Staging betrayal

Judas sits on the table pulling on a cigarette. Jesus paces up and down wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with an image of Don Quixote. Jesus begins to speak. But wait a minute, can this be He? He's talking about being interviewed for membership of the Apostles ("When I was being interviewed for my job as an apostle/ I thought Jesus's questions were rather prickly,/Like sitting on thistles"). Judas is acting like he was the one doing the interview ("Congrats, the job is yours"). Eventually it becomes clear that Judas and Jesus have agreed to swap roles, just to see what it feels like. Uneasy. But interesting.

A surreal and satirical blend of voices from history, myth and contemporary Irish society, Brendan Kennelly's best-selling sequence of poems, The Book of Judas, first appeared in 1991. Turning the notion of betrayal on its head, the book depicts Judas as a scapegoat in the grand design of Christ's martyrdom. Now a slimmed-down version of Kennelly's Judas is making its stage debut, thanks to Maciek Reszczynski, artistic director of Theatre Unlimited who has been honing it for performance for the last five years.

"When Kennelly gave me a copy of the book he said `Would you ever put a bit of an oul' dramatic shape on this'," recalls Reszczynski on a break from rehearsals in Kilkenny. The play is co-produced by the Kilkenny Arts Festival.

Judas is played by Adrian Dunbar, and - wearing a biblical-looking beard - Phelim Drew plays Jesus. The third member of the cast, David Collins, has not yet appeared. It is only day two of rehearsal, but already the atmosphere is intense: "It's a scientific experiment aimed at establishing whether they will get closer to the truth if they swap sides," says Reszczynski.

Reszczynski demonstrates an obsessed dance with a silver coin before throwing it on the wooden floor - the sound is chilling.

This is not his first encounter with a Kennelly ouevre. He also created a stage version of Cromwell, which was first performed back in 1986 (in which David Collins, who also appears in Judas, played the title role). The stage version of Cromwell - a powerful satirical cycle of poems about another loathed villain as well as an investigation into Irish history, society and inherited neuroses - began as a once-off at the Kavanagh's Yearly gathering in Carrickmacross, was performed in the GMB at TCD for select audiences, transferred to the Damer Hall and thence, by 1992, to the Bush Theatre in London: "Cromwell went on and on," he recalls.

So how did Reszczynski, a Polish actor now working as "an Internet wizard" for the BBC in London, come to found Theatre Unlimited in Ireland? It is a long and dramatic story, worthy of a stage version of its own. In 1982 the Dublin Theatre Festival "got a thing about Polish theatre" and invited the Contemporary Theatre of Wroclaw (of which he was a member) to perform a play called Birthrate as part of the festival. The company returned to the DTF in 1983 to perform Anna Livia, its memorable version of Finnegans Wake. TCD graduate Daire Brehan was so inspired that she followed the company back to Poland to study with them as an apprentice assistant director. Reszczynski was her interpreter. Three months after they met they got married.

By 1984 Brehan was expecting their first daughter Klara and the two came to Ireland "on a coal boat from Poland". They met Brendan Kennelly who remembered Daire from her stint in Players and told her Cromwell would make "a great show". They ended up in Kilkenny, where they set up Theatre Unlimited. The name of the company was chosen to reflect the unlimited potential of theatre: "At that time film and TV were seen as threatening to theatre, whereas we believed theatre had nothing to fear because it is all based on the imagination. Apart from the plays of Tom McIntyre such as Dance for Your Daddy, the unlimited potential of theatre was not such an obvious thing in Ireland. It was different for me, I came from Grotowski town; I was full of Peter Brook."

Dramatising a cycle of poems such as Cromwell - and later, Judas - did not seem such a daunting task for him because "poetry is central to the Polish idea of theatre. All the big national dramas are rhymed plays. The Wroclaw company I worked in was trying to find a way forward for theatre, inspired by poetry, not in the traditional sense of text, but in terms of imagery and hallucinations."

He laughs. "Kennelly's poetic anachronisms work for me. I learned the history of Ireland through Cromwell. That's why I'm not so popular in England, where I live now. I'm a Paddy-Polack."

WE return to the genesis of Judas. How did he cut down the almost 400-page book of poems into a 90-minute stage play? He admits that many of the book's colourful characters had to be abandoned, including the Pinstripe Pig, the Wurrum, the Chat Show Host, Ozzie the Dublin delinquent and the Twelve Apostlettes (among them Dolly Mount and Sally Noggin). James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Hitler do make an appearance, however:

"The poems that are included have not been butchered and they are hung on the skeleton of the Passion Play. Any poem that did not move along the main story - and it is the greatest story ever told - was cut out," he explains. "It's all about a key moment, where they exchange roles and Judas wonders: `If I had not betrayed you would the Bible have been useless'?"

He acknowledges that Poland is now "like Ireland was in the 1970s - priest-ridden", but the religious element of the story of Judas is not its appeal for him: "This is not really about the Bible. Judas is the archetypal traitor and Jesus is the archetypal god of love. It is about two people being unfaithful to each other. They could be a pair of farmers in the west of Ireland. One would give his life for the other. But in the right circumstances, he'd sell him too. It fascinates me why people do that. You can't explain it. The old stories are filled with contemporary content, and Kennelly is able to capture that."

Judas runs from Saturday, August 12th until Sunday, August 20th at 8 p.m.