Review

Peter Crawleyreviews Bleeding Poets at The New Theatre.

Bleeding Poets, The New Theatre, Dublin

"You poets," fumes the Dublin barmaid Mary Malone (Lisa Lambe) at her boisterous clientele. "You think you can say whatever you like, do whatever you like." "Yeah," drawls Edgar Allan Poe, "it's called poetic licence." Daniel Reardon's new play abounds with such liberties (not to mention such gags), imagining an encounter between three famous 19th-century bards in the Bleeding Horse pub during 1847, the worst year of the Great Famine.

Here, Francis Sylvester Mahony (Arthur Riordan), a prolix and aesthetically scornful former priest, awaits the pub's most regular customer, the tortured eccentric James Clarence Mangan (Mark O'Regan). Mahony's hopes are not too different, one suspects, to those of Reardon's play: that by simply bringing these figures together, they will ignite a rich celebration of poetry; Mahony having recently raided the vaults of the Vatican for obscure works, which he hopes the pair will bring to the world's attention.

How Edgar Allan Poe (Michael James Ford) fits into this is anybody's guess, but in he bursts, pistol cocked, spitting out oaths like a hard-boiled detective. Then again, plotting is not the strong point of Bleeding Poets, which brushes past the flimsiness of its premise in pursuit of a pleasantly donnish exercise in matching biography to poetry.

Director and composer Trevor Knight has not exactly been given a verse drama to work with, yet he must attempt to express poetry theatrically, replicating its intoxication with music and movement. For this he depends largely on Lambe, at once an earthy counterbalance to the poets' heady discussion, but whose beauty and magnificent singing also casts her in the role of muse: poetry in motion.

This also works nicely when each poet delivers a competitive "Bell's poem", pitching the bouncy pastoralism of Mahony's Shandon Bells to the declamatory horrors of Poe's The Bells, before resolving in the sad, slow tolling of Mangan's The Passing Bell - each rendition supplying its own character note.

Reardon's reverence to these conjured figures often mires the play in extended quotation and a burdened sense of historical explication. The real poetic licence lies in more outlandish, contemporary touches. Regan's hilarious, slurring portrayal, for instance, wittily acknowledges Shane MacGowan (himself a Mangan fan), while Ford's audacious take on Poe becomes all the more fun for its psychotic amplification. Riordan, meanwhile, is one of the few actors who can negotiate over-written jawbreakers and almost make them sound like natural speech.

There is, however, a fretful energy to Roomkeepers' production, filling the void of narrative (neither the poets nor the play have anywhere to go) with the misspent voltage of farce and sudden, perfunctory parodies. The play is certainly erudite, but by no means smug, genuinely keen to share its appreciation for the beauty and madness of poetry. The consequence is that it makes a more satisfying primer than a play.

Runs until Mar 22