Stage Struck

Peter Crawleyon a sudden profusion of political plays.

WHAT is the point of political theatre? Is it to take an audience - a mass of prejudice with hearts, minds and a few programmes - and move it towards a new point of view? Should it challenge prejudices, shock us out of a fixed position, or simply reaffirm the truths we hold dear? Or can political theatre actually be entertaining?

I only ask because political theatre is big business right now. Shortly after the Abbey's Julius Caesar - a study in power, ambition and relentless spin dryly staged in an election year - the hottest tickets in Dublin town are Don Carlos and Kicking a Dead Horse. All art is political, as George Orwell once underlined with a neat irony: "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." But here politics does not lurk beneath the surface.

Don Carlos, for instance, is billed as a political thriller, although the emphasis of Rough Magic's production is firmly on the first part. It may be an 18th-century drama, pitting individual freedom against institutional tyranny, but any play that contains the line, "The instrument that God places in my hand is terror", as Mike Poulton's new version does, is going to have more than a chime of relevance for our own age.

Elsewhere, Sam Shepard's new play, an absurd comedy about a hapless art dealer's efforts to bury his inconveniently deceased horse (which had sold out before it opened), is bound to be read as a political allegory.

At one stage, Stephen Rea delivers a comically exasperated, potted history of the American Dream. His litany touches the expansion of the railroad, slavery, and the invasion of sovereign nations. "What else can we possibly do?" he asks.

On opening night, this got a wry laugh of recognition, the auditorium's equivalent of a sage "hear, hear!", which reminded me of something Edward Albee said not too long ago. "All theatre is political if it engages you. If more people took theatre seriously we'd have different election results. I've yet to meet a serious playwright who wasn't a liberal democrat."

Really? I'm no fan of slavery, oppression, invasion or inconveniently deceased horses, but there's something about an assumed political consensus in a theatre that chills the blood. Albee never met Shakespeare or Schiller, but it's safe to assume that neither of them was a card-carrying lib-dem. If the soul of drama is conflict, there's nothing particularly consoling about an agreed ideological outcome, however right-on.

This week's addition to our political party is Talking to Terrorists, a "docudrama" by Robin Soans, which tries to sidestep the charge of propaganda by scrupulously assembling the reported speech of terrorists and victims alike.

There is some worth in going to the theatre to rehearse or reinforce your political convictions, to sound out their structure and test them for hollows, even if you leave with every prejudice still intact. That's my conviction. But one day I hope to see a show and change my mind.