A slice of life on a decorated platter

ONE of my favourite cartoons is from Dublin Opinion in the 1930s. In it, two formidable, Dublin, working class matrons are squaring up to each other with evil intent. One of them is fixing her narrowed eyes on the other and saying "Looka here, Mrs Murphy, we'll have none of your Abbey Theatre realism in this here tenement." It is an acute comment on the difficulty that so often faces anyone trying to dramatise urban, working class life: where does the realism end and the reality begin?

Paula Meehan's first play for adults, Mrs Sweeney, produced by Rough Magic at the Project in Dublin, could almost have been called Juno And The Pigeon. It is, at one level, an updating of Sean O'Casey's early plays. The old Georgian tenements have given way to a place not a million miles from Fatima Mansions but there is the same sense of working class people living simultaneously at the end of their tether and in each other's ears.

The tough, hard bitten mother has, like Juno, to cope with a useless husband and his talkative crony, though her daughter's disaster is not pregnancy but death from AIDS. The Covey like know all, well played by Anto Nolan, still likes the sound of his own voice but the theories he expounds are gathered not from Generski's thesis on the origins of the proletariat but from New Age books and obscure television programmes.

At another level, though, Paula Meehan reaches back much further than O'Casey for her inspiration. As her title suggests, the play is also a feminist take on the Irish legend of the mad birdman, Sweeney Among The Branches, a story that has attracted the interest of, among others, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and Flann O'Brien.

Again, as with O'Casey, the myth is brought both up to date and down to earth. This Sweeney is a middleaged Dubliner so traumatised by the slaughter of his beloved racing pigeons that he begins to imagine that he is one. In taking on the myth, Meehan turns, as she put it in an early poem, to the figures of women Hollow of cheek with poverty/ And the whippings of history!

Within this rich weave of resonance and allusion, the problem is to find the room for realism. For on this highly decorated platter, the play also tries to serve up an old fashioned slice of life. While playing with aspects of literary and theatrical tradition, it also tries to simply draw attention to present day social realities. The world we are asked to envisage is that of a marginalised Ireland, where crime, drugs, domestic violence and AIDS prey on the lives of three women (played by Ger Ryan, Neili Conroy and Gina Moxley). The play is, in other words, trying to be both a knowing exercise in style and an honest revelation of an often hidden reality.

THE surprising thing is not that it doesn't work but that it comes so close. The flaws are obvious enough.

It is too long and slow. It has too little development. Too much of what the characters have to say lies uncomfortably between dialogue and declamation. Some of it is more like a bad parody of O'Casey than an improvisation on his themes. (Does any working class Dublinman, outside the Abbey stage, talk about himself in the third person, as the drunken husband does here - "Nobody says a word to Jimmy O'Reilly"?) And, though she makes brilliant use of the spaces opened up by Barbara Bradshaw's excellent set, director Kathy McArdle sometimes allows the actors to talk into empty space rather than to each other, exacerbating the disembodied feel of some of the language.

But with all these difficulties, there are also extraordinary moments of theatre. Somewhat paradoxically for a play written by a very fine poet, Mrs Sweeney is at its best when the focus is on the action, not the words. And what is striking is that the further the action moves away from realism, the more convincing it gets. In the second half of the play, when the mechanics of setting up a realistic plot are left behind and the writer's gift for a hardedged, angry absurdity is given full rein, there are some startling and gripping scenes.

As Sweeney becomes all bird, and as strange objects - a Starry Plough flag, a hideous Virgin Mary lamp, the weird carnivalesque costumes that the women don for a Hallowe'en party - take centre stage, the play acquires not just a darkly anarchic sense of humour but a vivid theatrical life.

Ger Ryan as Lil Sweeney and Mick Nolan as the birdman of Maria Goretti Mansions begin to occupy the stage with a new conviction. The blacker the humour, the starker the imagery, the better the performances and the more enthralling the theatre.

What this suggests is that it is the wild myth of the Sweeney story and not the apparent social realism of O'Casey that is best able to get to the heart of lives on the edge of Irish society today. The challenge is not so much to show the way we live now but to shape it through the imagination into images that will burn themselves into the brain. When she has the courage to pursue such images, Paula Meehan proves that she certainly has the imagination to forge them.