Irish Theatre Highlights 2013

Ordinarily at this time of year we get lots of reviews of the year for fiction, film, sport and so on – but we have not (yet) had one for Irish theatre. So, if only to get a conversation going, I thought it might be interesting to consider what the highlights of the year have been.

It’s been a very good year for Irish theatre, both at home and abroad, so it also seems worthwhile taking a moment to enjoy some memories.

First, a disclaimer. I’m not a theatre critic. I haven’t seen everything and when I do go to the theatre, it’s mostly for personal enjoyment rather than objective analysis. Because I live in Galway, it’s easier (and often cheaper) for me to see theatre in London than it is to see theatre in Cork or Derry, so I can’t give a representative discussion of theatre throughout the island. And because I’m an academic, I always struggle to see more than 5-6 shows at the Dublin Fringe, since it coincides with my busiest time of year.

In other words – if I’ve  left something out, it’s because I probably didn’t see it, couldn’t see it, or (as in the case of Anu’s Thirteen) couldn’t get tickets. So if you think there is a glaring omission, that’s what the comment box below is for…

Rather than focussing on individual productions, I thought it could be more interesting to pick out a few trends that seemed to dominate the year…

A Year of Magical Acting…

I can’t remember another year in which there were so many excellent performances by Irish actors.

The year started strongly with Owen Roe’s Lear at the Abbey – a performance that everyone expected to be great, but which still surpassed my expectations. I also enjoyed Sean Campion’s performance as Kent – and was stunned by Hugh O’Connor’s Fool – a genuine revelation, in the sense that I’d never known O’Connor could perform with such emotional intensity and skill (which is not to disparage his earlier work, but rather to say that what he did here was completely different).

Later in the year we had Tom Vaughan-Lawlor playing both roles in Howie the Rookie and then Niall Buggy doing amazing work in McGuinness’s Hanging Gardens. Those performances by Roe, Vaughan-Lalor and Buggy are among the best I’ve seen by a male performer anywhere, and at any time.

Probably the most surprising performance this year was by Olwen Fouéré  in riverrun. We all know she’s a great actor, but her use of body and voice in her adaptation of (or response to) Finnegans Wake was like an entirely new art-form: more than theatre, more than opera, more than dance, more than literature, more than song – not quite any of those things but somehow bridging the gaps between all of them.

Two other performances by Irish actresses stand out for me, but both of them happened in London.

Caoilfhionn Dunne  was impressive in Conor McPherson’s Night Alive, doing a great deal to refute the notion that McPherson’s women are always underwritten, by giving a performance of lovely intelligence and depth (albeit in a part that, it must be admitted, didn’t give her much to say).

Meanwhile Sarah Greene stole the show (from Daniel Radcliffe, no less) in Michael Grandage’s revival of McDonagh’s Cripple of Inishmaan. As Slippy Helen, Greene knew how to combine her character’s cruelty with charisma: we understand why Billy is in love with her, but also understand how and why she might have once “ruptured a curate”.

The person who originated the role of Slippy Helen was Aisling O’Sullivan, and she is currently displaying a lot of that same mischievous humour in Druid’s Colleen Bawn. As she showed when she played Helen back in 1997 – and as she’s showing now – O’Sullivan is a seriously funny actor. It’s great to see her enjoying herself so much in the Boucicault play: her work in it with Ronan Leahy is one of the funniest double acts I’ve seen this year.

It was also a strong year for ensemble. I loved the way Druid shuffled the deck in its revived DruidMurphy. Marty Rea was every bit as good as he had been when the show premiered in 2012, but it was fascinating to see Rory Nolan and Garret Lombard take on new roles – with the Lombard vs. Rea confrontation in the 2012 Conversations now joined by another Lombard vs Rea confrontation in A Whistle in the Dark. Judith Roddy in the latter play was also excellent, in a role that Eileen Walsh performed so strongly last year. Watching Roddy reveal an entirely new perspective on the part of Betty, I found myself thinking that it’s a pity that the Irish Times Theatre Awards don’t recognize revivals. Sure, I know that the judges have enough to see as it is, but I would have expected Roddy to be a strong contender for a supporting actress nomination if she’d been eligible.

I also liked the ensemble in the Gate’s Enemy of the People. Again we had a central confrontation between two men – in this case Declan Conlon and Denis Conway. But in the supporting roles there was also terrific work, especially from Fiona Bell, an actor who deserves to be seen more often, and in stronger roles. Bell was also very good in Major Barbara at the Abbey where again I found myself wanting to see her onstage for longer.

Another strong ensemble was found in Rough Magic’s revival of Digging for Fire. That production wasn’t as funny as the original Lynne Parker version, but there was a nice sparkiness in the interactions between Orla Fitzgerald’s Clare and John Cronin’s Danny.

But perhaps the most surprising ensemble performance was in the Gate’s Streetcar. Lia Williams’s Blanche was literally the talk of the town for the entire run: I heard so many people gushing about how good she was. I was definitely impressed by her technical virtuosity and emotional authenticity – but the most enjoyable aspect of the performance for me was in the quality of the acting across the ensemble. Catherine Walker and Garret Lombard both gave unusually restrained performances, while as Mitch Denis Conway turned what could have seemed like miscasting into a directorial masterstroke. In the script his character is supposed to be in his late 20s/early 30s, but because Conway looked a couple of decades older than that, his falling-out with Blanche took on added pathos: we understood that Blanche really was his last chance to find happiness. Too often in Ireland we find the big classic plays being well cast in the lead roles but badly filled out in the supporting cast – but here everyone was doing excellent work.

And there were many other strong performances during the year. Gary Lydon stood out in Gare St Lazare’s Godot, while I enjoyed John Carty’s Clov in Blue Raincoat’s Endgame. Lalor Roddy and Janet Moran were brilliantly over the top in Corn Exchange’s Desire Under the Elms. Paul McGann’s Underschaft in the Abbey’s Major Barbara was fascinatingly restrained, both technically and vocally – and thus balanced out by the controlled passion of Clare Dunne as Barbara. And the all-female ensemble in Mephisto’s Eclipsed was excellent: that too is a show that should be seen more widely.

So it was a very strong year for Irish acting, both individually and collectively. I found myself thinking several times during the year that it’s a pity that Irish Times Theatre Awards doesn’t have a category for Best Ensemble: as this year showed, the creation of strong ensembles is one of the things that Irish theatre is doing particularly well at present. That said I don’t envy the judges their decision-making this year: they are going to have to omit some performances that in other years could well have won awards.

Irish Design

Also particularly impressive this year was the quality of Irish design. It would be an exaggeration to say that this is a golden age for Irish design – but there is the feeling that such an era could be approaching. Irish design is usually not as well resourced as is the case in, say, the US or the UK – which means that our productions don’t always have the level of detail you might get in regional American sets – and don’t usually have the snazzy projections and motorised sets that you get in London and on Broadway.

But, illustrating the truth of the cliché that less is more. Irish designers at present seem to be taking more risks than I see in theatres abroad: they are constantly searching for new ways to represent ideas visually and with sound, perhaps (at least in some cases) because shrinking resources make literal or life-like representations difficult. I would hesitate to say that Irish designers have a distinctive vocabulary, if only because so many of them also work abroad. But when I go to theatre in Ireland – wherever I go – I have a feeling that something unique to our theatrical culture is happening in the area of design. And I am constantly surprised by what I see and hear.

One of the year’s biggest surprises came in Decadent Theatre’s Skull in Connemara when, about 20 minutes in, the opening scene’s Irish country kitchen collapsed to the ground, revealing a cross-section of a graveyard, and showing John Olohan literally underground. As directed by Andrew Flynn, that scene change was at once shocking and exciting and, like the play itself, was both funny and morbid at the same time. I’ve been saying for years that I will go and see any show designed by Owen MacCarthaigh, regardless of what the play is: you just never know what he’s going to do. He’s genuinely original, and deserves to be better known throughout Ireland. By replacing the country kitchen with a graveyard, MacCarthaigh and Flynn did exactly what McDonagh does: they show how dead that clichéd Irish country kitchen has become, and then have fun playing with its corpse. This was a great example of design complementing the play’s themes precisely.

Something similar happens with Francis O’Connor’s amazing set for Druid’s Colleen Bawn, which I saw last week. When the curtain was pulled back at the start of the play, I quite literally found myself saying “wow”. Since this production will be seen in Dublin next month I won’t describe it here (though you can see a partial image of it above, in the picture of Aisling O’Sullivan and Ronan Leahy), but it’s another example of a design concept which is both true to the play and wholly surprising. And it contrasts sharply with the design for the unforgettable Conal Morrison version of that play at the Abbey in 1998.

That surprising quality was true also of the design for Pan Pan’s Embers, especially with its use of a sculpture of a human skull by Andrew Clancy. Recalling those black and white images of Beckett’s head floating in space (like a secular St Oliver Plunkett), the skull also brought us back to theatrical first principles, locating Beckett’s play in a space somewhere between Golgotha and Yorrick’s grave. Aedin Cosgrove’s lights did not just illuminate the action; rather, the transitions from light to darkness became an active presence within the performance itself, almost like a third character to add to Andrew Bennett and Áine Ní Mhuirí’s voices. And then we had Jimmy Eadie’s sound design, all crunching shells and briny lapping water, which managed to both locate and dislocate us. Pan Pan again show us what an Irish total theatre can feel like.

There was lots more to enjoy during the year: the set in Hanging Gardens, the costumes in Fabulous Beast’s Spring Awakening and Petrushka, the lighting in Junk Ensemble’s Dusk Ahead, the set and sound design for Desperate Optimists’ otherwise disappointing Tom and Vera, the grimy, bloodied set and costumes for Blue Raincoat’s Endgame, the Mad Men-esque costumes of Enemy of the People, the projections for The Risen People….

But my favourite production in terms of design was the Gate’s Streetcar. Just as the cast cohered surprisingly well together, so here the design team worked together extraordinarily well, emphasizing all the time Blanche’s theatricality – and her slipping grasp on reason. I loved the richness of Paul Keogan’s lights, the vivid detail of Denis Clohessy’s sound design, and the strange familiarity of Lee Savage’s set. This was genuinely beautiful work.

New Plays by Irish Women

Another interesting pattern was the growing status of new work by Irish women. Elaine Murphy’s Shush appeared at the Abbey, making Murphy only the third woman since the 1930s to have a play appear on our national theatre’s main-stage. It was great to see the theatre taking a chance on a relatively new writer (Shush is Murphy’s second play), and good also to see their ongoing commitment to redressing an historical omission that is – to be blunt – shameful, and which reflects badly on Irish theatre in general, even if it is similar to patterns that pertained in other English-speaking countries.

For that reason, I was also glad to see Carmel Winters’ Best Man get a long run in both Cork and Dublin. And I was impressed by Rosemary Jenkinson’s Planet Belfast, a play which I have not seen but which I did read, finding its contextualisation of Northern Irish politics in terms of global concerns both funny and urgent. Nancy Harris’s Love in a Glass Jar appeared at the Peacock, and while it is a very short play, it confirmed for me that Harris is one of the most interesting young writers around at present. She writes work that is very funny, but there’s always an undercurrent of sadness in her work: an awareness of how loneliness motivates so many of our interactions – and explains so many of our most stupid decisions.

And let’s not forget Olwen Fouéré’s riverrun. We’ve seen already some interesting adaptations of Joyce from male writers such as Michael West, Frank McGuinness and Dermot Bolger, but Fouéré’s script was – well – something else again.

At the time of writing, the Irish Playography lists 55 new plays that were produced in 2013, including adaptations and plays in Irish – and of those, 20 were written or co-written by a woman. I can’t say for certain whether that list is complete, but as a representative sample, the list provides an interesting picture. In 2003, 25% of Irish plays were written by a woman. This year, roughly 40% of Irish plays were written by a woman. Those figures can mask a whole range of other imbalances – the most obvious being that plays by women are still produced mainly in smaller venues, and for shorter runs, than is the case with male authors. But the upward momentum is something to be glad of.

And the appearance of Shush on the Abbey’s main stage is also a step in the right direction – its production gave heart to a lot of the young women I know who are interested in writing for the stage, even though many of them want to do work that is very different from Murphy’s.

So: much more to be done here, but at least we are heading in the right direction.

Irish Plays in the UK

The impact of London on our theatre has always skewed the production and reception of Irish plays. It can be argued (and has been, by me, among others) that when Irish plays are written with a London audience in mind, they tend to avoid dealing with matters that are of exclusively local importance. It’s also true that Irish plays that succeed abroad are often accused of trading on Irish stereotypes – about our drinking, our humour, our fecklessness, our attitude to religion, our all-singing, all-dancing acceptance of oppression – and so on.

Yet London gives Irish actors, writers and designers opportunities to make a living where here they can hope merely to scrape by. The presence of Irish plays in the West End or in Edinburgh helps to promote Irish drama throughout the world, and that has spin-off benefits for education, tourism and publishing. And as I’ve written before, the English and Scottish theatres are both undergoing separate but interlinking renaissances at present – so it’s good that Irish writers and theatre practitioners have a seat at the feast.

For these reasons, it was wonderful to see Once – the Musical make its way to the West End (following a very short Irish out-of-town try-out at the Gaiety). Likewise, while some people have dismissed The Commitments as a jukebox musical, it appears that its success is already creating new audiences for Irish work; I haven’t seen it myself yet but colleagues and friends speak highly of it.

Conor McPherson’s Night Alive is probably the best new Irish play of 2013, and as I’ve written already it marks what could be a significant development in his work. Also, his The Weir had a strong run in London which has resulted in a West End transfer next month. And we had Daniel Radcliffe acquitting himself well in a very good production of The Cripple of Inishmaan earlier this year.

Yet there are downsides too. I still don’t understand why Richard Eyre’s version of Pirandello’s Liola needed to have the Sicilian characters all speaking in Irish accents: this kind of ethnic stereotyping, whereby Irishness can operate as an exoticised but familiar rural ‘Other’ in England, should have died out a century ago. And I don’t know why the Donmar Warehouse continues to refer to Conor McPherson as one of “our” (i.e. their) best-loved dramatists. And much as I liked Once, Cripple, and The Night Alive I do worry that they are locating Irish drama within a very narrow frame. All three feature alcohol prominently. The McPherson and Walsh plays feature music prominently (as does The Commitments, of course). So the “Irish play” in London does not mean “a play from Ireland”; it instead refers to a genre in which a very narrow set of things may happen. So what happens when Irish writers don’t want to write “Irish plays”?

In Edinburgh, it was again a good year for Irish work. Deirdre Kinihan is getting long overdue recognition, and the success of Halcyon Days both in Ireland and abroad will, I hope, help to develop her work further. Landmark’s excellent Howie  also did well at Edinburgh: my only fear is that it will see Vaughan-Lawlor working permanently outside of Ireland.

But perhaps the best news of the year in the UK was the ongoing success of Owen McCafferty’s Quietly. That play appeared at the Peacock in 2012, where it struck me as the most important new Irish play for at least five years – due to the quality of the writing, but also thanks to the astonishing performances by Patrick O’Kane and Declan Conlon. I can’t help thinking that this is going to be yet another Irish play that will be celebrated when it returns from a triumphant London run, having been underrated at home (this is what happened to The Walworth Farce also). But at least it’s getting the notice it merits.

Brecht

We know there’s more Brecht to come next year, but his work played a dominant role on the Irish stage during 2013.

I never quite got over the disappointment of learning that Mark O’Rowe wasn’t doing the script for Threepenny Opera at the Gate – so the Dublinisms in an otherwise standard script for this production didn’t sit well with me. But it was definitely a very good evening’s entertainment from Wayne Jordan, often measuring up to the heights of Selina Cartmell’s Sweeney Todd, which I thought was once of the Gate’s best productions of the last decade.

Leaving aside his plays, Brecht’s influence was felt everywhere. It was present in Colin Murphy’s Guaranteed, not only in the decision to have the actors read from their scripts but also from the staging style. And it was present too in Jimmy Fay’s lively Risen People, a production that managed to commemorate the 1913 Lockout without ever losing sight of the human pain that was endured during those events.

Does this mean that Irish theatre has become more political? As ever, I find this question troubling, since it often seems to confuse journalism with art. Brecht’s work is great not because it responded to events in Germany in the 1930s or America in the same era; it is great because it reveals truths about power, social hierarchies, human nature, and the significance of art. It’s for this reason that Brecht’s work is being so widely produced at present – and why it will probably continue to be produced for a long time to come.

For example, I saw an excellent RSC production of Life of Galileo earlier this year. Its exploration of what happens when you tell truth to power makes it very relevant at a time when governments and media everywhere seem to be cracking down on dissent. Its consideration of the relationship between science and religion likewise is pertinent, and not just in countries like the US where we hear stories of high-schools removing the theory of evolution from the curriculum.  But Galileo is also a show that could have played in Ireland, where it might have been seen as a commentary on the place of Catholicism in our society – yet in England it seemed to be addressing issues in that society about privacy, power, wealth and austerity.

In other words, great art will always be relevant.

Yet as Colin Murphy’s Guaranteed showed, there is room too for the journalistic approach. Guaranteed is a play which, I think it’s fair to say, is not looking for the big transfer to London – or to be revived fifty years from now – or even five years from now – on artistic grounds. That’s because it’s very much about Ireland now – it is speaking to our society, and asking us to inform ourselves about what our banks did, in a way that may provoke us to make decisions that can change the way our country is run. It’s been a very long time since I sat in a theatre that seemed as engaged and as committed as was the case when I saw this production in Bray this summer. We need more work like this.

Like many people, I’m very excited about Rough Magic’s major production of the Sky Arts-sponsored Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogony next year (and let’s face it, a production of Brecht sponsored by a Rupert Murdoch company raises loads of interesting questions). So we know we’ll be seeing more Brecht. But it will be interesting to see if anyone can follow the lead of Murphy and Fishamble.

Music and the Musical

A final trend was the growing use of music, and the rise of the musical. I am not sure if those two developments are directly connected. But in new plays we saw incidental musical being used to strong effect – as happens in The Night Alive and Shush, most noticeably. We also saw some excellent musicals, the best of which was, of course, Threepenny Opera. And then we saw work that seemed a hybrid of the two, as in The Risen People.

I think the growing presence of music on our stage is at least partly due to the impact of the Grand Canal Theatre, which is creating new audiences for musicals generally. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s going to be interesting to see how the Grand Canal will fit into the Irish theatre ecosystem in the years ahead. Ideally I would like to see a situation whereby at last some of its annual programming included successful Irish plays, featuring Ireland-based actors and practitioners. I’d worry about the long-term impact on Irish theatre if we have a situation where whole audiences are only seeing theatre that is imported here from abroad.

But on the positive side, I do suspect that it’s possible that someone who goes to see a musical at the Grand Canal might then feel somewhat more comfortable with the idea of going to the Gate or the Abbey for the first time to see Threepenny or Risen People – and that in turn might make them feel more comfortable with the prospect of seeing other kinds of work for the first time. Is that kind of audience development actually happening? I have no idea. But I am glad that we in Ireland have a chance to see work as strong as the Lion King – or, next year, War Horse.  And as I’ve written elsewhere, there is also perfectly enjoyable theatre there, from the Old Vic’s Noises Off to Wicked, both of which I enjoyed very much.

Personal Highlights

So, in no particular order, my personal highlights for 2013 would have to include:

• The acting and design in Streetcar Named Desire
• The sound of 600+ people being pleasantly surprised by how good Once was, at the opening night interval in the Gaiety.
• A British play: Chimerica by Lucy Kirkwood in the West End – brilliant, ambitious, morally powerful new writing.
• riverrun 
• Niall Buggy in The Hanging Gardens
• Owen Roe in Lear
• Howie the Rookie
• Listening to great Irish writers – Marina Carr, Mark O’Rowe, Enda Walsh, Owen McCafferty, and many others – at this year’s Synge Summer School.
• Druid’s revived Whistle in the Dark
• The feeling of electricity in the air in the post-show discussion at Guaranteed
• Conor McPherson’s Night Alive – a play that has really stayed with me since I saw it six months ago. Let’s hope it gets an Irish production soon.
• Dusk Ahead by Junk Ensemble.
• The set change in Skull in Connemara.
• Ian McDiarmid in the RSC’s Life of Galileo
• The performances in Corn Exchange’s Desire Under the Elms, especially from Janet Moran
• The Abbey’s willingness to stage Major Barbara, a play that is theatrically inert but which was among the most thought-provoking productions of the year.
• Fabulous Beast’s Rite of Spring and Petrushka.
• Digging for Fire – could have been a nostalgia trip, but seemed as vibrant now as it did back in the early 1990s.

I am sure I’m omitting many other things, but that’s what stands out for now.

Anyone care to add to the list?

Irish Musical Theatre – A New Development That Has Always Been With Us

A few weeks ago, I did a brief interview with Eithne Shortall of The Sunday Times about the Irish musical. In her feature, she writes about Once and The Commitments, and wonders if these two productions suggest that we’ll see more  Irish musicals during the years ahead.

I think she’s right. I can see evidence of this growth at NUI Galway, where incoming Drama students are passionate about musical theatre, making GUMS (the university musical society) one of the university’s most vibrant student groups. And many students come to study theatre not because they have appeared in work by Synge or O’Casey or Friel, but because they were in a school production of South Pacific or Grease or West Side Story. We’re introducing classes in musical theatre from next year in an attempt both to meet that interest and to stimulate more of this kind of work.

Of course, the Irish musical has been around for a while. We saw it work brilliantly almost a decade ago (can it really be that long?) when Rough Magic premiered Bell Helicopter and Arthur Riordan’s Improbable Frequency, a musical about Ireland during the Second World War – which included such hilarious songs as “Be Careful Not to Patronise the Irish”. And we saw it on the main stage of the Abbey only last year with Wayne Jordan’s production of Alice in Funderland by Raymond Scannell and Phillip McMahon. Each of those productions was greeted with a lot of commentary, both formal and informal, suggesting that perhaps – at last – we in Ireland might be on the verge of developing a tradition of musical theatre.

I wonder, though, if it’s quite that simple. Music and musicality have always been important if not essential for Irish plays. One of the best examples of the importance of music can be found in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock – which features a long scene in which the characters sing songs and play music on a gramophone.  It’s not a coincidence that Captain Boyle, who spends the play’s first act trying to deceive his wife, will in this scene choose to sing ‘Oh Me Darlin’ Juno, I Will Be True to Thee’ —a song intended to emphasize his honesty, which therefore reveals his duplicitous and hypocritical nature.  Another example is Mrs Madigan’s choice of the song ‘If I were a Blackbird’ to sing in the play’s second act:

   If I were a blackbird I’d whistle and sing;

I’d follow the ship that my true love was in;

An’ on the top riggin’, I’d there build me a nest,

An’ at night I would sleep on me Whillie’s white breast!

This seems quite an innocent choice, but given that her audience includes Captain Boyle—a former sailor who is supposed to have inherited a large amount of money—her choice of a love song with a maritime setting reveals a great deal about her motives.

Arguably, the play’s turning point occurs in that same scene, when we hear Juno and Mary singing ‘Home to Our Mountains’ from Verdi’s Il Travotore.  O’Casey does not transcribe the words of this piece; he does not change them to reflect the accent or social status of the singers, but states that they must sing the song well.  By showing that the two characters can express themselves perfectly well in this artform, O’Casey hints that they are capable of transcending their circumstances—and indeed makes the case that they must do so.

And then the scene concludes with the song “If You’re Irish, Come Into the Parlour” playing on the gramophone while a funeral dirge is underway – a brilliant contrast of kitsch Irishness with the solemnity of the funeral ritual.

Juno is not a musical – but its use of music is far more than incidental or contextual: it reveals character, develops the themes, shapes the audience’s responses, and offers us new ways of seeing such issues as nationalism, religion, gender, and the relationship between Irish and international culture. And it seems to me that a lot of Irish plays use music in a similar way: they are not quite musical theatre, but they are much more than “music in theatre”.

Tom Murphy has a very similar scene to O’Casey’s in his under-rated 1998 play The Wake, which again sees a family gathering for a sing-song.  And there’s  a brilliant scene in his The Gigli Concert in which the Irishman acts out the story of Gigli’s youth while Toseli’s Serenade plays in the background. In Garry Hynes’s last production of the play (which I reviewed on irish Theatre Magazine), Denis Conway matched the movements to the music so carefully that it was almost as if he was dancing at times.  And the use of song in Conversations on a Homecoming offers rare moments of beauty in a play that is otherwise quite fearlessly ugly.

In the blog, I’ve also written a few times about the use of music in contemporary plays. This pattern worries me slightly, since it reminds me of something I occasionally see in the work of inexperienced directors and writers – which is that when you can’t work out how to convey an important mood or emotion to the audience through acting, staging, or writing, you let a piece of music do the work for you (and too often it’s the same music: Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Massive Attack).

Yet when done well, music can transform a play. As I’ve recently discussed, Frank McGuinness uses a song from the Mikado beautifully in The Hanging Gardens. Similarly, Conor McPherson’s use of music is almost always successful: I’m thinking of the use of Neil Young as a kind of ironic counterpoint to the action in Shining City or of John Martyn’s Sweet Little Mystery to bring us blinking back into the sunlight in The Seafarer.  And then there’s Enda Walsh, whose use of Doris Day in Misterman and more kitsch Irish ballads in Walworth Farce add to the sinister and unsettling quality of both plays. And who can forget the contrast between the intensely verbal sisters in New Electric Ballroom and Mikel Murfi’s amazingly sung “Wondrous Place” in the same play?

Enda Walsh, incidentally, is the only Irish dramatist I know of who has won a Grammy – since his song “Abandoned in Bandon” appears on the soundtrack to Once – the Musical.

And there are many other examples we could think of. Billy Roche’s The Cavalcaders is arguably as much a musical as The Commitments is (in both cases, song is used as part of the action – songs are only sung when they would be sung in the ‘real world’). Something similar could be said of Christina Reid’s The Belle of the Belfast City. And think of how important music is for Brian Friel – Cole Porter and traditional music in Lughnasa, Chopin in Aristocrats, Thomas Moore in The Home Place, and so on. Likewise, Elaine Murphy’s use of music in Shush seems influenced by Lughnasa – a play which, I think, must also have had an impact on Marie Jones’s restaging of the Blind Fiddler back in 2003.

I’m also conscious of how deeply invested in music so many Irish dramatists are. For example, Stewart Parker was, among many other things, a brilliant rock journalist – and it shows in his drama.

We can also see the importance of music in some of the recent adaptations that have appeared at the Abbey. As I suggested in that discussion with Eithne Shorthall, Frank McGuinness’s The Dead – which again made use of the songs of Thomas Moore – was almost like a hybrid: not quite a musical but not quite a play either. And it seems that the Abbey’s forthcoming production of The Risen People – opening next week – will be making extensive use of music too.

Quite often, establishing an Irish musical tradition is seen as being like beating the All Blacks: something we really should have done a long time ago, but will, we hope, get round to doing sometime in the near future. But could it be that the reason we don’t have a tradition of musical theatre here is because, in some ways, it’s always been so firmly embedded in our theatrical culture anyway?

Shush at the Abbey

Last Wednesday night I attended the opening night of Elaine Murphy’s Shush at the Abbey.

There’s something very exciting about seeing new writing on the Abbey’s main stage, especially from a young dramatist who’s not very well known yet. Most of the Abbey’s recent main stage premieres of new writing have been by established Irish writers, and many of them have been adaptations – productions such as McGuinness’s The Dead and John Gabriel Borkman, Tom Murphy’s Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant, Roddy Doyle’s Government Inspector, and the ill-fated Adigun/Doyle Playboy of the Western World. There are exceptions, of course: Bernard Farrell’s new play Bookworms has appeared twice, and most recently Richard Dormer’s Drum Belly caused a bit of a stir at the theatre.

All that said, it’s very unusual – and perhaps unprecedented in the contemporary period – for us to see a writer’s second play debuting on the Abbey’s main stage.

Elaine Murphy’s first play was Little Gem, which was co-produced by Guna Nua and the Civic Theatre back in 2008. That play proved a (somewhat unlikely) commercial success, transferring to the Olympia and later to Peacock stage of the Abbey itself; it also toured nationally. I describe the success as unlikely because it was a monologue play by a then unknown author, but audiences actually responded very positively to Murphy’s presentation of different generations of women – and to the quality of her language and her humour. Those traits appear again in Shush, though this time we move from monologue to dialogue, in a play about five women who gather in a suburban house to celebrate a birthday.

I’d imagine that Shush could match and potentially even exceed the success of Little Gem. But what I found most exciting about the opening night was that I was seeing a new play by a woman on the Abbey’s main stage. That’s something I’d only ever experienced three times previously, when I saw Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats in 1998, Marina Carr’s Ariel in 2002, and Marina Carr’s Marble in 2010. In other words, Elaine Murphy is only the second woman to have a new play on the Abbey’s main stage during my lifetime.  [note – after publishing this post, I got a note from a reader to say that in 1988, Jeane Binnie had a play on the Abbey stage, making her a third Irish woman dramatist – http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/archives/production_detail/702 ]

After the 1930s, Deevy’s plays were revived on the Abbey’s main stage from time to time, notably with Katie Roche, which appeared there in 1975 (it was also revived in the Peacock in 1994). And Lady Gregory’s (unduly neglected) Devorgilla was revived in 1949 and 1966, while her best known plays such as Hyacinth Halvey, Spreading the News, the Rising of the Moon and the Gaol Gate had occasional main stage productions right up to the early 1970s. After that, Gregory more or less disappeared from the repertoire, most noticeably in 2004, when the Abbey’s centenary celebrations featured a play about Gregory (Colm Toibin’s Beauty in a Broken Place) but neglected to produce any of her own works – a poor tribute to a woman who had not just established the theatre but kept it open for almost thirty years of her life. So the Abbey’s main stage has not been hospitable to women dramatists, both historically and more recently.

The story is a little different in the Peacock, where there have been some very good plays by Irish women, especially recently. Since the turn of the century, at the Peacock I’ve seen new work by Stella Feehily, Hilary Fannin, Paula Meehan, and Marina Carr. And in 2010/2011 that theatre staged plays by Marina Carr, Carmel Winters, Nancy Harris, and Stacey Gregg. I’d be curious to know if that was the first time any Irish theatre has staged four plays by different women consecutively: I certainly can’t remember anything comparable happening.

So in the last five years or so, the Abbey has been addressing the neglect of women dramatists historically, and has been making a concerted effort to redress the problem. It’s a pity that their attempts to do so have not generated much comment or coverage, if only because the Abbey is doing something that could be more widely imitated.

In Irish theatre generally, the relative absence of women dramatists is a serious problem. Ireland’s second biggest theatre the Gate produces relatively few new plays; the only time I can recall their producing an original play by a woman was when Yasmina Reza’s Art appeared there in the 1990s (though Anne-Marie Casey wrote a version of Little Women there a couple of years ago, and Joseph O’Connor and Conor McPherson have respectively adapted Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and The Birds for the theatre).

Druid has produced work by Geraldine Aron throughout its history, and in more recent years premiered Leaves by Lucy Caldwell, but a majority of its productions are by male authors like Synge, Murphy and McDonagh.

Rough Magic has the strongest record in this regard, having premiered a number of important plays by women – many of whom are also actresses, as it happens. Liz Kuti’s Sugar Wife and Gina Moxley’s Danti Dan stand out, but they’ve also produced very good plays by Ionna Anderson, Rosemary Jenkinson, Morna Regan and others.

Likewise Fishamble have brought us work by Sonya Kelly, Abbie Spallen, and Rosalind Hassit – while in the north Tinderbox has recently produced work by Lisa McGee, Rosemary Jenkinson, Stacey Gregg.

But the overall picture is not good. A few years ago, I went through the Irish playography, counting the number of plays by women. Roughly one in four Irish plays produced between 1990 and 2005 were by women. And most of those plays were produced in smaller venues. Plays by women were therefore much less likely to be published, to be reviewed, to be written about by academics, to win awards… And while there have been some improvements lately, things haven’t changed much since then.

It’s not as if women aren’t writing plays, of course. Ursula Rani Sarma and Stella Feehily can be pointed to as examples of very successful Irish women dramatists. But both of them are produced mostly in Britain, and it would probably be fair to say that Feehily in particular is better known in London than she is in Dublin. Similarly, Nicola McCartney is from Belfast, but she appears far more often in surveys of Scottish theatre than in discussions of Irish drama.

So for these and other reasons, it’s great to see the Abbey taking a chance with a new play by a young female dramatist.

As for the play itself… Well, I agreed with Peter Crawley when he stated in his Irish Times review that the play tends to avoid metaphor or significant events; he also pointed out that it’s not very dramatic. He gave it two out of five stars, though, and I thought that was a bit harsh.

Watching the play, I would have liked to have had a sense that there was a bit more going on beneath the surface, but the lack of dramatic action didn’t bother me. This is a play in which characters with no sense of direction sit around talking for hours, contemplating whether they have the will to go on, and engaging in inconsequential games in order to pass the time. Shush is not trying to be Waiting for Godot, but Murphy does show an awareness that Irish audiences don’t necessarily need something to happen regularly. As with so many Irish plays, the drama lies not in the action but in the dialogue. And while the primary theme here is the relationship of these women to each other and to the (off-stage) men in their lives, there are also some interesting explorations of themes like emigration, alcohol abuse, and middle class materialism (and vulnerability to economic shock). Inevitably – perhaps too inevitably – there is a moment in which dance is used to express emotions that are unable to be articulated verbally. So we never feel too far away from another Irish play about five women: Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa.

Murphy also does something that we don’t see often enough in Ireland: she writes five good parts for women of varying ages. The performances here are very funny: the roles could easily enough turn into caricature, but Deirdre Donnelly, Barbara Brennan, Niamh Daly, Evan Bartley and Ruth Hegarty all flesh out their characters in interesting ways. And Jim Culleton as director allows the laughs to come naturally: his direction is unforced and unhurried, and he pays Murphy the compliment of trusting her work. I’m not sure many other directors would have been so generous, and the production is all the better for that.

I suspect that some of my fellow academics may debate, and perhaps even condemn, the play’s gender politics during the coming years. Murphy gives us five women who are for the most part self-fashioning and self-directing; they’re also (mostly) interesting and individualised. But there is also a tendency for the characters to judge and assert their value in relation to whether (and how much) they are noticed by the men in their lives. For example, without wishing to give anything away, there is a moment in the play in which the suggestion seems to be made that the only thing that makes one of the character’s lives worth living is the prospect of attending a significant event in the life of one of her male relatives. We’re used to this kind of characterisation from film and novels, of course, but Murphy leaves those generic conventions largely untroubled.  Again a comparison with Lughnasa feels apt: Friel’s five women are to a large extent influenced by how they are seen by men like Gerry Evans, Father Jack and Danny Bradley. But Friel’s play is formally so original that it gives us many other ways to see the characters.

I also wondered about the decision to have the play’s least intelligent character deliver its most insightful speech. The passage works well in performance, and helps to bring us towards the conclusion, but someone could argue that the play seems to be suggesting that the way to be happy is to think about things as little as possible.

These are minor criticisms, though, and they don’t detract much from the many positive qualities of the production.  Shush is an entertaining play, and it’s often very funny. And if the genre is familiar, the dialogue itself is very original – it literally sounds like no other play I’ve seen before. I think it will be seen as offering a very good night out, and should be very successful on that basis.

But the real significance of the production, for me anyway, is that it’s a step towards normalising the presence of women dramatists on the main stages of our theatre. We still have a long way to go, of course – but Shush feels like a good start.