Skeletons are dancing again

Blood is flowing on the legitimate stage again; throats are being slashed, people are being beaten with lead pipes, and boiling oil is being poured over old women. All this ghoulish glee abounds in just two recent plays, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Cripple of Inishmaan, which opened in New York this past year to much acclaim.

Written by the Irish playwright, Martin Mc Donagh, they are playing now or in the next months in regional theatres across the US: from Costa Mesa to Denver, Atlanta, Iowa City, Cincinnati, Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Providence. Aided and abetted by other Mc Donagh pieces, such as The Lonesome West and A Skull in Connemara, an Irish blood bath splashes across US stages.

Never known for their pacifism or aversion to violence, are the Irish just trying to amuse their English and American cousins with their profound sense of cultural difference, as they have since Shakespeare's time? Speaking of Shakespeare, hasn't he penned a bit of gore - from Titus Andronicus to Lear?

What's new about bloody stages, you may ask? Didn't the Greeks begin it with their eye-gouging Oedipus, child-eating Atreus, bride-burning and child-slaying Medea, and son-dismembering Agave, to mention just a few favourite classics from Oedipus the King by Sophocles to The Bacchae by Euripides? Yes, Greek theatre certainly crowded its stages with violent people, but their actual acts of mayhem were not shown on-stage. Enacted off-stage, these horrific deeds depended on a messenger's speech and the power of the audience's imagination to conjure their dramatic effects.

We must admit that Shakespeare did not hold with the Greek preference for off-stage gore. Think of the conclusion to Hamlet: "of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, of accidental judgments, casual slaughters". Actually, Shakespeare's inspiration poured not from the directives of Aristotle's Poetics but from the sanguine pages of the Roman Stoic philosopher and playwright, Seneca. Court playwright and politician, Seneca tried to rein in the atrocities of his Emperor Nero by writing cautionary tales portraying the cosmic mayhem that resulted if the irrational violence of an Ajax or a Medea disrupted the universe.

Shakespeare's contemporaries and heirs followed his example and enthusiasm for bloodshed and passed it on to the Jacobeans. Recall the gruesome details of their shocking dramas such as The Revenger's Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi with poisonous skulls and limbs hacked off. No, violence on-stage and off is not new to the world's stages. However, for the past 100 years or more, it has been shunned in the domain of serious dramatic art.

Something happened in the legitimate theatre with the advent of modernism. "No more villains," said Ibsen, and on-stage violence was again relegated to the discreet offstage gunshot. Hedda Gabler commits suicide in another room, Chekhov's despondent Constantine in The Seagull fires his gun out of sight, even O'Neill's Hickey in The Iceman Cometh only tells us of how he killed his wife, we don't witness it.

However, it seems that the voyeur function of the theatre was left unfulfilled by these discreet, Greek practices, and the public's desire to see the bloody deed itself up close and personal still persisted. This desire was met in the popular theatre of the late-19th century; the more violence was pushed off modernist stages, the more prominent it became in popular venues.

The details of death and dismemberment could be banished from the serious theatre. They were taken over by melodrama and, in fact, became the centrepiece of the blood-drenched stage of the Grand Guignol.

The Grand Guignol was a French theatre which began in 1895 at the peak of Ibsenist influence in revolutionising the modern theatre. In the Parisian theatre "The Prince of Terror," the name proudly chosen by the resident playwright, Andre de Lorde, took up his reign and provided a succession of gory, horror-filled plays which served up regular eye gougings and acid baths to his curious and eager audiences.

These crowd pleasers were not the stuff of serious drama and are not to be confused with the dramatic poems of the austere master of realism from Norway. However, gore and violence could not be long kept in the wings in the 20th century, which early disclosed its aspirations to be the most violent century that humanity has ever endured. Antonin Artaud, recognising the direction of the era as early as 1932, called for a Theatre of Cruelty, a mythic and epochal spectacle whose "themes will be cosmic, universal, and interpreted according to the most ancient texts drawn from old Mexican, Hindu, Judaic, and Iranian cosmogonies".

Under the rubric of politics and warnings against the eruptions of poverty and oppression, violence also re-entered the scene on-stage with the English Angry Young Men. Although some might say that, compared with the brutes of the contemporary stage, Jimmy Porter in Look Back In Anger was more talk than action.

The violence of the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s introduced to English stages had a decidedly Brechtian political edge. The people sodomising or being sodomised, for example, in Howard Brenton's Romans in Britain symbolised the English and their troubled relations with the Irish.

Today, on-stage sodomy is back, and the blood-stained stage is here again. Moreover, the new brutality is not making a political point, and it's not relegated to the declasse melodramas, genre thrillers or murder mysteries - it's highbrow entertainment.

Triumphantly, with the Irish leading the field, plays such as The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Cripple of Inishmaan, the American Killer Joe, and the British Shop- ping and F***ing and Closer, are dishing up violence in the name of art, and middle-class audiences are loving it. That the latest efforts of the most serious dramatic artists of England and Ireland are replete with manic physical violent acts on-stage is credited with bringing younger people back to theatre.

What is going on here? Certainly one need look no further than movies, where melodrama went a century ago when it left the stage and found a cosy and lucrative home. However, films in the past few years, claiming a higher seriousness, have presented an ever accelerating menu of onscreen violence from Trainspotting to Pulp Fiction, and from Natural Born Killers to Run Lola Run and Boogie Nights.

Perhaps the theatre, roused by constant rumours of its demise, has taken up on-stage violence because, unlike the movies - where only the most naive believe the violence is actual - the stage presents live people who seem to do grisly but gratifying things to each other, right in front of us.

The rumour persists that in the late stages of their decadent decline, the Roman theatres substituted condemned criminals to be really executed in the shortened versions of the famous tragedies that they served up to the restless crowds. A brutal audience if there ever was one; the blood lust of the Roman mob was not sated but only whetted by the frequent gladiatorial contests in the Circus Maximus.

Perhaps again, the theatre of the Western world, like the theatre of the late Roman Empire, is trying to match the bloody thrills of another entertainment. For the Romans, it was the gladiatorial combats and the feeding of Christians to ravenous lions - for today's theatre, is it an attempt to compete with the cartoon-like escalation of baddies and mayhem of movies? Maybe it is the final numb exhaustion of disbelief of audiences who have seen one too many special-effects shots.

In such an atmosphere of blase disbelief, the on-stage action of a love-starved daughter pouring boiling oil over the deformed arm, shrunken by other scaldings, of an ageing, hateful mother holds the audience in thrall. This new, one-on-one, homely, domestic torture reeks of reality. After all, the Irish have, for many decades, followed the advice of one of their greatest writers, George Bernard Shaw. When asked about the close proximity of the exhibition of pain and the arousal of laughter in Irish drama, Shaw commented: "We all have skeletons in our closets; the trick is to make them dance."

Martin McDonagh's parade of gleeful, ghoulish protagonists reminds us that when skeletons dance, it's always a danse macabre.

Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane opens on Tuesday at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

Norma Jenckes lectures in drama at the University of Cincinnati