Reality bites

You don't have to look far in Ireland for scandals. So why haven't we turned them into drama? Arminta Wallace investigates how we could make a start.

We like to think of Ireland's theatrical palette as rich, varied and satisfying, so it comes as quite a shock when somebody points out that it contains not inconsiderable gaps. The news that the Tricycle Theatre, in London, is working on a dramatisation of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, to be staged next spring, seems to have caused one of those periodic shock waves to ripple around theatrical circles on this side of the Irish Sea.

Over the past decade the Tricycle's director, Nicolas Kent, has produced a fistful of box-office hits based on transcripts of tribunals into subjects as disparate as the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence (The Colour Of Justice), war crimes in Bosnia (Srebrenica) and the suicide of the UK government scientist David Kelly (Justifying War). And Guantanamo: Honor Bound To Defend Freedom, based on accounts of detainees, recently moved to Broadway. But Bloody Sunday? Why, people here are asking, didn't it occur to us to do this one ourselves? Come to think of it, why don't we do any theatre of this kind? Are we indifferent? Lazy? Scared?

At a public interview organised by Theatre Forum in Dublin last week, Kent emphasised that although the Tricycle's verbatim productions stem from the notion of using drama to campaign against injustice, they are pieces of theatre, not slices of agitprop activism. But as was evident even from the short filmed extracts he had brought to show the audience of Irish theatre professionals, the use of verbatim trial evidence packs an unparalleled dramatic punch.

At the end of the Lawrence-inquiry show, the actor who plays the judge asks the court to stand for a minute's silence, out of respect to the dead boy. "At 85 out of 87 performances," recalled Kent, "the audience spontaneously rose to their feet as well." Political theatre, he concluded, gives people the sense that they're participating in the democratic process.

We could do with some of that. So why hasn't this kind of show been staged in the Republic? It's not as if we're short of material. Seven tribunals and inquiries are sitting. Could it be that they, or the events behind them, are not dramatic enough for verbatim theatre? Absolutely not, says Ronan Wilmot, artistic director of the New Theatre, in Temple Bar. He recalls a production called For The Forgotten, staged at Liberty Hall by Black Box Theatre Company earlier this year to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. "There was an actor for every casualty," he says, "and it described what happened in each person's day. It was very, very moving, because as each story was told, then it just stopped when the bomb went off."

The theatre was packed, and the response, he says, was extraordinary - but the show was ignored in the wider theatre world. "There was a piece on the RTÉ nine o'clock news, but that was about the height of it. I felt it was appalling that it was ignored by both the media and the mainstream theatres." This indifference is particularly striking, he says, given the origins of our national theatre. "If you go back 100 years the people who came together to give a national identity to the arts were absolute political radicals. The very birth pangs of the Abbey are in radical political theatre. The establishment has lost its way completely, and this lack of a political dimension in theatre is one of the reasons why, in my opinion."

Those who wish to defend our theatrical record point to the kind of work done by the Project Theatre with Fiach MacConghail and Peter Sheridan at the helm, as far back as the 1970s, or to occasional shows by such campaigning actors as Donal O'Kelly, Gerard Mannix Flynn and John Breen, of Yew Tree Theatre Company, who toured a successful show based on the life of Charles Haughey.

"What I tried to do with Charlie was to see the world from his point of view, so it wasn't a polemic in any sense," says Breen. "The reason I wrote it as a play is that politics is a public sphere and theatre is a communal event, a very public witnessing of the story. But I think people felt that this was a very interesting story. If you're going to examine the ramifications of something like the Stephen Lawrence inquiry in minute detail, that's a very different thing."

Breen points out that we have not yet had a theatrical examination of the Arms Trial. "After Charlie I thought about doing a dramatic reconstruction of the Kilkenny incest case, but I came to the conclusion that the only place it could go on would be the Abbey or the Peacock." Why? "Because it would be a very hard sell. I'm sorry if that sounds hard nosed, but it would be a very difficult night to get an audience for. Only the loyalty of a big mainstream-theatre audience would, I think, carry it through."

Perhaps. During the Theatre Forum interview Kent observed that when he announced his intention to do a play about Sir Richard Scott's inquiry into UK arms sales to Iraq in the 1980s, the Tricycle's box-office staff sighed and said they might as well go on holiday for a few months. Luckily, he added, they didn't.

In Ireland Joe Taylor and Malcolm Douglas have created an audience out of nowhere for their re-enactments of the planning and other tribunals on Tonight With Vincent Browne, on RTÉ Radio 1, which they took to the stage as The Tribunals Show. "People who haven't heard it think that what we're doing is skits and sketches, sending the whole thing up. It's not, actually," says Taylor. "Nicolas Kent's dramatisation of the Hutton inquiry went for the darker side; I've gone for the lighter side. But there's no escaping that what's said in the witness box is extremely powerful."

Taylor happily admits that the stage show, which is in Dundalk today and has a three-night run at Liberty Hall, in Dublin, from November 25th, is largely played for laughs, but it has a serious intent. "If you're going to bring people into the theatre for two hours you have to entertain them," he says.

"So people laugh, but when they leave the theatre that's when they'll think, Holy Mother of God, did they really get £80,000 when the rest of us were being told the country was broke?"

Taylor adds that radio's record on political dramatisation is exemplary. He has been involved in some "powerfully striking" re-enactments of the trials of Oscar Wilde, for Browne's show, and played Lord Saville in a 90-minute dramatisation of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry for Radio 1.

On stage such re-enactments would, if anything, be even more powerful. But finding an audience is not the only difficulty associated with staging political theatre, as the artistic director of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, Paula McFetridge, points out. "It's easier to do that type of work when there's a range of theatres doing other work as well," she says. "In a city the size of London there's an audience that's politically astute and wants to engage with these kinds of issues."

On the considerably smaller stage of Belfast, she says, everything is much more personal. She once played Mairéad Farrell, the IRA member shot dead by British security forces, in a Tinderbox production of Hugh Stoddart's play Gibraltar Strait. "We were young, and we were petrified. Belfast was still getting an awful lot of hassle at that time - and, well, there were people watching to see that we got home from rehearsals safely and stuff like that. I mean, I look like Mairéad Farrell and I'm from the same area."

On the day the play opened, seven years after Farrell's death, her family received her belongings in the post, in a brown-paper parcel. "I've always asked myself this question," says McFetridge. "As an artist, do we have the right to make money out of people's pain? You need to put a distance in time and place between the actual events and the dramatic portrayal of those events. But how much time? And how do you deal with the emotions that you engender? You can't just go into schools and do theatre workshops on child abuse. You'd need a therapist working with you, a professional who could cope with the counselling issues that would be raised."

Other tricky issues include those of legal and political bias. While a case is ongoing it can be argued that a jury is bound to be influenced by the existence of a much-discussed piece of theatre. And there is also, as John Breen notes, a tendency for the word "political" itself to imply politics of a particular shade. "You can end up telling people what they want to hear," he says. "Would the National Theatre in London produce a play which put forward a pro-life point of view? I don't know."

Breen and McFetridge agree that Irish theatre could do with the sense of relevance and raw energy that would come from an infusion of political theatre. Where, though, to start? The writer and director Gerard Stembridge says we need to build up a tradition of theatre as a political tool. "It doesn't work if you just put on one play. The context is very, very important - and the ongoing conversation that it creates. Our mainstream theatres don't put stuff around the whole experience of theatre-going that would add to it: workshops, seminars, lectures, foyer exhibitions. The thing about the Tricycle Theatre is not just that they started doing these verbatim shows but that they've kept on doing them. It should be part of the job of producers and artistic directors to seek out this kind of politically engaged theatre.

"There's a sense in Ireland of theatres waiting around for writers to come up with new plays rather than commissioning plays on specific topics. As a writer I see the difference between theatre and film in this respect. I can never recall being asked to write a play about anything in particular." Many new Irish plays are, says Stembridge, political in one way or another. But most of them are historical. "Irish theatre seems to have a terror of meeting politics head on, without hedging it round with metaphor or dressing it up in costumes. That has its place - Observe The Sons Of Ulster, for example, is a fantastic play - but it seems to have become the only way of doing things."

Stembridge suggests using a poetic drama on one stage to complement a piece of radical theatre on another. There is also great potential, according to McFetridge, to use ticket deals to promote hard-hitting but hard-to-sell shows, giving everyone who buys a ticket for a mainstream stage show, for example, a half-price ticket for a new play on a political topic. Perhaps, John Breen adds, Dublin Fringe Festival could play a role in commissioning new pieces.

We're not, it seems, short on ideas either. But will we get any action? The answer at present is a suitably political definite maybe.