Art and the Mirror Image

I READ in the Guardian the other day that "the trickle of plays and playwrights crossing the Irish Sea has become a flood".

I am always interested in natural phenomena as they apply to the arts and was further intrigued to read in the same article that, according to playwright Jimmy Murphy, it is a British misconception that Ireland is full of playwrights and wonderful plays: "You think what you see in England is the tip of the iceberg. It isn't. What you see is what there is.

The business of trickles and floods and what is or isn't an iceberg can confuse. The popular notion of the iceberg as metaphor is that six sevenths of the mass is beneath the surface. So we are meant to understand that there isn't really that much Irish play talent in England (or Ireland).

But this obscures the actual size of icebergs, which can be as big as a 10 storey building. And that's only the ones originating in the Arctic. Those from the Antarctic are quite often up to five miles long, with the visible bit rising maybe 45 metres above water.

That is one big lump of ice. If we must talk then of an artistic output in iceberg terms, we have to be more specific. The tip of an Antarctic iceberg, artistically speaking, is enormous, and we Irish have no need to feel ashamed here just because there is nothing beneath it.

In the same Guardian article, Dermot Bolger is quoted as saying that 25 years ago, there was an archetypal Irish play: "The country had a mirror it could look into and see itself. Occasionally it would run off screaming, but the mirror was there. Now it's as if someone has smashed the mirror into a thousand pieces. It makes a pretty lousy place to live, but it's great if you're a writer because there's so much to write about."

If Ireland's mirror was broken, the question arises as to who broke it, and was this wanton act of vandalism reported at the time? The artistic community itself falls under suspicion since it expresses such delight at its breaking. There is a "motive", as the Garda would say.

As for the old National Mirror days, Joyce must have been full of regret in later years that he did not stay on in Ireland for more interesting "material" than the dreary stuff he used himself, and that he was born in such dull and uninteresting times with no hint of child abuse or priestly misbehaviour or orphan abandonment or drug addiction. Finding the universal in the particular is all very well but the writer is better off when things are actually happening in the country, that's well known, a bit of action and turmoil and stuff splashed across the national media, that's what's wanted to get the artist going.

During "The Troubles" of course, the artists were out in force, delighted to have access to this exciting material. It was strange, however, that 25 years of warfare gave rise to no more than a couple of decent plays and a few passable stories (and a great deal of rubbish), no one knows why, dammit, it wasn't as if the artists were stuck in the old National Mirror days.

But it is great that living in such a "lousy" place we can now took forward to plays based on child abuse and so on, "reflecting" (in the broken mirror, I suppose) modern Ireland, now such a grown up country with the keys to its own door. The socially concerned drama is the thing of course, Beckett made terrible mistakes in the direction he took, that's clear enough now.

All right. I see where the rural guards are again bemoaning their low tech life. They want to have - fax machines and computers and mobile phones like the lads in Dublin - excuse me, their "city counterparts".

This headlong rush for new technology and its supposed benefits is ill advised. There is no evidence to show that new technology in Dublin garda stations has improved the crime detection rate.

Am I then among those misguided romantics who want to keep the rural police force mired in the past, left in its backwaters without access to modern methods of crime detection and prevention?

No. But there is more to a country Garda station than crime prevention and community service. There are cultural connotations. How many plays, for example, could ever have been conceived, never mind staged, if the rural garda could not be seen, metaphorically (or metaphysically) to walk on stage at the opportune moment and without necessarily saying a word, change the whole course of the drama?

There would be no Playboy of the Western World for a start.