CULTURE SHOCK:FOR A long time, but particularly from the late 1970s onwards, the Dublin Theatre Festival operated according to a fairly fixed notion of home and abroad. The home side was the unusually strong Irish tradition of literary drama, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
The festival was a showcase for the largely justified idea that Irish drama of the old-fashioned kind with a text and a playwright at its centre, had global importance. The away side was the imported avant garde. While we were showing the world the continued vibrancy of text-based drama, it was showing us the physical and visual sides of theatre. The stream of 20th century performance running through Artaud, Brecht and Brook was temporarily diverted in our direction.
With the globalisation of culture, this whole paradigm has changed. There is no longer a clear sense of "Irish" and "foreign" work that divides along the line separating literary drama from avant garde performance. The most obvious example is the presence in this year's festival of Pan Pan's The Crumb Trail. Pan Pan is an Irish-based company, headed by Gavin Quinn and Aedin Cosgrove, using Irish performers and sometimes Irish texts. But it is really an international touring company, located on the grid of global festivals and more likely to be to be encountered in Shanghai than in Shannon.
This is not just a question of how the company functions. It is also about the nature of the work. The Crumb Trailis written, directed, designed and performed by Irish people. But there is nothing specifically Irish about the piece itself. It takes its bearings from two co-ordinates: the Grimm Brothers tale of Hansel and Greteland the internet. It is a co-production with the Forum Freies Theatre in Dusseldorf and instead of following the traditional Irish route of travelling from Dublin to New York, it journeys in the opposite direction, having already garnered accolades off-Broadway.
More profoundly, The Crumb Trailhas absolutely no interest in the whole world-view implied in the dichotomy of home and abroad. Its own world is placeless, rootless, without history or social context. It plays with a certain kind of intimacy and directness: Gina Moxley who both wrote the text and is one of the four performers plays Gina. Arthur Riordan plays Arthur.
They reveal painful things about themselves. But this intimacy is deliberately false, inserted into a context in which the lines between the personal and the impersonal, the true and the false are hopelessly blurred.
Actors telling you about their “real” selves are still acting.
And in all of this, The Crumb Trailepitomises both the joys and the limitations of weightlessness. The international avant garde is a gravity-free environment. In order to function, it has to cut its ties to the local and specific, to all the shades of meaning through which a defined community is enabled, to borrow a phrase from Brian Friel's Translations, to distinguish between intimacies. Indeed, The Crumb Trailfundamentally challenges the idea that the local and specific exist anymore. It proposes a world of personal isolation, electronic simulacra and collapsed narratives in which "reality" is just another genre.
This weightlessness can be exhilarating. Quinn and his performers have a ferocious commitment to the idea of being out there, beyond the beyonds, bumping up against fragments of cultural and social debris. There’s a relentless and fully embodied courage to the piece. On an open stage, deliberately constructed as a rehearsal space, the performers (Aoife Duffy and Bush Moukarzel as well as Moxley and Riordan) are on a high wire without the safety nets of psychology, characterisation or plot. Even the last defence of the actor – illusion – is stripped away. This very nakedness is itself compelling and it is at times superbly crystallised in visual imagery and in particular in Cosgrove’s powerfully evocative use of silhouettes.
Yet weightlessness also has its limitations. The paradox of the global performance avant garde is that its biggest difficulty is with what was its original appeal. It began with the shock of the new, and now it struggles with the whole idea of novelty. As the recent James Coleman retrospective in Dublin reminded us, the multi-media trail has been blazed in art a long time before the invention of the worldwide web. The ideas at the heart of The Crumb Trail, of cognitive dissonance, of placelessness and anomie, of a reality drowned in simulacra, have been around for a few decades now.
Even its recasting of fairytale, haunting as it is, follows on from the work of Angela Carter, of Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witchor of Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman. It's actually, by now, rather a mainstream notion.
And this raises the other limitation that The Crumb Trailhighlights. The piece deals in the currency of hollowed out meanings, which is to say, in artistic terms, of clichés. It explores the postmodern culture of pastiche and repetition exemplified by YouTube hits like Star Wars Boy. But it confronts the same danger that anyone exploring this territory has to deal with: how do you wade through clichés without getting some on your clothes? Moxley's text adopts the standard defensive procedure of self-consciousness: these aren't clichés because we know they're clichés.
This is not much more convincing here than it generally is. Using Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, as Moxley’s text does, for example, is itself an almost obligatory reflex of international avant garde theatre. It seems more like a pious gesture than any kind of revelation. And it is not easy to know what to make of the two very bad grunge rock songs that are used in the piece.
Are they meant to function as examples of musical and emotional cliché or are they just not very good? None of this is to deny the vitality and lingering power of The Crumb Trail. It is simply to say that the decision to cut one's moorings and move beyond a common and local frame of reference has costs as well as benefits. No one quite knows how to reassemble the lost meanings so clearly evoked in the piece. What does seem likely is that doing so may require the reconstruction of a narrative more articulate and resonant than an old fairy tale.