Screen writer

Let the bad times roll, writes Peter Crawley

The news is bad. Times are tough. The economy is kaput. Political parties are in freefall. Your dinner has been ruined. In days like these you could use some cheering up. So, scraping together the last few shekels the bailiff couldn't find, you wonder what carefree entertainment is playing in the theatre.

Well, at the Abbey there's a spectacular version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht's gangster-heavy parody of Nazi Germany, currently marketed with the comforting words, "There's a recession looming. A new leader is needed." Hmmm.

Surely the Gate has some rosy escapism on the cards? Why, it's The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens's story of despair, loss, repossession, mental and physical disintegration, and blameless lonely orphans dying in penury. Standard Christmas stuff, really.

It's often said that, at times of crisis, the multitudes want to be transported from the nasty grip of reality into the consoling arms of fantasy. That's mostly bullshit. Think Great Depression and you imagine Busby Berkeley's wholesome chorus girls and the innocent chuckles of the Marx Brothers. The reality was a more complicated and sinister tide of gangster films, the dangerously suggestive Mae West and, come to think of it, the subversive chuckles of the Marx Brothers.

At the same time in Irish theatre, things looked innocent from the outside, but inside you found a much darker core. At a time of political repression and religious censorship, the Gate committed to Oscar Wilde, who always hid a wicked intent beneath playful covers, while the Abbey's biggest draw was George Shiels, a popular farceur now lost to history, whose comedies sketched out a deceitful and vicious world.

Flash forward to the hideous 1980s and you couldn't part a curtain without finding a gritty revival that stripped all varnish from the classics. If the world looked bleak, the stage did too. It's not entirely coincidental that one of the defining shows of these famished times was called The Great Hunger.

Still, I was surprised to read the anguished words of an Australian musical producer the other day, who was slashing ticket prices for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. "Musicals are traditionally the last thing people want to spend their money on in tough times," he said. The plummeting box office on Broadway tells a similar sob story.

All of which is enough to give the producers of Macbecks("a brand new musical comedy") some sleepless nights between now and January, when it opens at the Olympia. "Concerned by the Credit Crunch?" it asks. "Reeling from the Recession? Depressed by the Downturn? Well here's the remedy."

For their sakes, I hope so. But with ticket prices for this Macbeth/ David Beckham mash-up set much lower than I, Keanoand The Last Days of the Celtic Tiger, they're also making recession concessions.

If it's true that audiences go to shows not to sing their worries away but to stare them down, then we may learn much from the mixed fortunes of a fascist, an orphan and a football star. It's a strange lesson for a box-office, but maybe misery really does love company.

pcrawley@irish-times.ie