Rabbit and Bat make a comeback

And they say none of us knew nothing. Well, Rabbit knew plenty, even then.Rabbit wouldn't need tribunals to tell him what was going on. His father Bat would be horrified, however. His stupid, flustering old father, who doesn't know the value of money, loves his wife and harbours romantic revolutionary ideals.

You'd think Rabbit would have rid himself of the memory of his father by now, but the word is, that when Donal O'Kelly's Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son, which first went up in a Rough Magic production in 1988, returns next week to Kilkenny Arts Festival, the struggle between father and son will still be going on.

Rabbit, a self-made haulage magnate with a swivel chair and a Louis le Brocquy on his wall, is haunted by his father, Bat, a gentle, loving and basically, defeated man. Bat's defeat was the defeat of the country, bled dry by colonialism and a botched revolution. Like so many Irish plays, the idea of the state as misconceived comes across - Bat's wife, Mamie, lovingly calls her husband "me little revolutionary" as they sport around in the newly-plumbed-in, womb-like bath; but the revolution has gone down the plug-hole.

The moment in the play which sums up Bat's humiliation is the refusal of his boss, Mr Curbishley, to take Rabbit on board his boat because he has no life-belt, although he had been promised the trip: "Can he swim?" asks Curbishley, cruelly and unnecessarily. Bat calls Curbishley a "Blue shirt bastard", and O'Kelly, who performs all of the characters himself, gives him an Anglo-Irish twang. Curbishley is the inheritor of privilege and the Free State has given Bat no freedom. Rabbit's nose starts to twitch with humiliation that day,and his vision of progress becomes the crass abandonment of his father's decency. That day, Rabbit starts to look for a way to finish the revolution his own way.

The path he chooses is to kill the memory of his father's world. He climbs out of it ruthlessly, on the back of others. Now his haulage trucks are speeding along the roads of the "empire" - the new, European one - replete with "luscious foods" such as "hazlett, Keogh, and picnic roll, maple-cured bacon, butter-basted viandes . . . "

But still he can't completely kill the memory of his father, and the past he evokes. With his side-kick Keogh, he reverses Robert Ballagh's steel table, which has served as Bat's womb-bath, and turns it into a boat, so that he can go on that trip which Curbishley denied him so long ago. Amid Joycean runs of language - and the journey itself is Joycean - he tries to conquer, to get between the "concrete thighs" of the bay.

O'Kelly is fascinated by such Odyssean quests as evidence of men's misplaced need to be heroes. In his 1997 play, Catalpa, in many ways a companion piece to Bat the Father he deliberately mocks the Odyssean journey for its cost to women, and by extension, of course, its cost to men. And while The Catalapa was meant to be on a whaling expedition, harpooning all that soft flesh, it was really part of a successful Fenian conspiracy, so the question of successful and unsuccessful revolution is again posed.

O'Kelly's gift in 1988 was to portray Irish society in transition while that transition was happening. In 1988, Bat's world, with its poverty, its community and its revolutionary ideals, still seemed quite close. However, O'Kelly understood the value of "Cash-converted!" and could see, with his artist's gift of prophecy, that Bat was doomed and Rabbit's wheeling-dealing capitalism would win out. The play's poetic yet precise portrayal of that transition makes it one of the great Irish plays, and one of the greatest of the 1980s, a golden age for Irish theatre.

It was a golden age for Irish theatre, surely, because there was so little else to do and so many people writing that some would have to write something worthwhile. The complicity between the audience and the theatre was another factor; surely it existed because relative hardship created a great illusion, at least, of community.

There was also, it seems to me, a general uneasiness about who belonged in Ireland and to whom Ireland belonged. Perhaps it was a sort of post-colonial angst. And so Rabbit, as he sails around Dublin on his steel table, has the same compulsive need to trace the outline of, and name, the landscape which we see in old Irish ballads, and which we see in Joyce. Rabbit captains his craft: " . . . full steam ahead, Keogh! Stoke her up to full steam ahead for the Pigeon House pointing in its own peculiar way to Chapelizod where we're bound. In between her concrete thighs, Bejasus! Chapelizod here we come! Head for the Pigeon House, Keogh! Dollier over that side! The Virgin on the Rocks watching us as we pass!"

All of that anxiety seems to have passed. So has the special complicity of audience with theatre. While the play is prescient in many ways, it may show its age when it presents itself before a Kilkenny audience next week. If Rabbit were real, you feel, he would no longer be haunted by the ghost of Bat, the past would have receded, and far from needing to enter the "concrete thighs" of the bay, he would be sitting pretty on Killiney Hill, looking out at it.

Perhaps not, however. Perhaps Bat, beckoned back to life, will silence Rabbit enough to reconnect his audience with the injustices of the past, so that it can see more clearly the injustices of the present, and with the kindness and compassion of his own personality. Perhaps, this time, it may even seem that he could - after a few tribunals - win the struggle and find the heart under Rabbit's pinstripes.

Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son runs from Saturday, August 12th until Wednesday, August 16th at 6 p.m. at the Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle