Getting back to the story

By accident or by design, eircom Dublin Theatre Festival opened on successive nights two shows that stand at the extremes of contemporary theatre. One, Robert Wilson's stunning version of Georg Bⁿchner's Woyzeck, was a consummate synthesis of an idea that has been in motion since Wagner's stagings of his own operas: the notion that theatre is not a separate art form but a crossroads where all the forms - musical, visual and verbal - meet. The other, Peter Brook's version of Can Themba's Le Costume (The Suit), offered a chance to share the vision of the man who led the revolt against this idea by seeking to return to the roots of theatre.

By marking out these two clear boundaries, the festival also established an ideal pitch on which to judge the state of play of Irish theatre. Where does it stand on a scale between Wilson and Brook? Has it evolved anything like the technical mastery of Copenhagen's Betty Nansen Theatre, without which Woyzeck would have been impossible? Does it, on the other hand, have the capacity to tell stories with the awesome directness of Le Costume? Or can it ignore these oppositions and find its own path to excellence?

With work on view by some of Ireland's major writers - Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Conor McPherson and Neil Jordan - some kind of answer could be expected to emerge.

The one thing that seems clear is that no Irish company could mount a spectacle such as Wilson's Woyzeck. This kind of total theatre requires actors who can also sing powerfully and move precisely, and for all the advances in professional skills, Irish theatre doesn't have many. It also requires a sophistication in the use of, for example, lighting, that is not obviously available.

The nearest Irish approach to the kind of theatre on view in the festival was Blue Raincoat's version of Macbeth. In the 10 years of its life, the Sligo company has made an impressively coherent attempt to locate the techniques of European physical theatre in an Irish context. Yet Niall Henry's production suggested the effort still has a long way to go.

The show was precisely that: a display of physical performance skills that occasionally focused themselves into concentrated images. Two scenes - Banquo's ghost and Macbeth's second encounter with the witches - were memorable. Entirely absent elsewhere, however, was any notion of what the techniques were for. Instead of telling the story of Macbeth in a different way, the show ended up not telling it at all.

The decision to deliver the verse in hollow monotones may have been deliberate, but deliberate monotony is still monotonous. Too much seemed merely capricious. Someone may know, for example, why the actors were dressed like refugees from a Delacroix painting or, to put it less heroically, from a production of Les MisΘrables, but no one bothered to tell the audience.

An interesting contrast was the other big Shakespeare show, Edward Hall's production of Rose Rage, an adaptation of the Henry VI plays from the Watermill Theatre in England. The same basic notion, of visual storytelling supported by music, was at work. A similar aesthetic of substituting invention for resources was on display. Large-scale battles were suggested by the act of chopping meat on a butcher's block. Impaling the head of a traitor on the gates of York meant hanging a piece of raw meat in a clear plastic bag from a mesh cage that also served as a wall, a tower and a dressing room.

The key difference was that Hall and his company were passionately interested in telling the story. However heavily they edited the text, however many liberties they took, everything was driven by the simplest, oldest and most powerful motor: what happens next? All the vividness and creativity was channelled towards the most basic goal: making a connection with the audience.

What we got with Rose Rage, therefore, was total theatre informed and modified by its opposite. There could be no doubt where the counterbalancing influence came from: Peter Brook. The visit of Brook's ThΘΓtre des Bouffes du Nord with its adaptation of Can Themba's story allowed us to see a quiet, subtle distillation of Brook's vision.

It is worth noting that the show is rooted in a form that has a strong grip on Irish culture: the short story. Themba's tale unfolds in a surprisingly familiar world. The 1950s Johannesburg township of Sophiatown that is conjured up with such magical mastery by Brook could be the 1920s Dublin of O'Casey or the 1950s Cork of Frank O'Connor: a place where anybody's business is everybody's business and the intimacy precludes privacy.

With four actors - three African and one African-American - and one basic but infinitely adaptable set, Brook moves seamlessly between the evocation of a teeming, populous, endlessly nosy place and the enactment of the most intimate betrayals and cruelties. A wife's infidelities are exposed by prying neighbours. Her husband's revenge takes the surreal form of making her treat as a member of the family the suit left behind by the fleeing lover.

All of this is done with an apparent simplicity that is immediately engaging: funny, charming, peculiar in an unthreatening way. Only when it lingers in the mind do you realise how immensely rich, complex and mysterious the story is. The movement of the actors between narration and acting out is orchestrated with a touch so light that we do not feel it directly. The empty suit becomes as powerful a presence as Banquo's ghost: an uninvited guest whose hauntings lead to madness and death. The inevitability of what happens when intimate sins become public humiliations is played out with such suppleness that the artifice is almost imperceptible.

Whatever the difficulties of total theatre in Ireland, it might seem that this kind of dramatic storytelling should come naturally. The story has long been the basic form of both popular and literary culture here. And if you're looking for a creator of hauntingly mysterious theatrical fables, the success of the Abbey's wonderful Tom Murphy season suggests it is not necessary to look beyond these shores.

At first glance, the three short plays assembled at the Gate would seem to confirm the impression that Irish theatre should forget about complex visual spectacles. Each of the three writers involved - Brian Friel, Neil Jordan and Conor McPherson - was born about 20 years before the next. Here, then, are three generations of playwrights exploring the possibilities of simple dramatic storytelling. Each has one set, one man and one woman.

What you might expect is that as you move from the older writers to the younger ones, there will be a discernible shift from a dense, literary style to a more visual, physical and dramatic one. Instead, we get the opposite. All three writers question most profoundly the possibility of telling a coherent story at all. And the one who makes the most inventive use of the stage is the oldest - and, apparently, most mainstream.

For all that Jordan and McPherson have worked in a primarily visual medium - cinema - their plays are deliberately uninterested in visual presentation. In Jordan's White Horses, the key dialogue is delivered on tape, mostly in the lugubrious tones of the invisible Stephen Rea. In McPherson's Come On Over, the actors, Dearbhla Molloy and Jim Norton, actually have bags over their heads for most of the time. In both, engagement with the audience is largely shunned in favour of a stark appraisal of the impossibility of communication.

Jordan's play centres on the mysterious nature of love, which appears and disappears, making coherent relationships unattainable. McPherson's deals with the mysterious nature of stories, the way each human encounter is trapped in a maze of unlikely connections. Though neither is greatly interested in the relationship between actors and audience, each has its own power.

Jordan uses downbeat wit, McPherson the mesmeric power of narrative, to give shape to a sense of shapelessness.

Yet it takes Friel, the master, to show that reflections on the impossibility of coherent stories can also be funny, lively and marvellously creative. His The Yalta Game uses Chekhov's story The Lady With The Lapdog as the diving board from which he plunges into his familiar concerns of memory, language and the power of illusion. It, too, is concerned with the slipperiness of stories, as the seductive eroticism of making up a tale gives way to the collapse of the distinction between what is real and what is imagined.

The difference is that, through Karel Reisz's beautifully paced direction of Ciarβn Hinds and Kelly Reilly, Friel doesn't write about all of this. He enacts it. The technique of the play is first to hook us on the pleasure of making the imaginary seem real, then to evoke the melancholic aftermath of this pleasure. As he reels out this small, perfect transformation of a story into a drama that utterly inhabits the stage, he points to the possibility that is still there for Irish theatre: a theatre besotted by words and stories that is still alive to the need to go beyond them.