‘THE STAGE, with all its efforts, can never be as artificial as life”. Currently there is in Dublin’s theatres – as well as in more unexpected sites around the city – enough drama to test the veracity of the writer Saki’s statement. Between the recent Dublin Fringe Festival and the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, now in full swing, the play’s certainly the thing.
Dublin's showcase festival provides the ideal opportunity to compare and contrast – how our home-grown drama stands alongside international work. The Irish stage still remains, fundamentally, a place for the storyteller whose tool is language. This is evident in the textually rich offerings of two of this year's major new Irish productions, both of them by authors more closely associated with the page than the stage, which begs the question where are the dramatists: Colm Tóibín's powerful Testamentand Hugo Hamilton's impressive adaptation of his own memoir, The Speckled People. And of course language at it most zestful is there in abundance in O'Casey's Juno and the Paycockin the Abbey.
While the reshaping of theatrical form – towards a greater fusion of other elements such as lighting, sound, design and movement – has been creeping into Irish theatre, it has not yet supplanted the dominance of literary theatre. Other traditional notions no longer hold: venues do not now always require a stage and ranks of seating: The Lulu House, Laundryand Tradeare among the "site specific" festival productions that are part of this trend. It is arguable whether it is still in the playhouse that the audience is most wondrously taken out of ordinary time, but a live space can sometimes have a resonance that even the most vivid text cannot create, as Laundry– set in a former Magdalene laundry – demonstrates.
Ireland’s reputation as an incubator of great playwrights – Sheridan, Shaw, Synge, Wilde, O’Casey, Beckett, Behan, Friel, Murphy, Kilroy and McGuinness, has long been established. But what of more recent and current generations of Irish dramatists? It is, sadly, questionable as to whether their work, unlike that of their illustrious predecessors, conveys, as Solzhenitsyn put it, “the life experience of one whole nation to another”. And yet, those recent crises challenging society and the wounds of boom time might well be beckoning to a new and daring voice in Irish theatre that will emerge eventually and unexpectedly. For now, perhaps the only certainty about theatre in Ireland – or indeed anywhere – is that it is in a state of constant flux.