We live in the 19th century as well as the 21st

CULTURE SHOCK:THE NOVELIST Julian Gough stirred some debate recently with his attack on Irish writers for being backward-looking and failing to connect with "the electric currents of the culture". It is certainly true that, for the most part, Irish writing (indeed Irish art as a whole) was not very good at reflecting boomtime Ireland. It is also true that this has been a problem for the culture – a society without resonant images of its present self is prey to precisely the kind of self-delusion and false consciousness that had such disastrous consequences for our economy and society, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

There are, however, three important qualifications that need to be taken into account. Firstly, it was ever thus. The realistic tradition in Ireland is, on the whole, a fitful and fragmentary one. We don’t do straight reflections very well – we prefer cracked mirrors. Secondly, and consequently, just because a novel or a play is set in the 1950s doesn’t mean it’s about the 1950s. Art – especially the kind of angular art that is the Irish mainstream – is metaphorical. Most Shakespeare plays are set in Italy and/or the distant past. That does not mean that they are not “about” Tudor and Jacobean England. And thirdly, the present is a tricky tense in Ireland. What is our “now”? It may be globalisation and lattes, cybersex and property prices, but it is also the revelation of the past.

Irish society, to an unhealthy but undeniable extent, lives retrospectively.

The corruption tribunals, the Ryan and Murphy reports are also “now”. The stories they tell were contemporaneously untold. They exist, not as a sealed-off past, but as current affairs.

This does mean that Irish writers can approach things from the most oblique angles. Certainly for writers of an older generation – and we are extremely fortunate to have major authors with 50 years of work behind them – the habit of refracting stories through other stories has acquired an almost baroque complexity. There is even a process of double refraction, of contemporary Ireland strained through a European classic and then shifted back into an Irish past.

It is particularly striking that this approach has now been adopted by two 75-year-old Irish playwrights of the classic generation that came into its own in the 1960s, Tom Murphy and Tom Kilroy. Quite independently, Murphy and Kilroy have arrived at a similar destination with The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrantat the Abbey last June and Christ Deliver Us! on the same stage now. Both plays are based on 19th-century European classics – Murphy's on Mikhail Soltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlyov Family, Kilroy's on Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening, written in 1891 (though not staged until 1906).

Both are expansive, episodic pieces with large casts and disconnected narratives. Both combine dramatic, even melodramatic action and rapid shifts of scene with an oppressive, even claustrophobic atmosphere. Both have a slightly distanced, almost cinematic feel, as though the figures who inhabit them are more ghostly image than fleshy reality. It would be easy to say that these are the indulgences of old men who have long since been unplugged from the “electric currents of the culture”. It would also be entirely wrong. For if we view the two plays as serendipitous companion pieces, they function as a fascinating diptych on the depth psychology of contemporary Ireland. Put crudely, they deal with the twin source of its collective psychoses – property and sex.

It is, in the first place, a kind of statement in itself that these stories, however radically adapted, can make sense in a contemporary Irish context. Isn’t it a little scary that a mid-19th century Russian dissection of the mania for acquisition can function so well as a metaphor for early 21st-century Ireland? And that an 1890s attack on sexual repression and cruelty to children can be tailored so well to the Ireland of the Ryan report? The backward glance, in other words, is not merely retrospective. What may be the distant past elsewhere is still a part of our reality. We are living in the 19th century as well as the 21st.

In the case of Christ Deliver Us!, it makes particular sense that the play is essentially about ignorance. Its central concern – and Kilroy makes this even more explicit than Wedekind does – is with the gap between what the body knows, its urges and demands, and what the repressed mind can process and articulate. The wellspring of the entire tragedy is a simple act of explanation. Michael explains the facts of life to his friend Mossy in written words and drawings. This basic act of enlightenment sets in motion a wave of tragedies. Explicit knowledge is as dangerous here as it is in the Garden of Eden.

Kilroy locates this basic story brilliantly within a recognisable 1950s provincial Ireland, capturing the speech and manners of the period. But it unfolds more profoundly within the memory of that period, the bitter afterlife of its class distinctions, its industrial schools and Magdalen homes. If the play feels ghostly, it is because it is not essentially about a socially realistic 1950s but about our present need to confront the psychic legacy of the culture that was at its height in that decade.

And in this regard, a play about ignorance is entirely relevant to our present condition. The key psychological question of the Celtic Tiger years is the same as the one that hovers around the industrial schools: our collective ability to both know and not know. We knew that the industrial schools were institutions of organised cruelty but somehow remained detached from this knowledge. And we knew that much of boomtime Ireland was delusional, but allowed this knowledge to remain entirely inert. We do not have the luxury of looking with smug disdain on the wilful ignorance that Kilroy anatomises.

The remarkable thing is not that veterans like Murphy and Kilroy approach the present though the past. It is that they remain interested in that past, not for its own sake, but in relation to the way it has shaped our present world. The only difference is that they see boomtime Ireland, not as a sealed-off chamber of contemporary meanings, but as a trophy house haunted by its unacknowledged memories.