High drama on and off the stage

THEATRE: The good, the bad and the ugly - Irish Times critics look back on 2002 and assess the best and worst in the arts world over the past 12 months. Today: the year in theatre, dance and books.

During the 20th century, whenever there was talk of a "new Ireland", theatre was an important participant in the discussion.

In the early years of the century, when cultural nationalism was gathering force, the foundation of the Abbey was a key event.

In the 1920s, when the new State was finding its feet, playwrights like Denis Johnson and Sean O'Casey were both constructing and subverting its mythologies.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, John B. Keane, Hugh Leonard and Thomas Kilroy were dramatising the struggle between tradition and modernity in ways' that gripped the popular imagination and changed the terms of the argument.

Going on these precedents, we might expect that in 2002, as the frantic euphoria of the boom years gave way to a more anxious mood of questioning what we have achieved, the theatre would be to the fore.

It wasn't. There were some brave attempts to get to grips with the way we live now. But they were mostly honourable failures. And they were, in any case, the exception. Could we honestly say that anything on an Irish stage matched the gripping national psychodrama of Roy Keane in Saipan? If you wanted to see contemporary Ireland in the theatre, all you had to do, at one level, was look around you. The bright, glittering, ambitious Ireland of the 21st century was certainly an inescapable presence. But it was far more evident in the theatres themselves than in the drama they contained.

This is the paradox of Irish theatre in 2002: a spanking new infrastructure that loudly proclaims its confidence in the future, containing voices that speak in uncertain tones.

Two splendid new spaces - the Helix in Dublin City University, and the new Liberty Hall Centre that gave a home to the Dublin Theatre Festival - were added to the already impressive array of provincial and suburban theatres that have sprung up in the boom years.

These spaces in turn have generated an unprecedented demand for theatre productions and a whole new sense of access to an audience that can no longer be dismissed as a metropolitan elite. It is not at all clear, however, that the Irish theatre is capable of meeting that demand or responding to the new communities that can now, in theory at least, be addressed on their home ground.

It was somewhat symbolic, for example, that the first professional theatre show in the new Liberty Hall Centre, Donal O'Kelly's The Hand, was verbally rich but also curiously nostalgic.

It was also rather apt that in a year when we lost the first of the titans who emerged in the late 1950s, John B. Keane, theatre companies kept reminding us of the sheer scale and ambition with which 20th century Irish playwrights approached the history of their own times. Garry Hynes's immaculate production of Keane's Sive vividly re-created the shock of the play, bringing out the deep strangeness of the society Keane depicted.

Ben Barnes's production of The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey, showed, if nothing else, that O'Casey's brave confrontation with what were then recent and raw events created a work of lasting resonance.

The return of Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire to the Peacock, the Lyric's terrific production of the same writer's Conversations on a Homecoming and the Abbey's revival of Hugh Leonard's Da likewise underlined the success of these writers in taking a keenly observed Irish reality and turning it into a theatrical metaphor.

It was also rather poignant that both the new Irish plays at the Gate, Brian Friel's Two Plays After and Frank McGuinness's Gates of Gold, were looking back at theatre history, Friel elegantly nodding towards Chekhov, McGuinness more boisterously conjuring the spirit of Micheal MacLiammoir.

If all of this suggested a theatre culture brooding ruefully on past glories, the difficulties of trying to cope with Tribunal Ireland were obvious. With both the Gate and Druid having rather quiet years, it was left to the Abbey to push the boat out into these turbulent waters. However unsatisfactory the result, it should be said that failing in difficult tasks deserves a lot more praise than succeeding in easy ones. The Abbey, as we should expect from a National Theatre, at least had the guts to try.

It did so on the main stage with three new plays: Sebastian Barry's Hinterland, Gerard Stembridge's That Was Then, and Marina Carr's Ariel. Barry wrestled, perhaps too obviously, with the spirit of Charles Haughey. Stembridge probed the pomposity and smugness of the new Irish elite and picked up the vibes emanating from the Flood Tribunal with a property developer giving a bribe to a Minister. Carr re-imagined Agamemnon as a Midlands TD on the rise.

None of these plays ultimately worked. In all of them of them there was a sense of Irish theatre searching for but failing to find a way to turn our present public realities into effective dramatic metaphors. But the over-the-top attacks on Hinterland in particular should not be allowed to deflect playwrights from the attempt to engage with the surreal public world of contemporary Ireland. Hinterland may well have been, as Eileen Battersby claimed in The Irish Times, "bad manners", but well-mannered theatre is hardly what we need right now.

Highlights: the actors - John Hurt and Penelope Wilton's masterclass in precision and empathy in Friel's Afterplay at the Gate; Derbhle Crotty's magnificence in Sive and The Good Father at Druid, and The Plough and The Stars at the Abbey; Conor Lovett's embodiment of the Beckett trilogy on tour; the brilliant double act of Adrian Dunbar and Conleth Hill in the Lyric's Conversations on a Homecoming; the whole cast in The Notebook/ The Proof in the Dublin Theatre Festival; the astonishing Heather Woodbury in her epic What Ever in Galway and Dublin.

Lowlight: The emergence of the full implications of the Abbey's failure to grasp the opportunity to re-build its dilapidated HQ during the boom years. In chillier times, with a Government that has no great interest in the arts, the Abbey is left with a building that is gone beyond repair but with no immediate prospect of a replacement.