No politics in Irish theatre? Hold on a second . . .

In his recent documentary 'Power Plays', Fintan O'Toole argued that modern Irish theatre has failed to engage with national issues of the day. But by taking the cultural and dramatic dialogue outside of the theatre all together theatre makers are doing just that, writes SARA KEATING

FINTAN O'TOOLE'S recent RTÉ documentary, Power Plays, and the accompanying article on these pages, has provoked considerable controversy among contemporary theatre makers. For those who didn't see it, the documentary was part personal journey, part political treatise. His general argument was that Irish theatre since the mid-1990s has failed in what O'Toole sees as theatre's primary impulse: to engage with the major national issues of its days. However, for a younger generation of theatre artists and audiences, O'Toole's dismissal of the work of major writers such as Mark O'Rowe, Enda Walsh, and Michael West, among others, and younger collaborative artists such as Brokentalkers, Anu, and TheatreClub seems short-sighted.

Although these theatre makers are not working within the dramatic parameters favoured by Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy or Tom Murphy, the intense globalisation of Irish culture in the past 10 years means that Irish writers are examining an entirely different society; a diffuse and permeable culture rather than a unified one.

As a consequence, there has been an enormous shift in the way the individual (and the individual artist or playwright) engages with the world, and this has had consequences for theatre’s form as well as its content.

The dominant form in Irish drama from the mid-1990s onwards was the monologue play, which has been widely criticised by O’Toole (and many others) for its tendency to pull away from the social world rather than engage with it. However, the monologue play in its early incarnations in the work of Conor McPherson, Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh, was, in fact, a powerful social statement encapsulated in the single-voice dramatic form.

While the homogenous Irish ideal of Yeats, Gregory and O’Casey, and the dichotomous Ireland of Friel and Murphy lent themselves to the grand social realist play, for the disenfranchised youth of an expanding contemporary population, the monologue play was the quintessential embodiment of a generation’s alienation. Late-capitalism Celtic Tiger Ireland was an increasingly individualistic society, where traditional communities had been shattered by urban migration and the swell of social housing on cities’ outskirts.

The violent suburban wasteland of Mark O'Rowe's Howie the Rookie, the 48-hour brawling binge of Conor McPherson's Rum and Vodka, the anti-social psychic rupture of adolescence in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs: these plays might not have been political in the way that Brian Friel's Translationsor Tom Murphy's The Sanctuary Lampwere, but they expressed a fundamental dis-ease with a society where the governing structures of church and State – no matter how dysfunctional – had entirely fallen away. These were plays that embodied the legacy of these failures rather than debated the consequences.

There were plays too, however, that placed these failures more concretely before an audience; the work of Martin McDonagh, for example, although the outrageous comic form of his plays often confused audiences about the solemnity of some of his cultural critique.

The Leenane Trilogy was not just a post-modern pastiche of Irish drama. It also showed us the consequences of late-capitalist culture on the more traditional structures of rural Irish life. The pathetic priest, Fr Walsh, in The Lonesome Westexpresses the profound crisis of faith in the Catholic Church. The treatment of Mag in The Beauty Queen of Leenanehighlights the neglect of the elderly in a society obsessed with progress, while her daughter, Maureen, is a product of a sterile environment in touch with the modern world through television, but unable to access any of its advantages. In fact, what McDonagh's plays reminded us was that as much as the new wealth had changed Ireland, a culture is not reinvented overnight.

One of the specific criticisms that O'Toole makes in Power Playsis the failure of Irish playwrights to critique the excessive cultural consumption of Celtic Tiger Ireland: its want-it-all, have-it-all culture. Where was the big play that warned us of the inevitable crash, he asks.

However, to critique the new materialism of Irish society in this direct way was to limit oneself to a specific world of the middle-classes.

Instead, contemporary theatre makers, like Pan Pan ( The Idiots), Anu (their four-part Foley Street project), Brokentalkers ( Silver Starsand Track) or TheatreClub ( Heroin) turned to portraying disenfranchised communities; those who did not have access to cultural capital, often eschewing fiction for a reflection of real-life communities in collaborative projects showcased on the fringes of mainstream theatre.

This work does not lend itself to an easy academic catch-all assessment, but it shows the willingness of contemporary theatre artists to be political in a more fundamental way: by taking the cultural and dramatic dialogue outside of the theatre all together.

Although these works represent a variety of different dramatic and thematic approaches to changes in Irish culture over the past decade, when evaluated together they create a persuasive counter-argument to O'Toole's thesis. By focusing so closely in Power Playson what the role he thinks theatre should play in Irish life, he neglects to see the myriad of different possibilities for what Irish theatre is becoming: a vital, multiplicity of personal voices and political interventions that transcend the simplistic configuration of the epic social play.

Five of the new power plays

The Walworth Farceby Enda Walsh 

"What are we if we are not our stories?" a psychopathic father asks his sons, whom he has trapped in a flat on the Walworth Road in London. But the play also asks what Irish culture is if it is just its stories. It is time to reinvent the cultural myths of Irishness, Walsh suggests in high farce, reinventing the traditional "Irish" play while he is at it.

Freefallby Michael West

A man has a stroke and scenes from his life flash before his eyes. His failing marriage and collapsing house become a metaphor for a nation rotting from the inside out. Emotional rigour and political reflection delivered in finely honed experimental piece of ensemble theatre.

Improbable Frequencyby Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter

A satirical musical about neutral Ireland during the second World War was more politically relevant than it might at first have seemed, reflecting a cultural shift from nationalism to revisionism and a willingness to question the historical legacy of Ireland's isolationist policies.

By the Bog of Catsby Marina Carr

Carr excoriates the materialistic values of Celtic Tiger Ireland in a dark portrait of midlands Ireland. By the Bog of Cats
explores the social consequences of greed, as a Traveller woman's revenge upon the settled community becomes an act of personal tragedy.

Howie the Rookieby Mark O'Rowe

Two men united by their "namesake in Lee-ness", martial arts hero Bruce Lee, embark on a journey of ultra-violent proportions through the social fringes of suburban Dublin. Narrated from a first-person perspective, O'Rowe breaks down the audience's position of judgment. He was not interested in "the people in the house who are witnessing this" but "the people who commit".