At last: a love story on the modern Irish stage

WHEREVER love stories begin, it isn't in the modern Irish theatre. Since

Synge, plays that are simply about what happens between men and a women are astonishingly rare.

There is no Irish equivalent of, say, Harold Pinter's Betrayal, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? or David Mamet's Sexual Perversity In Chicago plays in which the social world recedes into the background and all the attention is focussed on love, desire, sex and treachery. Arguably the most complex relationship between a man and a woman in love with each other that has been dramatised on the Irish stage in recent decades is that of Grace and Frank in Brian Friel's Faith Healer - and they don't even appear on stage together at any point in the play.

Isn't it rather extraordinary, for instance, that in a State whose laws until very recently allowed sentences of up to life imprisonment for male homosexual intimacy, the theatre has been more at home with gay sex than with straight sex? Arguably the most powerful play about heterosexuality in modern Irish theatre, Thomas Kilroy's The Death And Resurrection of Mr Roche, has a gay man as its central character. Arguably the most touching love story in a contemporary Irish play is that between the two male hostages in Frank McGuinness's Someone Who'll Watch Over Me. Is there any recent Irish play that is as open about sex between men and women as, say, Gerry Stembridge's The Gay Detective is about sex between men?

There are probably two reasons why enactments of heterosexual intimacy should be so rare. One is that relationships between men and women in Ireland for most of the twentieth century have had at least as much to do with economics, class, politics and religion as with either sex or love. In most post war Irish plays, boy meets girl stories quickly become forced marriage stories, emigration stories or frustration stories. They tend to be more about what doesn't happen than what does, to end soaked in regret rather than in sweat. They incline more to the world of ballad and melodrama - young girls married to old men or young love thwarted by evil designs - than to the contemporary sensibility of "relationships". An outsider judging Irish society from its plays might wonder why the population didn't die, out, since the idea of two people falling in love and finding happiness is so obviously problematic.

It is only very recently, with the emergence of a new generation of urban, middle class writers that it has seemed possible to write a play in which politics, economics and generational conflict hardly matter and an audience can be expected to follow the contours of a relationship in its own terms. David Parnell's Licking The Marmalade Spoon, which he himself directs for Baoi's Productions at the Project Arts Centre until November 23rd is not only a first full length play, but also a venture into relatively unfamiliar territory.

And as such it offers a reminder of the second reason why there are so few Irish plays about men and women: it is enormously difficult to dramatise an ordinary relationship - without inviting an audience to ask "so what?" The great advantage that older Irish playwrights had in writing about relationships' was that precisely because big social questions were always breaking their way into the action, private lives could become metaphors for "the public world. In Licking The Marmalade Spoon, however, there is no public world at all, except a dimly glimpsed milieu of Italian restaurants, trendy clubs - and bustling bars.

At one stage, one of the four characters, a young investment banker called James (played by Paul Meade), is asked whether he has thought about writing a novel. He asks, in turn, what a young investment banker from Killiney could possibly have to write about; and the line is just a little too relevant for comfort. It is poignant that Ross (Barry Barnes) and Louise (Catherine Walsh) fall in love, fall apart and end unhappily. It is nice that Carla (Jennifer O'Dea) and James fall in love and end happily. But there are, in the theatre, bigger words than poignant and nice - dramatic, funny, and gripping, for instance - and there is no call to use them here. To be really enthralled by the fate of these characters, we would need either more edge or more depth - either some sharp observation of contemporary sexual mores or some profound delving into the psychology of sex.

IF it is light on content, however, the play is much better as an exercise in form. Usually, with a first play, a writer has too much to say and has not yet found the means to say it. Here, oddly, it works the other way around the style is much more impressive than the substance. The fact that the playwright and the director are one, often a problem for an inexperienced writer, gives the piece its strength. Everything that Parnell has written seems to have been conceived precisely for the stage, creating a pleasantly seamless effect.

On a seriously good set designed by Paul McCauley, the action moves with great confidence between straightforward naturalism and a richly imagined dreamwold of conversations that are taking place inside Louise's head. That confidence allows the actors to give performances in which, even if they are not fully stretched by the material, they display considerable clarity and conviction. If David Parnell can match his deftness and cleverness with passion and urgency, he could follow this beginning with something off real force.