Playing to a new world order

Theatre 2005: All this week, Irish Times critics look back on the past year in the arts and give their verdict.

Is there such a thing now as "the Irish theatre"? Looking back on the first year of the second century of the Irish theatre movement that began when the Abbey Theatre opened its doors in 1904, it is hard to avoid that question.

It does not arise simply because 2005 was a year in which the Abbey itself was plunged into such a deep crisis that its very survival was called into some doubt. For beyond those contingent events, there was an unmistakable sense that the whole ambition of the Abbey's founders - to create a markedly distinctive national theatre culture - may be out of date. The voices that will linger in the air as the year closes may not speak in Irish accents at all.

There is, of course, a degree of continuity with the past. For a year that did not add to the store of Irish theatrical classics, 2005 was still one in which we were reminded to a remarkable extent of the continuing presence of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, who both began to write in the 1950s and who are both now in their seventies. But we were also simultaneously given a demonstration in their new plays of the intertwining of the English and Irish theatres: each was directed by an Englishman and had an English actor in the central role.

The abiding memory of the Gate's production of Brian Friel's The Home Place, his most accomplished new play since Dancing At Lughnasa 15 years ago, was that of the wonderful English actor Tom Courtenay making the 19th-century Donegal landlord Christopher Gore at once painfully inadequate and utterly dignified.

Tom Murphy's Alice Trilogy was staged in London by the Royal Court and equally dominated by the mesmerising Juliet Stevenson, whose only flaw was her uncertain hold on an Irish accent. Both plays had English directors (Adrian Noble and Ian Rickson) and though Derbhle Crotty was magnificent in both, neither seemed unimaginable without an Irish presence.

Likewise, when he drew some of the most eminent English and Irish actors together to celebrate Harold Pinter's 75th birthday at the Gate, Michael Colgan seemed to stake a claim for Dublin as the natural asylum for all those in England who revere the embattled arts of the literary theatre. Cheeky as the claim may be, it was certainly not out of keeping with a year in which the distance between Dublin and London seemed unusually short, and in which neither Cork 2005 nor the Dublin Theatre Festival produced a major new Irish play.

The best Irish play to have its Irish premiere in 2005, moreover, was Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, which played at the Cork Opera House as part of the Capital of Culture programme. It was directed (superbly) by an Irishman, John Crowley, featured a fine performance from Jim Norton, and does have some connections to Irish work such as Murphy's Bailegangaire. But it was presented by Britain's National Theatre, owes more of its language to Pinter and Joe Orton than to any Irish source, and its ambience is essentially that of the central Europe of Kafka and the Brothers Grimm.

There were some superb performances by Irish actors - Ailish Symons in Enda Walsh's Pondlife Angels in Cork, Catherine Walker in Tom MacIntyre's What Happened Bridgie Cleary, Marie Mullen, Aaron Monaghan and Catherine Walsh in DruidSynge - but the box-office stars tended to be from abroad.

If the big performances were not coming from English actors, there was fair chance that they would be American. The wonderful combination of raw potency and tentative delicacy that Christopher Meloni brought to bear on the character of Eddie in Mark Brokaw's potent production of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge at the Gate was a classic of Method acting. Ed Harris's utter command of the audience at the Everyman Palace in Cork for the world premiere of Neil LaBute's Wrecks was another object lesson in the virtues of an American acting culture that produces stars who retain the discipline to be bloody good at what they do.

If the Gate was successfully positioning itself as an international Anglophone theatre with its Pinter season and the likes of Courtenay and Meloni, the Abbey seemed to be exploring a similar notion, albeit more half-heartedly. It commissioned and staged a new English play, Shelagh Stephenson's Enlightenment - a highly unusual move from the perspective of the national theatre's own history.

Given that the play set itself up as a reflection on the state of the affluent West after September 11th 2001, the notion of the Abbey taking on a wider remit was not a bad one. Unfortunately, nothing in the play or the production really answered the question of why it was happening here rather than on BBC Radio Four.

Likewise, the idea of giving Vincent Woods's re-telling of the Deirdre myth, A Cry From Heaven, to the avant-garde French director Olivier Py was good in theory but in practice created a dissonance that undermined the theatre's most ambitious production of the year.

Some of this general impulse to move away from a specifically "Irish" theatre derives from the simple need to look outside the narrow frame of Irish history. Many of the good things that happened outside of the big theatres had international dimensions that were informed by large-scale political conflicts. Two plays, for example, dealt with the legacy of slavery and the 19th-century anti-slavery movement.

Rough Magic did a splendid job with The Sugar Wife, written by the English-born Elizabeth Kuti, and Donal O'Kelly vividly re-enacted the voyage to Ireland of the fleeing slave and great anti-slavery agitator Frederick Douglass in The Cambria. The recent Balkan wars were richly evoked in B*spoke's production of Biljana Srbljanovic's mordant satire on Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, Family Stories.

The most physically impressive Irish show of the year, Michael Keegan-Dolan's The Story of the Bull, may also have been the most divisive (people seemed to love or hate it and it was hard to find anyone who was left indifferent) but it, too, was marked by its cosmopolitanism.

The Bull denied the existence of separate forms and moods, not simply demolishing the dividing line between theatre and dance, but looping between witty social commentary and visceral prehistoric ritual, opera and Irish dancing, horror and beauty, pop and baroque, schlock American movies and Irish rural comedy. Using the Táin stories to reflect on contemporary Irish vulgarity, it was nonetheless up-front about its internationalism. There can be few more direct (or deliberate) images of the end of Irish specificity than that of having Cúchulain played by a Slovakian dancer, Vladislav Benito Soltys.

Does all of this mean that the notion of a national theatre is now redundant and that the Abbey's crisis was more than an organisational one? Hardly. It may not be accidental that the high-point of the Abbey's rather grim year, Tom MacIntyre's low-key, slow-burning, but beautifully evocative What Happened Bridgie Cleary was rooted in a specifically Irish event and used a tangy, ripe Hiberno-English.

And it is certainly not irrelevant that the greatest theatrical event of the year was a repossession and re-invention of one of the Abbey's original energies - the fabulous, untamed imagination of John M Synge. DruidSynge, Garry Hynes's breathtaking staging of all six of Synge's plays, was one of the finest achievements in the history of Irish theatre.

It established Synge's greatness beyond any doubt, secured Marie Mullen's place as a world-class actor, and vindicated the sheer richness of mood, from puckish delight to awful devastation, of which the theatre is capable.

It also proposed its own answer to the question of whether the "Irish theatre" that Synge's comrades imagined still exists: only if it is desired with enough passion.

Highs & Lows

Highs

DruidSynge. Thirty years of work on Synge by Garry Hynes, Marie Mullen and Mick Lally culminated in a single day, when his entire corpus of plays could be experienced as one work, in which images from one play echoed off those from another. The whole was still more than the sum of the brilliant parts.

Lows

The revelation that the Abbey had managed to lose almost €1 million without knowing it brought Ben Barnes's reign as artistic director to a nasty end. The only consolation was that the crisis was too bad to be patched up, and there is real hope that the reformed structures will allow the National Theatre to rebuild its morale and its reputation. Footsbarn's mini-Shakespeare festival in the IFSC even suggested that the likely new home for the Abbey could actually work as a theatre venue. After an annus horribilis, the only way is up.