Dead or alive?

Mega-musicals of the sung-through variety that attract international audiences in London and New York rarely come to Dublin. Yet within the next 12 months the latest oeuvre from the authors of Les Miserables and Miss Saigon is likely to find its way across the Irish Sea. If it's a success that is. And why should it not be? After all, Miss Saigon made £17 million profit in its first year and Les Mis made a cool billion in its first decade. Alain Bloublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg clearly have the Midas touch. Or had. Because when Martin Guerre opened in London in July 1996 (already several months late) reviews were what is termed in the trade "mixed" and ranged from "Masterpiece of musical magic and mystery" to Grandiose, music efficient but flavourless".

The show limped on for four months while impresario Cameron Macintosh set about fixing it, wheeling in a new lyricist and generally throwing in a series of artistic hand grenades. The 55th-richest man (personal fortune estimated at u250M£250 million) who had already spent u4four million bringing it to the Prince Edward Theatre (which he owns) spent a further £500,000 on the revamp. So after a break of two weeks the curtain went up in November 1996 on Martin Guerre Mark 2.

Most critics agreed it was an improvement. But a crowd-puller? No.

"The plot doesn't grip, the score, adequate enough as background music, fails to provide any memorable balance. Highpoints are still the same as they were when the show opened," wrote Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph. He ended by saying: "I doubt whether any amount of revision could succeed in making a silk purse out of the original material."

We'll soon find out, because next Tuesday yet another version opens, at West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds for a three-month run, to be followed by a six-month tour of England and Scotland before hitting London. Ireland is not yet on the official tour schedule, but will be, if Conall Morrison has anything to do with it, he assures me. Because if Martin Guerre Mark 3 is the rip-roaring success the Cameron Macintosh machine would have us believe, it will be down to the 32-year-old from Co Armagh. I caught him during a break in the technical run-through on the afternoon of the first preview. Experienced man of the theatre though he is, this is Morrison's first musical. How did it feel? "There are a lot of musicals I've seen which send my stomach into knots of pain and embarrassment but my stomach tells me that this is an absolutely pain-free zone. I think it's very robust stuff indeed."

The young, associate director of the Abbey might seem a strange choice for a pile-em-high populist musical. But Cameron Macintosh has great faith in serious-minded directors. Miss Saigon was directed by Nicholas Hytner, and Martin Guerre's first director was Declan Donnellan, whose Cheek By Jowl company was far from mainstream. Macintosh hired Morrison after seeing his ground-breaking production of Tarry Flynn at the Abbey last year. "I suppose Tarry Flynn was a large cast, about a rural community and that's the connection that he made in his head," Morrison explains modestly.

The present cast of 23 is considerably smaller than the original, but the setting is still definitely rural. There, any similarity with Morrison's recent work in Dublin - Kavanagh and Boucicault - ends. This is no jaunty comedy but a dark tale of love and deceit set in war-torn 16th-century France. The story is by now familiar to cinema-goers via the French film version of the same name, starring Gerard Depardieu and the American cover, Sommersby starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster, where the action was shifted to the American Civil War.

Andrew Lloyd Webber once said: "A musical is either organically right or organically wrong. If it's organically wrong, no amount of fixing can help". Morrison's contention is that by the time he was involved there was not that much wrong with it anyway. After all, he reminded me, it ran for nearly two years and won the 1996 Lawrence Olivier Award for Best Musical.

"I went to see it when I knew that the guys wanted to talk to me about it, and it was hugely impressive. It has a negative reputation simply because it didn't run for 13 years like Les Mis. There was so much to enjoy but I agreed with their analysis that the story wasn't that clear and the scale was too big."

Because, like all such musicals, Martin Guerre is essentially a love story, a love story whose background happens to be civil war. "One problem that I did have when I first saw it was that it was too straightforward," he admits. "One side were goodies and one side were baddies. And whatever the historical veracity I didn't feel it worked dramatically. It lacked the balance you have between the Montagues and Capulets or the Jets and the Sharks. If you're going to have a classical story of a couple of individuals being crushed or pulled around by the collective will, you need to feel a dramatic balance of powers within that collective will."

Brought up a Catholic 10 miles from Portadown, Morrison knows the pressures of living in a community riven by sectarian division. And he has now put this aspect of Martin Guerre firmly centre stage. "It's still a popular musical and works within those conventions, but the explorations of prejudice, of poverty, or environmental factors - all the kind of contexts that are going to empower or drive the love story - are explored to the utmost. I think that, without making any grandiose claims for the piece, it does have something to say about sectarian hatred and the quick steps that can lead to civil war, be it Northern Ireland, be it Kosovo, be it wherever. Even though it's set four centuries ago people go down the same tragic steps and we're repeating that pattern very much today."

Morrison's collaborator, choreographer David Bolger, had perhaps an even more daunting task: according to the critics, the choreography by veteran show-biz hoofer Bob Avian was the best part of the original show. But Bolger says this was not a problem. "Conall wanted a very different approach. He wanted to bring out the realism and the harshness. So I wanted a very earthy feel to the choreography to explain who these people were. And when we auditioned we were looking for different abilities, different looks and shapes, people who would represent a community and who didn't look like trained dancers on a stage."

So what does David Bolger think? Is Cameron Macintosh mad to be throwing God-knows-how-much money at this jinxed show, or is it third time lucky? "I think, the bottom line is that it's an absolutely beautiful score, and I really admire Cameron's drive to get it on and to stand by it." Then he tells me about one girl who he learnt last week had been in the show since the beginning. "I said to her, `this must be really strange'. And she said, `no, it's fantastic, because it's so different, it's like a completely different show and it's brilliant'."