened fire on a group of 5 and 6 year-old children, killing almost everyone in the class, including the teacher. He then committed suicide himself.

I was watching this news report, shocked and upset – and became aware that from the other room Cave’s “O’Malley’s Bar” was still playing – a song about a man who enters a bar and murders his fellow townspeople. The contrast between  the reality of the massacre in Scotland with the sexed-up, rocked-up narration of murder by Cave suddenly seemed horrifying.

While I have since heard different songs from Murder Ballads in many different contexts, I don’t think I have ever again listened to it the whole way through. I know – and knew – what Cave was trying to do, but I felt that his album was using the coherence of musical form to bring order and occasionally even beauty to the theme of murder. In doing that, Cave was of course following a long tradition. But in the context of the Dunblane massacre, Cave’s songs seemed at risk of making such events instead seem in some way comprehensible or even normal:  normal not in the sense of being morally right, but rather in the sense of being something that we can and should expect as part of our ordinary lives. Making something comprehensible is of course not the same thing as making it seem justified. But it no longer seemed possible to listen to that album in the same way. I’m not criticising Cave in stating this; I just found the juxtaposition of the album with the real events too disturbing to shake off.

I was thinking about all of this while watching David Greig’s new play The Events, which is running at the Peacock as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. While it was  inspired by the massacre in Norway by Anders Breivik, it also speaks to such events as Dunblane, not to mention the many horrible atrocities that have recently taken place in America. It also resonated painfully with events in Athlone last weekend, when two young girls were lured from a birthday party and sexually assaulted.

The Events asks how a community can and should survive after such an atrocity has taken place, focussing on the figure of a choir-leader called Claire (Neve McIntosh) who is one of the few survivors after her choir is attacked by a young man with a gun. She engages in a series of dialogues with other people (all played by Rudi Dharmalingam): a journalist, a politician, her psychiatrist, a friend of the murderer, her partner, and then, finally, the killer himself. Along the way, she tries to attribute responsibility, to understand the murderer’s motivations and background – to try to make sense of ‘the events’ and by doing so to assuage some of her own guilt at surviving them.

The play reaches some surprising conclusions. But it’s not giving anything away to suggest that Greig doesn’t offer his protagonist or his audience comforting answers: all we are  left with is the choice to accept our confusion and try to move on as best we can.

What makes the play especially stimulating – and this is why I was reminded of Nick Cave – is that it is performed each night with a different community choir on stage. The choir’s presence might at first seem gimmicky but it quickly becomes evident that they are carrying a great deal of the emotional power of the production, their live bodies contrasting all too painfully with the people who had been murdered in the play.

I have written before on this blog about playwrights using music to make certain emotions seem more evident – a trend evident in Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive and Elaine Murphy’s Shush, among many other examples. I am uneasy about this technique, especially when it is used by younger or less experienced writers, since it tends to be used to evoke a feeling that the dramatist ought to be able to inspire through writing (in other words, it can sometimes be a bit lazy). But in Greig’s play it works very well.

Firstly,  the choir  operates as a metaphor for community. We have a variety of people: male and female and of different ages and backgrounds and nationalities – and of course with different kinds of singing voice as well. What seems like a busy mass of individual bodies on-stage is transformed into a (literally) harmonious collective through music.  And importantly,  they are not using music to respond directly to the murders. Rather they use it as a way of asserting a shared determination to continue living – to remember and perhaps to forgive as well. So where Murder Ballads beautifies death,  The Events reminds us of the beauty of ordinary life.

In this respect, the play reminded me slightly of Karl Jenkins’s Armed Man, a mass for peace which (I believe) is very popular with choral groups around Ireland and the UK. Some of that music is militaristic and (as sometimes happens with Jenkins) a little bombastic. But the movements that deal with forgiveness and peace are often very moving, as can be heard in the “Benedictus” below (go on, click on it and listen as you read the rest of this post – you’ll enjoy it).

In other words, what impressed me about The Events is that it doesn’t try to make sense of murder. It instead says that our shared community with each other will help us to keep going when we realise that some aspects of life and death cannot be understood or explained or predicted.  Claire’s “healing” (if we can call it that) arises not because she has made sense of “the events” but instead because she has been embraced by a larger collective – who rescue her from her sense of isolation and confusion.

Strangely, this means that the play can feel somewhat under-powered. As Fintan O’Toole put it in his Irish Times column this weekend,

It is striking that Greig and [the play’s] director, Ramin Gray, more or less admit, in the form of the piece, that drama, on the scale they can manage, is not quite adequate to the task of exploring the big themes of racism, difference and decency.

I’d agree with that – I found myself surprised that Greig didn’t reach for a conclusion that was more profound or more substantial in some way. But his solution seems in some way more honest, more apt, more in keeping with the sense of helplessness that we feel when confronted with events like those in Dunblane or Utoya.

One other thought. For the play’s run at the Peacock, a different choir appears on stage at every performance. There’s a link here with Greig’s other works, and indeed with some of the things that have been done by the National Theatre of Scotland generally (this play is not produced by NTS but it has a similar approach to audience involvement).

In bringing choirs onstage, Greig is doing something similar to what he did with the brilliant Prudencia Hart, a play about Scottish folk music which is staged in pubs, performed as if everyone is at a session. So when we see the play we watch it not in a theatre but in a pub: the lights stay up, we are encouraged to buy pints, and it is all as raucous and as immersive as a good rural session would be. It’s also one of the best productions I’ve seen in the last 10 years, but that is another story.

We hear a lot in Ireland (and elsewhere) about plays being “relevant”. Too often theatre-makers and critics think that “relevant” means that we should see on stage all the bad news that we read about in the newspapers. But Greig’s Events and Prudencia Hart show a different approach to making theatre relevant: they share a knowledge that in every community in Ireland and Britain there are hundreds of people who travel out night after night to perform – in choirs, in pub sessions, in amateur drama, and in many other ways as well. One of the reasons for the vibrancy of Scottish theatre at present is that groups like the NTS have tried to connect with amateur performances – integrating them without appropriating them. They thus make theatre that is relevant to the ordinary lived experiences of such groups.

We’re not unaware of this kind of process in Ireland. One of the reasons that Louise Lowe’s work is so exciting is that it draws on the communities it depicts. And one of the reasons Macnas’s work is so inspiring is that it is a total fusion of professional and community theatre. But I still think there are lessons for us to take from plays like Prudencia and The Events – both of which show that our communities are performing in ways that could be better connected with our theatres.

On the bus back home after The Events I was working through these thoughts and decided I should give Murder Ballads another try, so I lined it up on the i-pod… I didn’t get to the end – in fact I only got to the half-way point. But I was glad to be reminded of how surprising and beautiful I had found this song when it first appeared 17 years ago:

“In A Glass Darkly” Junk Ensemble’s Dusk Ahead

Just a quick note about Junk Ensemble’s Dusk Ahead, running as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival this year…

I saw this last night in the Project, and was surprised to see that the theatre was only about three-quarters full. That seemed a pity, because it’s an excellent show, and I’m sure it would be enjoyed by anyone who sees it. So without wishing to write an advertorial, I thought it might be good to encourage others to go

Choreographed by Jessica Kennedy and Megan Kennedy, the piece is performed by five dancers who also sing and play musical instruments – so one of the things that immediately impressed me was not just the virtuosity of the performers, but also their versatility across different disciplines.

A score is played over the PA system, but it’s accompanied by a live cellist (Zoe Reardon) who sits stage-right for the duration of the performance. It quickly makes sense that the company has chosen to include that most sensuous of musical instruments on stage: this is a very passionate and (to use the word again) sensuous performance.

As the title implies, Dusk Ahead explores ideas about light and darkness, and/or sight and blindness. It’s about borderlands or (to use one of academia’s worst clichés) liminal spaces: places of transition where rules can temporarily be set aside or reinvented.

It explores ideas of sight and blindness in many ways. The performers often move blindfolded or with their eyes closed, for example – and there are some occasions when they are able to synchronize their movements despite being unable to see each other (as for instance when three of them perform with their heads in boxes). And much of the performance is carried out in very dim light.

Twilight is thus represented not just as a period  during the day, but also a metaphor for how we see the world (evoking ideas about Plato’s cave etc). Ultimately the performance seems to propose that blindness (metaphorically) can offer a deeper kind of sight – that what appears to be weakness can instead become a kind of strength. If that seems to put us in the territory of Sophocles’ Oedipus, the comparison is apt – since this has a mythical or ritualistic quality to it. And it’s a quality that’s still lingering in my mind, more than 14 hours after having seen it.

The theme of having a kind of half-sight extends into the metaphorical realm too. There’s one very passionate scene in which two of the dancers manage to sustain a kiss over several minutes and through dozens of different movements. At once erotic and funny, this scene presents the actors with their lips fixed firmly to each other – their eyes closed all the while. This seems an innovative  illustration of the cliché that love is blindness (although the Irish Examiner interprets this scene very differently)

There are also moments of aggression too, as when two of the performers are blindfolded and forced to wrestle with each other. There’s a sense here in which violence comes from the impotence of being unable to see the world clearly enough.

As you might expect, given the theme, the quality of the design is very impressive. Sarah Jane Shiels’ lighting does not just illustrate the performance; it becomes a significant element of the performance (in a way that can be contrasted fruitfully with the opening of Germinal)  And set and costume design by Sabine D’Argent likewise is not just the context for the performance but adds  to the working out of the core ideas in the production. And Denis Clohessy’s score and sound design are also massively impressive (following on from the terrific work he did with the Gate’s Streetcar). Anyone with even the slightest interest in design needs to see this show.

As I’ve said, then, this is surprisingly passionate: it moves  freely from eroticism to aggression and sometimes blurs the distinction between the two. Both musically and in terms of the movement, it is also very beautiful at times. It’s sometimes ugly too, but never coarsely so.

As I walked away from the Project Arts Centre, heading towards the Peacock to see The Events (about which more later), I listened to the other audience members who’d been to the show. “I really liked that,” one of them said. “I mean, I feel like I’d need a Master’s degree to understand what was going on, but I really liked it”.

Well, I don’t think anyone needs any kind of prior qualifications to go to this – and it’s not important to feel that you understand all or even any of it: it’s best simply to experience it. But the point is that everyone coming away from this show seemed much calmer and happier on the way home than they’d been coming in.

The performance is on at 6.30 on Thursday and Friday and at 6.00 on Saturday and Sunday of this  week. It ran for about 75 minutes when I saw it (that is, by the time I left the theatre it was 7.45). So if you’re seeing The Events or Riverrun or any other show that starts a bit late, I’d really recommend this. And indeed it’s well worth seeing in its own right.

The video below gives some sense of how the performance is staged and is worth a look.

Joe Dowling, Ireland and the Guthrie

Last weekend, I was in Minneapolis to attend the annual conference of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora network, which this year was about Tyrone Guthrie and the relationships between Irish and American theatre.

It was a fascinating conference. We heard a great keynote from John Harrington, who pointed out how important America had been for many Irish practitioners. He referred to the early Abbey actors, to writers like Denis Johnston and Stewart Parker, and to Garry Hynes. I’ve written a few times before on this blog about the disappointing lack of American plays on Irish stages, but Harrington’s paper reminded me that American influence makes itself felt in other ways: in innovative approaches to writing or direction or acting, for example.

There was also a very stimulating keynote by Jose Lanters about Tom Kilroy, in which she compared the Abbey and Guthrie productions of The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde. Kilroy stands out in the contemporary tradition as an Irish dramatist who is unusually open to non-Irish influences. As Lanters showed, Constance Wilde shows the traces not only of Pirandello but also of Japanese practice.

The differing approaches to the production in Ireland and America were also very interesting: the Guthrie production was much closer to dance than was the case in the Abbey production – but it also seemed to have been over-produced. As directed by Patrick Mason and designed by Joe Vanek, the Abbey Constance Wilde had a striking simplicity that forced the audience to focus entirely on the sadness of the Wildes’ life. In contrast, the Guthrie production filled the stage with eye-catching details, including beautiful androgynous costumes for the plays’ mute attendants (puppeteers who also manipulate the live actors). But in doing so it may have made it more difficult for the audience to attend fully to the action.

It was also great to see the Guthrie Theater itself – surely now one of the world’s great theatres. With three stages, shops, lecture rooms, and an education department, the theatre is unlike anything we have in Ireland. I was struck by the thought that, at a cost of $130 million, the Guthrie cost more or less the same amount as had been earmarked for the Abbey between 1999 (when Patrick Mason finished up) and 2002 (when Ben Barnes proposed to move the theatre into the Docklands). I’m not sure that Dublin could necessarily support a space like the Guthrie – with its proscenium arch stage, its thrust stage, and its studio space. But the Irish theatre would thrive with such facilities. Fintan O’Toole and others have made the point before, though, that to see what Dowling did in raising the money to build the Guthrie is to face the disappointment that we have nothing even remotely comparable in Ireland.

When Friel went to Minneapolis in the early 1960s, he found the experience liberating – there’s his famous line about the ‘parole’ from ‘inbred claustrophobic Ireland’. The cultural differences between Minnesota and Ireland have probably narrowed during the last 50 years, but as ever America can throw up some surprises. For example, I loved the announcement on the front door of the Guthrie that guns are banned in the theatre. “But no-one brings guns to a theatre,” I said to an American companion, in my best tone of European anti-gun indignation. “Tell that to Abraham Lincoln,” came the reply.

Also impressive was that the bookshop had a good stock of Irish plays, including Thomas Conway’s Oberon Anthology of Irish Plays. It’s exciting to know that people like Grace Dyas, Mark O’Halloran, Amy Conway, Neil Watkins, and others are being read abroad – along with work on Friel:

The highlight of the conference  was a public interview with Joe Dowling, who was very interesting on his time at the Abbey. He spoke about the importance of reintroducing Shakespeare to the Abbey’s repertoire, for example (and I’ve read the press clippings for his Twelfth Night and Much Ado from 1975 and 1976 – and audiences loved them). He also spoke about how he opened up the Peacock to younger actors – and indeed to young bands, including Thin Lizzy. He recalled standing in the foyer of the Abbey and feeling the ground shake from the band playing downstairs in the Peacock – a nice metaphor for what he tried (mostly successfully) to do with the theatre.

He also spoke about the problems he’d encountered there. When asked how he’d begun directing he explained that he was appearing in The Colleen Bawn – and that on opening night only the first three acts had been rehearsed. So before going on stage, he started telling one of the other actors where to stand.

He also spoke about some of his difficulties with the Abbey Board when he became Artistic Director from 1978 to 1985. When in 1985 the Board made a decision he didn’t (or couldn’t) agree with, the Chair simply said to him that “the boss is the boss”. In other words, the Board was in charge, and his job was to do what he was told, without discussion. So he resigned.

He spoke about that feeling of despair after his resignation – the fear that he wouldn’t work again, the frustration with how things had turned out. Those feelings were alleviated somewhat when, on the day after his resignation, he got a phone call from Michael Colgan. “So what are you going to direct for us at the Gate, Joe?” Colgan asked.

Dowling also spoke at length about his direction of Donal McCann in Friel’s Faith Healer – a harrowing story about how McCann had to battle his alcoholism in order to create one of the great performances in the modern Irish theatre.

What struck me most about Dowling’s tenure at the Abbey is that he did an enormous amount to liberalise the theatre. It was he who directed Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche in the 1970s, for example – reintroducing to the Abbey repertoire one of its greatest women playwrights. He also brought McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster to the Peacock – a play that marked a new generosity not only in terms of sexuality but also sectarianism at our national theatre. Dowling gave Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross its Irish premiere – amazingly, the first and last time Mamet has been produced at the Abbey. And he also programmed shows like Murphy’s Gigli Concert, Barry McGovern in Endgame (a show now almost entirely associated with the Gate), and Cyril Cusack in Merchant of Venice. And he brought in Michael Bogdanov to do a challenging version of Hamlet on the theatre’s main-stage – only three years after Bogdanov had faced a charge of obscenity for his production of Romans in Britain in London.

Dowling attracted some criticism last year for his programming of the Guthrie’s fiftieth anniversary season, which was dominated by male authors. To be fair, I think the theatre has shown in its subsequent choices that it’s taken on board those criticisms. But there’s an interesting Irish context there – in that Dowling did more than any previous Abbey artistic director to bring new voices to the stages of the national theatre, broadening our approach to sexuality, gender and religion. When one views his career in its entirety, he certainly can’t be accused of being the kind of director who only ever wants to produce dead white heterosexual males.

Hearing Dowling talk, I found myself thinking that, like so many people of talent in 1980s Ireland, he would probably have gone mad or otherwise self-destructed had he stayed in the country. But to see what he’s achieved in the Guthrie – and to consider all he did during his time at the Abbey – was to face the realisation that he’s been a significant loss to Irish theatre too.

In other words, Irish theatre is at its healthiest when the channels are open with other cultures – when a Tom Kilroy can bring Japanese and European ideas into his very Irish play, when a Stewart Parker or a Garry Hynes can learn from American performance and then bring those ideas back home. But the career of Dowling at the Guthrie shows that there are many people who have left and, aside from occasional return visits, have mostly stayed away.

As opportunities for our theatre-makers recede – and as so many people head to London and elsewhere – I wonder who we’re losing now? And I wonder too if we are creating enough opportunities for those who have gone abroad to come home?