Many people have read Ulysses. I haven't. Many have read Proust's seminal work about a mosque which serves offal to famished Israelis: "Allah-rich Church - Two Tongues Per Jew", writes Kevin Myers
I haven't read that either, yet it too is in the established canon of seminal works of Western civilisation. But Candide is in a different category altogether. It is one of those most profoundly influential works of Western civilisation which influences no-one because no-one has read it. This is because it is all but unreadable. Indeed, in its original form, dramatically it is all but unpresentable. Yet it has taken vague root somewhere in the cerebellum, where it lingers like one of those characters one repeatedly meets only in theatre lobbies, and with whom one has polite, if slightly feverishly inventive conversations, without having the least idea who they are.
Tom Swift and Jo Mangan of The Performance Corporation are the exceptions in Ireland, possibly Europe. They have actually read Candide; and they have adapted it for the Irish stage with - I suspect - about much respect for the original text as a fandangoing bull has for the glass tables bearing the Royal Doulton. The result is anarchy of a very 18th-century kind: a bawdy bedlam, fragrant with all the delights of murder, sodomy, slavery and treachery. Candide is now running at the Civic Theatre Tallaght, but only until Saturday. And then it is over, possibly to be seen no more.
This would be a tragedy. It is sublimely funny, an unending banquet of brilliant writing and superbly inventive acting, featuring a cast of just five, playing in all some 39 parts. Or so it says in the programme. I have no way of knowing. At a certain point in the narrative, as in a Russian novel in which every single character goes by some variant of the name Voroshimoliov, you abandon all hope of understanding what is going on, and surrender yourself to the sublime lunacy unfolding before you.
The one reassuring feature of this production is Damien Devaney, the bewitchingly innocent Candide himself, who just about never leaves the stage (I think - for certainty is a luxury one searches for in vain in this production). The fact that he never departs from one's vision suggests strongly that he doesn't play any other parts, but nothing is quite as it should be in this Candide. For example, I happened to meet the cast after the play was over. I searched in vain for the actor who played Pangloss, Candide's idiot-mentor, and he appeared to have gone. It was only when I got home and I read my programme notes - finally - that I realised I'd been talking to him all along: Peter Daly, who also plays half-a-dozen other parts, but who quite brilliantly allows himself to be completely subsumed into the absurdity that is Pangloss.
I thought there were about four, possibly five women in the cast. There were only two: firstly, there was Regan O'Brien, who played as many male roles as female and who shimmered effortlessly from one persona with one costume to quite another persona in different clothes in a mere microsecond. One moment she was the outrageously named Cunegonde - at times, French is not so far from English, you know, and gond means hinge - the next an innkeeper, or priest, or executioner.
Sexy, bawdy, funny: most of all, mad Lynda Gough is at times even more omnipresent, playing some 11 parts, with such speed of transformation that they must have mastered the art of costume change by means of hosepipe in Performance Corporation. The programme is before me now, and I have trouble believing it: with effervescent élan, she plays the King of El Dorado, a dervish, a baroness, a magistrate - oh bloody hell, Eamon de Valera for all I know.
As zany as anything else was one character (of many) played by Michael Hayes: a slitherily treacherous Spanish (I think) servant speaking in a bizarre Louth-Navan accent, as of course the most treacherous Spanish servants invariably do. And Louis Lovett plays the most absurd, most fantastical, most lunatic part in the play: the old woman who forfeits a buttock to feed the troops during a siege of a city.
There are indeed too many parts for any ordinary mortal to remember of his berserk theatrical menagerie; but he is extraordinarily funny, not merely because he has some choice lines, but because as an actor he is firmly and clearly rooted in the insane, the preposterous and the certifiable.
Performance Corporation's Candide was directed by co-writer Jo Mangan. I am incapable of doing justice to the brilliance of her direction: imaginative, dirty, chaotic, joyful, bizarre, and certainly worthy of prolonged in-patient treatment at one of our less reputable psychiatric clinics. The kaleidoscope of her mind doesn't so much open on the stage as explode, the filthy beast.
Yes yes yes, you can say that Candide has a serious moral intent, and its message is as relevant today as it was 20 zillion years ago, in which case, go and sit under the stairs, turn on the light and read it in the aboriginal, unreadable French, you dimwit. More sensibly, you can declare that it is a holy cow that is une vache sacré no more: it was ripe for rape and ravishment, which is what The Performance Corporation delivers in glorious measure. And the stage management by Jane Nolan was - as always - superb. Civic Theatre, Tallaght: ends Saturday.