Putting horrors of the world on stage

Two powerful new dramas explore ethnic warfare and life in a dictatorship. Belinda McKeon watches their rehearsals.

During a break from rehearsals, the cast of the first of two new productions in "New Directions", a series devised by Dublin company b*spoke, are relaxing. Chatting. Taking the air. It's a warm day outside. "Have you stopped bruising yet?" asks Andrew Bennett of his co-actor Mary Murray. Murray nods gladly, and as she does so, the enormous metal chain which binds her by the neck to an iron skip at the side of the set glints in sunlight.

The bruises are everywhere on her body, but she seems to have built up a resistance now, seems barely to feel any more the constant blows and batterings inflicted on her character. Around her, smiling and stretching their limbs, Bennett and the other actors, Pauline Hutton and Rory Nolan, are exhibiting a similar immunity to the harshness and violence of the imaginative world into which they have thrown themselves over the past few weeks.

They're doing well; this is a world which, once seen, is difficult even for the observer to shake off. Children run wild in a cardboard city, amusing themselves by the enactment of scenes from their domestic lives: scenes of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, family pets, wishes and anxieties. But these are lives of suffering and paranoia, lives which are cut brutally short; these are children's fantasies of power, vengeance and annihilation. Though it is the place where children gather, this is no playground. At least not from the Western perspective.

Its world is that of 1990s Serbia, mired in bloodshed and edging closer to the NATO bombardment. Family Stories is the second part of the acclaimed Belgrade Trilogy by the young Serbian playwright Biljna Srbljanoviæ.

"I present the world as it is: garbage," were Srbljanoviæ's words as she received the German Ernst Toller award for Family Stories in 1999. "I am a person whose identity has been stolen." Fearlessly irreverent and bleakly comic, the play explores and exposes the psychic and societal scars of ethnic warfare and of life in a dictatorship, never with polemic, but with a vision that is starkly original.

Even in rehearsal, this play looks and reads strikingly, almost frighteningly different to the type of work familiar on Irish stages. It looks ruthless. In its grip, however, director Rachel West is excited. She first encountered the work of Srbljanoviæ while working in Germany, where it was popular and frequently produced. At the time, says West, German interest in the plight of Kosovo was enormous. "It was for Germany what the Gulf War had been for the rest of the world," remembers West. "Media coverage of it was so huge, so detailed, so gory and so horrific, and I was working in a theatre that was very involved in direct politics, and it was just very, very immediate."

The immediacy has had long-term results; West brought Family Stories - and Srbljanoviæ - to the "Playing Politics" series of readings at the Project during the 2003 Dublin Theatre Festival. When b*spoke put out a call for scripts for New Directions, she recommended the play for a full production.

Its power, she feels, stems from the child's eye view on violence which Srbljanoviæ has managed to create. It works, she believes, far more effectively than any reasoned political statement. "I don't think that political theatre is the only kind," she says, "but I do think that it's something that can raise questions, and awareness, and I think that with the wars that have happened since, the parallels and plights of the children and what they're experiencing . . . no matter what their religious backgrounds are, or what the exact conflict is, I think that keeps it very valid."

The atmosphere of Srbljanoviæ's play exists in layers, with apparently one-dimensional characters and situations giving way to deeper meanings and horrific realisations as the separate stories evolve. These layers require delicate negotiation by West's cast, who must play children playing adults - and, in Murray's case, playing an apparently autistic girl playing a badly mistreated dog.

"Yeah, we've studied dogs," laughs West, "and what they do and how they move. And then again, this is about how a child sees a dog. Which is maybe different to how an adult does."

The dog scenes are among the moments in the play when the deeply sad or vicious becomes deeply funny - in the hands of Nolan and Bennett in particular, this seems set to happen often in the b*spoke production. Srbljanoviæ's wit, as she creates a world in which children imitate Slobodan Milosevic as part of their everyday games, is savage and unrelenting - but might it also prove cathartic? Is there a risk that the gravity of Srbljanoviæ's play could be undermined by its own wry intelligence?

West feels there is little chance of a sweet release for the audience. "I think it's the other way around. It's a spirit I recognise very much from the North, that people, no matter what adverse conditions they're in, seem to have a great sense of humour about it, and a sense of togetherness and warmth amongst them.

"And I think that's what Biljana has managed to do . . . she cuts so close to the wind because she can, because she has created children interpreting adults, and so she can make fun of Serbia, of nationalism, of pain. And then just when you're enjoying it, you realise where it's coming from. And I think that's what makes it successful. It's not heavy. But it's the heaviness, I think, that you take away with you at the very end."

Heaviness will press on the hearts of those who see the second production in the b*spoke series, the Spanish playwright Fermín Cabal's Tejas Verdes, which will open in early July. The play takes its name from an old resort on Chile's Pacific coast, which became a torture camp following the overthrow of the president Salvador Allende in 1973.

Through a series of monologues by women affected by the nightmarish interrogations which became routine in the camp, Cabal's play becomes a testament to innocence, bravery, and to forgiveness, and to the continuing need, more than 30 years on, to bring the dictator who sanctioned such interrogations, General Augusto Pinochet, to justice.

Róisin McBrinn, who will direct the cast of five - Jane Brennan, Sarah Brennan, Susan Fitzgerald, Ger Ryan and Cathy White - through the often horrific detail of Cabal's script, believes that the play's chief call is to responsibility. Guiding Sarah Brennan, who will play the central character of Corolina, "the disappeared", through the first monologue, McBrinn uses words like "forgiveness", "understanding", "generosity".

Listening to Corolina's accounts of her rape and torture by the guards, it's difficult to accommodate such notions in the feelings that take root. The instinctual response is one of rage, fury, the call for revenge. But McBrinn hopes to go beyond that. As Brennan sits on the huge swing central to Paul Keogan's set, McBrinn tells her to stop swinging for a second, and just to be still. A reflective stance, it seems, is what she seeks.

"I think the play is much more about empowering us not to be apathetic," she says afterward, when asked about the question of justice for Pinochet's thousands of victims. "Not least about Pinochet . . . it's about remembering and our obligation not to forget what happened. And I think that stretches way beyond the Chilean question, and the question of that particular tyrant. It's a much more local aspiration."

McBrinn sees Tejas Verdes as an exploration of "man's inhumanity to man", and believes this to be something which impacts on every life. "The warning not to forget is a futuristic one," she explains. "So we need not just to acknowledge these events, but to remember them. And to listen to them."

The contrast between merely hearing and really listening is at the core of the play, as Corolina speaks to the mother who mourns for her, and implores her never to hear the reality of what became of her daughter - no matter how hard she listens, the facts must never ring true for her. But for the viewers, says McBrinn, such immunity would be irresponsible. "I think the play is about, too, people turning the pages of the newspaper and looking away, when they see visions of atrocity . . . it's about people walking on, and not listening to any of it. But in this play, you hear."

This tension is, for McBrinn, interesting also in that it comments on the art of making theatre itself. "I think it's also a commentary on what we do," she says. "Particularly a monologue - often, you don't hear. You go along and you don't particularly listen sometimes, and you lose somebody, and have to come back to them."

But Corolina and women like her are lost in a way that can only be understood through constant hearing. Just as for West, catharsis, for McBrinn, is not an option. "The challenge is to deal with the danger," she says, "of you coming along to see this, and acknowledging its history and what it represents, and then actually through catharsis walking away and doing nothing about it. The challenge is to create a consciousness, not just of what happened in this place, but of other people, other communities. One of the things we've been talking about a lot in rehearsal is the notion of forgiveness."

Does she really believe that forgiveness is truly possible in the context of the actions of this still-living dictator? "I do. I think that is one of the things that can be taken from the play, in the broader sense. Because it's like, without that, Pinochet will never be remembered in the true light that he should be, because there are still people who will protect him from that." People, she means, like the lawyer and the doctor in the play, who deny the reality of Corolina's torture and death. "They haven't forgiven themselves. So they won't admit to what they have done. And what he has done."

The figure of Corolina, says McBrinn, represents all of the disappeared. And her last monologue, from a place beyond the grave, is a final plea. "She cannot rest until we remember her. And that's not necessarily a religious theory. It's a spiritual one. And it's also an acknowledgement that these individuals, the disappeared, haven't died forever. It is an attempt to allow us to pass the baton."