Stage Struck

Any old excuse for a party, writes PETER CRAWLEY

Has it really been 100 years already? Why, it barely feels like a day over 24 months since this column first started. To tell you the truth, the centenary almost skipped my mind (everything since The Rising has been a bit of a blur), and it might have been overlooked entirely if it hadn’t been for the gently incessant rumble of cork-popping, cake-cutting, retrospective-mounting, birthday- bashing ceremonies in which the theatre so reluctantly engages.

This hygienic practice of endlessly reheating history’s leftovers is part of what keeps the pulse of Irish culture so healthy and relevant. And so we have Rough Magic’s 25th knees-up, an event that makes me nostalgic for their 20th, or indeed the Gate’s 80th, the Dublin Theatre Festival’s 50th, Druid’s 30th, Galway Arts Festival’s 30th, Beckett’s 100th, George Bernard Shaw’s 150th, the Abbey’s 100th, and Randolph SD | The Company’s 5 and a bith (who, to be fair, celebrated without much pomp).

Being no spring chicken itself, Stage Struck is easily moved to wistful reminiscences about its own legacy, such as our early take on Beckett’s debut (“meaningless twaddle on the plight of the homeless”, 1955) or how we had deftly revised our opinion by the time of his centenary (“meaningful twaddle about the plight of mankind”, 2006). But I wonder if all these round numbers are really doing us much good.

Rough Magic have rarely been a company for dreary introspection. Even last year's double bill honouring the 20th anniversary of the death of Stewart Parker seemed more driven than dutiful. And though it marks both the company's 25th anniversary and its 100th production, their current show, Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer, is a brave bit of scheduling unlike anything in its history. So, mazel tov.

But the cleverest response to laurel-resting may have been Tom Murphy's, in subversive cahoots with Chekhov, when in 2004 he found room among the chiming centenaries of the Abbey, The Cherry Orchardand the death of its writer to fit in yet another hundredth: the century- old bookcase of the Gayev family. Rhapsodised with ludicrously emotional encomiums, the otherwise blameless bookcase made its own point. It doesn't matter how old the institution, it only matters what you put in it.

That’s why a recent rumpus about how many Friel productions would be staged during the year of his 80th birthday, or why so few theatres thought to dust down Shaw for his 150th, seems so absurd. Friel is perennially popular and doesn’t need any sentimental intervention. Shaw hasn’t aged as well, so his quotes are in better circulation than his dramas.

There may be some jewels in Fishamble's Handel's Crossing, which honours the 250th anniversary of the composer's death, or indeed, in the Gate's planned Pinter retrospective to mark what would have been the playwright's 80th birthday. But sooner or later audiences are going to get celebration fatigue.

We’ll let Stage Struck’s happy returns land without ceremony, knowing that the birthdays that matter don’t need a reminder. After all, what’s another year?