Looking evil in the face

EVIL is not, in spite of Hannah Arendt's memorable phrase, really banal. The rather, is that we need a bit of banality to allow us to look evil in the face. If there is nothing to see but horror, our vision goes out of focus and everything becomes grotesquely distant, Just as Hieronymus Bosch's paintings of hellish torments tip over into quaint fantasy. We need a toehold in the mundane to allow us to peep over the walls of atrocity.

In Colm Toibin's essay The Trial of the Generals, about the government campaign of torture and murder in Argentina in the 1970s he tells of a torturer called Colores who stole a sewing machine from the home of a pregnant woman who was being taken in for questioning. Colores's wife had difficulty getting the machine to work, so while he was torturing the woman with electric cattle prods, he asked her for the instructions. It is such small, almost ridiculous, details that give us some point of contact with a brutality that is, for most of us, unimaginable.

As a play about the abuse of human rights, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, set during the dirty war in Argentina and presented by Co Motion at the Andrews Lane Theatre in Dublin is not of the order of Beckett's Catastrophe, Pinter's One for the Road, or Athol Fugard's The Island. But it has enduring strengths and the most important of them is that it is full of banalities. Most of what happens in it - cooking, eating, washing, lusting - is almost overbearingly ordinary. While the film version inevitably lent a certain glamour to these actions, on stage they are what would be, in any other context, achingly routine.

At times, the action brings to mind Brendan Behan's remark that the Abbey actors of the 1950s were the best fed theatre company in the world because, in the kind of plays they performed, someone was always about to put on a pan of rashers. Here, too, the two prisoners spend much of their time stuffing their faces.

Looked at purely in terms of style, the play is the most primitive kind of domestic drama, The Odd Couple with prison bars. An unlikely pair, Darragh Kelly's Marxist revolutionary Valentin and Gerard Murphy's transsexual Molina, thrown together by circumstances beyond their control learn to love and respect each other. The plot remains all the time just a few inches away from being trite. And what happens outside the cell is suggested by the crudest and least satisfactory of theatrical devices - the taped voice over.

And yet, all of this is, in the context, a virtue. It is the equivalent of the sewing machine - the banality that allows us to see the horror. It is the guarantee against voyeurism and glamorisation. Where a bad writer would have played up the torture and played down the mundane lives of the prisoners, Puig does the opposite. Because the trivia remain in the foreground, the horror - offstage, hinted at rather than shown - is safe from trivialisation.

PUIG does something else as well. To make sure that the torture, cruelty and violence that surround the play do not become fantastic, he creates a diversionary fantasy - the movie that Molina half invents and half recalls. Just as Scheherazade's stories in the Thousand and One Nights are haunting because they are told to stave off death, so Molina's improvisations gather force from the cruelty and death from which they attempt to escape.

Vanessa Fielding's production works so well because it starts from a clear sense of where the play's moral and dramatic centre lies - offstage. She and the actors have both the good taste and the technical discipline to underplay, to avoid the opportunities for meretricious exploitation that the text, of its nature, offers at every turn. (Kiss of the Spiderwoman has, after all, been turned into a musical.)

The production is an exemplary exercise in keeping one's nerve.

Chisato Yoshimi's set has the nerve to create a genuinely cramped space, where any dramatic movement is impossible. Darragh Kelly has the nerve to play Valentin as an ordinary, rather mixed up man, rather than a heroic revolutionary. Fielding has the nerve to go all the way with the domesticity of the style, trusting that the epic will emerge of its own accord from behind the pots and the pans.

And, Fielding had the nerve to cast the most flagrantly butch of Irish actors, Gerard Murphy, as a man who wants to be a woman. Murphy - who has, amazingly, never played a Dublin stage before - is best known for hairy chested roles: with the RSC he has played Prince Hal, Oberon, Petruchio, and Oedipus. Casting him as Molina removes at a stroke the danger of a Danny La Rue stereotype and adds enormously to the pathos of a big formidable man who sees himself as a movie heroine. What could, in unsafe hands, be tacky and abusive - becomes instead a more profound expression of imprisonment and a starker statement of the contrast between barbarism and human dignity.