IT IS not, this week, possible to see the Gate Theatre's superb production of Derek version of Phaedra, which ended a relatively short run last Saturday. Neither is it possible to see the second part of the Abbey's brilliant production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, for the simple reason that it has not been staged, and is unlikely to be in the near future. What these two plays have in common is (a) they are greats plays, acted, directed and designed to very high standards, (b) they are of foreign origin, ones being originally French, the other, American and (c) they have done mediocre business at the box office.
John Crowley's production of Phaedra is one that brings the weight of theatrical history to bear on the here and now. The play is refracted to us all the way from 428 BC, through a series of mirrors. Like a palimpsest manuscript, it has layers beneath layers Euripides's Hippolytus, itself a version of an earlier myth Racine's Phaedra, and now Derek Mahon's astonishingly adept version in which the language sparkles with the sheen of a newly minted coin.
What is bold and admirable about the production, indeed, is its willingness to rely on the freshness of the language to create the needs. Mahon's version, though it has subtle undercurrents of the present (Greece, like Ireland, has seen "too much random atrocity"), declines to adapt the time and, place of the action, just as Racine himself left the story in his Greek setting rather than shift it to 17th century France. He does not try to do what Tony Harrison did in his Phaedra Brittanica 20 years a go, and place the action in a recognisable and "relevant" context.
More importantly, he does not attempt to make the language colloquial or even obviously Irish in the way that many other Irish writers have done in the last 15 cars. The directness of his version, it's hard edged clarity and unmediated forcefulness, come from the sheer skill with which he balances a severe poetic form with vigorous, unpretentious and often playful content. The combination is familiar to readers of his poetry, but it is a familiarity that breeds awe, not contempt. Quite simply, Irish theatre is blessed to have a talent like Mahon's to draw on.
AND not only is the play accessible through Mahon's language, but it does also speak to things in modern Irish culture in a way that is more, profound than any surface political relevance or linguistic homeliness could. Racine's moral vision, deeply imbued as it is with the spirit of Jansenism, that peculiar Catholic version of puritanism that did so much to shape Irish culture in the 19th century is not far from home, And in more narrowly theatrical terms, Phaedra is a big part of the backdrop to Beckett.
John Crowley's production had the great intelligence to place its faith in the brilliance of Mahon's language and in the fact that the play already has, in a profound it indirect sense, a place in our culture. It had the confidence to take it for granted that this story can speak for itself and doesn't need to be tricked out with showy effects or soft concessions. And this is entirely appropriate to the play which is, after all, remarkable precisely for the sobriety, the under statement, the psychological truthfulness with which it slashes through the baroque grandiloquence that was all around it to make akey moment of the emergence of modern culture.
And that confidence was more than justified in Derbhla Molloy's wonderful Phaedra, a perfect embodiment of her own line "Panic behind a regal air Molloy was regal, imperious, commanding enough that you could see how far, she had fallen in her fierce, unmerciful love for her stepson Hipploytus. She was at every moment both monstrously demanding and abjectly abased.
Around her, she had Michael Byrne's powerfully repellent Theseus, an utterly convincing portrayal of a man whose heroic deeds have given him the aura of a sacred monster, very far gone beyond good and evil. Ingrid Craigie's Oenone, an ordinary woman caught up in the passions of titanic personalities and, crushed by them, managed to, make an usually unsympathetic character genuinely moving. And Gerard McSorley's final, thunderous aria, describing the death of his pupil Hipploytus, was a tour de force.
All of this made this Phaedra by a long way the finest Irish, production of a European classical play that I have seen. There was no feeling of watching a pale imitation, no need to make allowances, just a confident, consistently intelligent appropriation of a great work of European culture. Watching it you could feel that there is after all, some substance to the notion that we are all Europeans now. You could get, the same, kind of feeling of belonging to the international theatre that you got watching Angels in America.
Except, of course, that Irish audiences don't recall seem to share that feeling in numbers large enough to make Angels in America or Phaedra commercially viable even in subsidised theatres. Now that we have a theatre that is capable of, engaging with work from the wider world, it is not at all clear that there is an audience that is prepared to do the same.
