Culture Shock Fintan O'TooleMark O'Rowe is one of our best playwrights, but his work highlights the challenge facing Irish theatre writing
There is, I think, a widespread feeling that this is not a great time for new Irish drama. For a long time, we have been spoiled by the happy conjunction of three generations of playwrights. With the likes of Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy and Tom Murphy showing extraordinary stamina, the middle generation of Frank McGuinness, Marina Carr and Sebastian Barry remaining productive and the younger voices of Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Enda Walsh, Elizabeth Kuti and others making their own noise, five decades of invention have been intermeshed. But this field has been thinning out.
The playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and early 1960s can't be expected to produce a new masterpiece every year. The middle and younger generations have been struggling, like the rest of society, to find a shape for the political and cultural confusions of the new Ireland. And there are now more counter-attractions to the ill-paid and much-abused profession of playwright. McDonagh has given it up for the movies; Barry, for the moment, for novels.
But there are, I think, deeper questions about the form itself, and they arise quite sharply in Mark O'Rowe's new play at the Peacock, Terminus. O'Rowe is arguably the most interesting of the younger generation of playwrights. He has brilliance, daring and a high degree of virtuosity. These qualities are all on display in Terminus and make it essential viewing. But the play also highlights the struggles with form and language - and with the relationship between them - that need to be resolved if Irish drama is to move forward.
Those struggles revolve, to a large extent, around the dominance of the monologue, the form that has become the first resort for writers such as McPherson, Eugene O'Brien and O'Rowe. We know that these writers can write dialogue because we've seen I Went Down, The Actors, Intermission and Pure Mule. But it is as if, in their own minds, dialogue is for the screen and monologue for the stage. And this in turn suggests that the problem that they are struggling with is not dialogue but action. They come from a generation whose idea of action is formed by television and film and who don't seem to really trust the stage as a space where stories are played out rather than being merely told. Perhaps, for them, the mechanics of theatre - the laborious business of entrances and exits, of establishing characters and situations through dialogue - seem dull in comparison to the slick pyrotechnics of film narrative.
With O'Rowe, however, there is something else going on. What makes him so interesting as a playwright is his commitment to language. He has a strong sense of the need for a specific theatrical language. In this sense, his addiction to monologue isn't just a reaction to the dominance of the screen, it's a conscious search for an alternative to the screen. His obvious ambition is to forge a kind of speech that is both artificial enough to acknowledge the unnatural context of the theatre and tough enough to have the demotic immediacy of an urgent conversation.
In Terminus, a play made up of three alternating monologues, he takes that search beyond the eclectic influences that have been obvious in previous plays (Friel's Faith Healer, the slangy stage poetry of Steven Berkoff, the imagery of American movie violence) into another connection with popular culture. All those previous inspirations are still around, but they're overshadowed by a more upfront force: rap. Its presence is underlined by the use, more than once, in the internal dialogue of the term "nigger", but such heavy hints are unnecessary. The monologues are conducted through a maze of rhymes and rhythms, of assonances and alliterations, of off-beat metres and syncopations.
Where previous O'Rowe plays have been driven by with a kind of Joycean wordplay, here the energy that pulses through the words is the rapper's extempore flow: "We go, see the slow-mo ebb and flow of pub-spill; the mill, the babble, the rabble of wobbling waywards, exiled and aimless . . ."
There is an exhilaration in O'Rowe's inventiveness but also a mesmerising quality to the rhythm that gives the ingenuity a shape. There is also a narrative freedom in the form, an ability to move from the mundane to the fantastical, and from pathos to a final passage of breathtaking, outrageous and sublimely grotesque humour. It is easy to see why O'Rowe is testing this language, and what he's searching for within it.
Yet, as a theatrical experience, the play never matches the writing. However fine the performances by Andrea Irvine, Eileen Walsh and Aidan Kelly, however much the designs of Jon Bausor and Philip Gladwell add to the stark facts of three largely static actors delivering their lines, the contrast remains between the soaring language and the earthbound staging.
Ironically, the problem is exactly the one that faced Irish writing a century ago, when poets wanted actors to stand still and deliver their beautifully wrought lines. That impulse had to be abandoned and poets such as Yeats had to look for new ways of using music, dance and design to give physical expression to their words. They realised that great theatre has to exist in two dimensions: words and action. Sooner or later, the new writers, if they are to become great, will have to do likewise.