Political theatre has been around for a very long time. The most recent incarnation of the genre was led by the British director Nick Kent, who produced at The Tricycle in London a series of hard-hitting documentary dramas culled from the transcripts of notable public inquiries. At their best, such as The Colour of Justice, a highly-charged account of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, these dramatisations – based on verbatim documentary sources – acted as a lightning rod for public interest, understanding and, more often than not, anger as they sought to make accessible urgent, real-life political issues. It led Kent, by way of explanation, to coin the phrase “public-service theatre”.
In Ireland, the market for this form of theatre has been dominated by the journalist-turned-playwright Colin Murphy. The most notable and celebrated of his dramas were his earliest, detailing the events leading up to and around the financial crisis of 2008, which led to the now-infamous bank guarantee and the humiliating denouement of the IMF bailout not long thereafter. Two of his plays, Guaranteed! and Bailed Out!, brilliantly lifted the lid on events which shaped a generation, the effects of which we are still living with today.
There followed, during the Decade of Centenaries, retrospective looks at Irish historic events in the register of current-affairs documentaries. However, it is probably fair to say nothing that followed had the same impact as those early plays, which sought to capture the zeitgeist as it unfolded. They were, indeed, thrilling.
Playwrights acknowledge – and if they don’t, they should – their debt to the actors who first bring their work to life and the director who puts a shape on and orchestrates it. Given the vastness of the material to be wrestled into coherent drama here and the fact that Murphy was, at the time, a neophyte dramatist, the roles of the director Conall Morrison, the new-play company Fishamble and its director Jim Culleton cannot be overstated. They were pivotal in the success of these works. Colin Murphy does not stint in acknowledging that in his introduction.
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The collection presents the works in historical chronological order from the fight for sovereignty, which began in the GPO in 1916, to the symbolic surrendering of that sovereignty in the bailout of 2010. Read in this order, it is clear that Colin Murphy, like many an Irish playwright before him going back to O’Casey and beyond, has an acute realisation that the arc of history bends not just to tragedy but to farce.
Ben Barnes is a freelance opera and theatre director and a former artistic director of the Abbey Theatre.
