MISSION: IMPROBABLE

An Irish musical comedy about crosswords and code-breaking during The Emergency? Rough Magic Theatre Company's Improbable Frequency rises to the challenge, writes Peter Crawley

Elf snatch talent; slim chance (13 letters). A crossword clue might be an unlikely beginning for a new Irish musical, but as writer Arthur Riordan considers the curious genesis of Rough Magic's astonishingly ambitious new production for this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, his solution rests in improbability (Imp, rob, ability).

"I wondered was there mileage in doing a play, let alone a musical, about crosswords," says Riordan, a tall and endearingly diffident man, so self-effacing that at times he foregoes the personal pronoun.

"Reading about crosswords then, [I] discovered they were extremely popular in the '30s and '40s. In several World War stories they had actually been used to test code breakers. And the setter of the Telegraph crossword had been arrested, briefly, because a lot of his answers had also been Normandy landing code words. It was an entire coincidence. He was brought in for questioning."

The journey from crosswords to code-breaking was, then, an act of elaboration - as natural a progression as from the word "cryptic" to "cryptography". And so, when Tristram Faraday, a "hotshot cruciverbalist", is recruited to British intelligence and sent to investigate unusual broadcasts and stranger occurrences in the Irish Free State, history helped Riordan to flesh out the rest of cast.

The British poet John Betjeman, whose bouncy metres and rhyming schemes inform much of Improbable Frequency's verse, was then working as Press Officer to the British Representative in Dublin and was also suspected of being a low-level spy. Nearby, the Austrian scientist and accomplished playboy, Erwin Schrödinger, was studying theoretical physics in the Institute of Advanced Study. Meanwhile, the Red Bank Restaurant (which Riordan read about in David O'Donoghue's book, Hitler's Irish Voices) acted as a haven for Nazi sympathisers, a stone's throw from The Irish Times on D'Olier Street, where Myles na gCopaleen (aka Flann O'Brien) wrote his famously eccentric column.

"Once Myles and Betjemen were in place, that became a nice framework," Riordan says of his satirical comedy. "So the play could almost be a homage to both of them, taking the whole fantasy element from Myles and lots of rhymes from Betjeman. They could each represent their countries in certain ways as well."

Over four years, the Dublin-based Riordan and London-based composers Bell Helicopter exchanged lyrics and melodies, road-testing their ideas with a number of workshops along the way. It seems a fitting development for a musical in which separate traditions collide, performing comic duets and spiky tangos, laced through with desire and distrust.

On a recent rainy afternoon, with autumn hanging low over Rough Magic's alma mater, Trinity College, the dance studio in the Samuel Beckett Centre is a hive of activity. On one table a number of books climb into an improbable stack: Neutral Ireland and the Third Reich, The Poetry of Betjeman; a junior sleuth's Secret Codebook. On another, a stage manager carefully mocks up a revolver.

Arthur Riordan sits watching rehearsals, smiling in places, laughing in others and jotting down notes occasionally. Conor Kelly and Sam Park of Bell Helicopter crouch over laptops, minidisc recorders and a small mixing console. ("We're trying to get Arthur into the play," Kelly later revealed, intent on smuggling Riordan's voice into a code-breaking medley.) Meanwhile, on piano, musical director Cathal Synnott surges through The Interrogation Bolero.

Striding purposefully around a temporary set (awaiting the Weimar Republic embellishment of Alan Farquharson's decadent cabaret design), Peter Hanly and the stunning vocalist Lisa Lambe sing taut and lubricious exchanges, while the other cast members sail melodic "oooohs" into the space, underscored by a deep rhythmic ostinato: "Bom, ba ba ba, bom-bom." Director Lynne Parker observes everything.

"It's only a big show," Parker tells me once rehearsals are over, as though a historically set, satirical Irish musical fantasy is something you see every week.

"What's interesting for us is the fusion of talents. I've long been an admirer of Bell Helicopter's music. They've worked with me several times and it just seemed that they had an innate wit, that their music was funny. It was very eloquent and charming, but it was funny.

"What I hoped would happen, and what has happened, was that Arthur and they would fuse naturally. The nature of the show, the bigness of it, is the second thing. That's the challenge for the company. But I don't think anyone expects us to do Oklahoma."

After several happy experiences Parker admits that she's inclined to use live music "all the time now". But she will not entertain the notion that by commissioning this musical she has unleashed her own, inner Cameron Mackintosh. It was rather a case of seeing a musical in Arthur Riordan and setting it free.

"All of Arthur's work is essentially musical," she says. "Even the more naturalistic looking things are hugely to do with music and rhythm. Arthur thinks musically. He doesn't think like normal human beings." I start to laugh. "Seriously," she says. "I do think the word 'genius' applies, in the sense of him being utterly original. Although some of the verses are incredibly comic and very light in tone and wit, there's something profound at the heart of them, and his use of language is amazing. The musicality of language."

Language has indeed conjured its own musicality, as Bell Helicopter responded to Riordan's writing, dense with puns and wordplay, by concocting a pastiche of possibilities - from Noel Cowardesque ditties to near-Klezmer cabaret. Now paring back a surplus of material, Kelly and Park recall the end of an early, lengthy session with Riordan in a pub, where they worried that they had nothing ready to show Lynne Parker. Riordan agreed and, taking a napkin from the bar, wrote out the lyrics of what would become the theme tune of the British Office, Be Careful Not to Patronise the Irish: "Is it smugness or insurgency,/That makes them say Emergency?/I feel it lacks the urgency/Of World War Two".

"I find the whole subject and genesis of Irish neutrality fascinating," says Riordan, who has been satirising De Valera's Ireland and its legacy since 1992, with the first appearance of his alter ego, M C Dev.

"We're neutral, it's a deeply cherished aspect of our thinking," rapped Riordan in The Emergency Session, his one-man show with Rough Magic. "We're neutral, but for heaven's sake can you not see us winking?"

"There were several obvious reasons [for neutrality]," says Riordan today, "but the outstanding one was that the IRA wouldn't wear us siding with England - and there was enough sympathy in that direction. The second World War was a defining moment of the century and people acted like it was none of our business really. It's a strange genesis for a sacred cow."

Parker, however, sees the confused sympathies and political opportunism of this situation as anything but equivocal: "There's a wonderful balancing act going on, historically. 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' is one version, and then there was an enormous amount of people in this country who passionately opposed fascism. It's absolutely the stuff of drama."

Her phone rings. It's Riordan. He's concerned that one of the poem codes featured in the play may be flawed. "Arthur, I hadn't noticed that," she assures him. "It is really sub-atomic stuff." Creating a new musical, it quickly becomes clear, has presented its own set of codes which must be cracked.

Parker likens Bell Helicopter's pastiche of musical styles within Riordan's twisty-turny spy narrative to pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. "You've got this extremely strange plot," she says "and actually we've had to move around a lot of the jigsaw pieces a few times. It's more like a Rubik's Cube to be honest."

When Riordan speaksof the workshops, he might be talking about a particularly tricky crossword. "Some of the best stuff was written when presented with performance problems - things that didn't quite fit - and finding solutions to those problems."

When the puzzle is complete, though, Parker allows a teasing clue to the conundrum of Dublin as it appears in the production - a city that Riordan depicts with a satirical eye as politically and phenomenologically surreal, radiating a characteristic unlikelihood into the present day.

"What is surprising," says Parker, "is the truth at the heart of the mystery. And no one will suspect that, because it's improbable."

Improbable Frequency runs from September 27th to October 9th in the O'Reilly Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival (www.dublintheatrefestival.com, 01-6778899)