EINSTEIN, reputedly, was once asked whether he kept a pencil and piece of paper beside his bed in case a great idea came to him in the middle of the night and he might have forgotten it in the morning. He replied that great ideas are so rare that there is never any danger of forgetting them.
On much the same principle, I found watching Silviu Purcarete's breathtaking production of Aeschylus's Les Danaides at the National Basketball Arena this week, that there was no point in taking notes. This was a great idea, a production of such rare genius that there is no danger of ever forgetting it. It was the best visiting production in any Dublin Theatre Festival since the Brazilian Macunaima 15 years ago, and in itself made this year's festival a remarkable one.
Like all great works, it shattered assumptions about the art form in which it was cast. Ever since Aristotle, there has been a notion that tragedy and spectacle are opposite ends of a theatrical spectrum, that a play can have the dramatic rigour or visual luxury, but not both. What made Les Danaides so great was the boldness and brilliance with which it made a nonsense of the distinction. It was one of the most spectacular shows ever seen in Dublin - a cast of 110 actors playing over a stage area of 8,000 square feet, with lighting, movement, design and music firing on all cylinders.
But it also had an extraordinary purity of form, an elegance and dignity that gave it the stunning solemnity of a great religious ritual. Purcarete is a director in the great European tradition that stretches from Meyerhold to Brook, one whose aim is always to take an empty space and make it holy. And in Les Danaides, he used space with a fabulous fluency, now shrinking down to tiny and intimate details, now expanding it to awesome proportions. That most over-used of critical terms - magic - was at work.
As well as being a magnificent achievement in theatrical form, however, Purcarete's production was also a profoundly important political act. If it had the strangeness of something very old, it also had the urgency of present-day disasters.
Les Danaides is a myth about the origins of Europe, and as such, a stark challenge to any exclusivist notion of European culture.
For it tells the story of the flight from Egypt to ancient Greece of the 59 daughters of Danaos and their pursuit by their male cousins, the 50 sons of Egypt 105, who intend to marry them forcibly. Its tragedy is driven by a conflict between an Egyptian tradition of incestuous royal marriage (upheld by the sons of Egyptos) and a European taboo, against incest (upheld by the daughters of Danaos).
This story, with its images of war, rape and murder, of conflict between the classical world of Europe and what is now the Muslim world of North Africa, cannot but be coloured for us by the blood of Bosnia. Purcarete's genius is that he drew attention to these parallels with impeccable simplicity and economy.
The sense of the present was supplied simply by having the daughters of Danaos carry modern suitcases, which also served as walls, steps, tables and tombstones. The Muslim world was suggested simply by having them wear a kind of yashmak. And, more broadly, a modern sensibility was very, clearly on display in the way Purcarete imagined the gods as early 20th century decadents.
The result was a work in which moral and artistic purpose were so completely unified that a contemporary audience could experience something that must have matched in its mesmerising power the mythic intensity that the Greek tragedies had for their original audiences. If the Dublin Theatre Festival had done nothing else in its entire two weeks, it would still have been a triumphant vindication of an art form that was suddenly made to seem, not just pleasant or interesting, but urgently and absolutely necessary.
The only drawback of Les Danaides was that it made its nearest Irish equivalent in the festival - Macnas's Balor - seem much less remarkable than it might otherwise have appeared. Macnas's achievement in creating, almost from scratch, an indigenous form of theatrical spectacle, is truly astounding. Balor, the final part of the company's trilogy on Celtic myths, was a striking and enthralling re-felling of the story of the evil-eyed king who imprisoned his daughter in a tower on Tory Island.
On the purely, visual level, Ger Sweeney's richly worked designs gave the piece a real sense of coherence. And, theatrically, Ron Goodall's production had the kind of inventive use of space and confident deployment of physical skills that would be expected from Macnas's roots in the work of Footsbarn and Els Comediants.
But there was also a sense that Macnas has taken wordless, textless spectacle as far as it can go. However striking, the show remained very much on the surface, and even a gorgeous surface lacks depth. The sophisticated dumbshow in which the story was told retains elements of pageant and tableau vivant. The actors got to move and to strike poses, but not to achieve the kind of independent presence that might give the story some foundations in real human experience. The example of Les Danaides, showing that spectacle can be rooted in complex human emotions, presents a challenge that Macnas can hardly ignore.
AT least, however, Macnas can be spoken of in the same breath as Purcarete's great work, which is much more than can be said for the two British productions of the festival's second week, Train Spotting and Dealer's Choice. If Les Danaides vindicated theatre as a form, these two plays were a depressing reminder of just how far from those heights most mainstream theatre really is. Each originated with a major British company the Glasgow Citizens and the Royal National Theatre respectively. Each went on to commercial success on the West End. And neither was worthy of inclusion in an international festival of theatre.
Trainspotting, in particular, is arguably the worst play to have been included in the main festival programme over the last 15 years. In Irvine Welsh's novel, a catalogue of degradation is given a kind of gritty integrity by the strength, of the writing and the knowing humour of the narrative. Unpacked from its origins in Harry Gibson's poor adaptation, it is simply one damn thing after another. It is not clever, not funny, and not, in any genuine way, shocking. Anyone who has lived in Dublin in the last 20 years knows that heroin creates degradation. But what might be expected from a play on the subject - some semblance of interest in the whys and wherefores of a human disaster - is far beyond the wit of this boring wallow in misery for misery's sake.
The effect is like a parlour game played by a couple of particularly foul-minded and foul-mouthed 15-year-olds trying to outdo each other in a competition to come up with the most disgusting image. A man having sex with a hole in the ground? No, how about a man having sex in a toilet with his just-buried brother's pregnant wife? A man searching through excrement to find an opium suppository? No, how about a waitress squeezing a used tampon into the soup?
What is offensive is not the images themselves but the idea that simply putting together in a shapeless mess, with only the most desultory attempt at theatrical form, is good enough for an audience. The play ends with two men urinating on stage, but if they had gone up into the balcony and done the same thing down on the heads of the audience, the piece might at least have acquired the virtue of honesty.
Compared to this, the RNT's production of Dealer's Choice, written and directed by Patrick Marber, was a classic depiction of a different kind of addiction - in this case gambling. But in itself it was no more than a highly competent first play, capably acted and efficiently produced, but much more like a tolerably good tv script than a genuinely theatrical exercise. The characters - six men working in or connected with a London restaurant were established with a terribly ponderous deliberation, and the attempt at making poker into some kind of metaphor for their lives managed to be, at the same time, too literal and too contrived.
There was enough strong acting especially from the estimable Ken Oxtoby to hold the interest, and the odd good joke. But there was never enough urgency to, convince any sceptic that this kind of theatre is really necessary any more. Maybe, after Les Danaides, we should face the fact that it isn't.