the new generation of Irish 'playwrights' takes a bow
If you listened carefully during the Dublin fringe and theatre festivals, you could hear the hum of the zeitgeist going into overdrive. A profound shift is happening in Irish theatre, the most significant since the emergence of a new generation of Irish playwrights in the mid-to-late 1990s. That was an extraordinary time for Irish theatre, and 1997 was its apex.
Marina Carr had laid down a marker the previous year, with the transfer of Portia Coughlan to the Royal Court in London. Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom was touring the world, touching down in New York in early 1997 to acclaim from Ben Brantley at the New York Times.
Then, in July 1997, Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy opened at the Royal Court, to be followed by Conor McPherson's The Weir. As The Weir transferred to the West End, Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs took Edinburgh by storm, paving the way for its own West End transfer the following year.
More quietly, June 1997 saw a play called From Both Hips staged at the Project; two years later, its writer, Mark O'Rowe, would shock and awe London and New York with Howie the Rookie.
Ten years on, and no new writer has come close to joining, or challenging, a group of playwrights that has now become canonical. New voices have emerged, of course: the most prominent currently is Abbie Spallen, whose new play, Strandline, will be produced by Fishamble in Dublin next month.
But the mid-1990s' clique still stands largely unchallenged.
As Enda Walsh said in an interview last year: "If I was in my 20s trying to start writing, I'd be looking at myself, going 'Enda Walsh, Conor McPherson, Mark O'Rowe, Marina Carr: they're old, they're establishment'."
And so, if you just dipped into the Dublin Theatre Festival, perhaps to catch one of the world premieres by Conor McPherson or Sebastian Barry, or a Dublin premiere by Enda Walsh, you might have thought it pretty "establishment": a theatre festival headlined by new plays from internationally acclaimed playwrights, continuing a profound Irish tradition of writer-led theatre.
But if you hung around a little longer, or hustled for tickets for some of the smaller shows, or delved into the earlier fringe festival -- or just tuned into the hum in the background -- you may have noticed something very different. Unfamiliar companies working in unusual venues. Actors who look like technicians, playing with computers.
Programme credits that read more like those in the cinema, and afford equally little respect to the writer (if there is one). Actors who look like ordinary people -- because they are ordinary people.
These, the techniques and motifs of the rising trends for site-specific and documentary theatre, weren't new in themselves.
But what was new was the confidence and craft being displayed by those exploring them. A new generation of theatre makers is emerging that has absorbed these influences from the outside and has found unique and authentic ways to use them.
Two shows last Friday evening encapsulated this: 8pm saw me sitting in a pew in the candlelit University Church on St Stephen's Green, as choirboys from St Patrick's sang a requiem for Gerald Manley Hopkins. I had spent the previous hour walking around a Newman House viscerally haunted by Hopkins, who died there in 1889. The production was called No Worst There is None, and was produced by Dylan Tighe's company, The Stomach Box. Just 25 people per night saw it, over seven nights; at that capacity, it could comfortably run for a year, were UCD (which owns Newman House, the original home of the university) to give permission. A combination of walking tour, haunted house, performance art, literary archaeology and audio-visual installation, this was a smart, sensitive and impeccably crafted piece of site- specific theatre.
Two hours later, I listened as a very different choir sang a requiem for an Ireland past, in Silver Stars.
Musician Sean Millar wrote a song cycle based on interviews with older, gay, Irish men, in which they told him of their struggles to realise their true selves in Ireland and -- for many -- as emigrants in the US.
Millar gave these songs to a young Dublin company called Brokentalkers (Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan), who have been winning plaudits for their adept use of new technologies in theatre. (Recently, they produced a show in Dublin in which the sole actor was alone in a room in Holland, performing via a two-way webcam).
Brokentalkers recruited a cast of gay men, mostly inexperienced as performers, to form a choir to sing the songs, and interwove this with snippets of video and audio from Miller's interviews.
This was innovation absolutely at the service of theatre: as the woman sitting beside me exclaimed afterwards, you would have to have had a heart of stone not to have been moved it. But the point is not simply that these two shows were good, but that they were brave and new, and very, very good.
There are others like them, and together, they make up a new generation -- which suggests that the next generation of internationally-recognised Irish playwrights won't actually be playwrights.
Conor McPherson's first theatre company was called Fly By Night. Like McPherson, the best of this new generation of theatre makers will prove not to be.
colinmurphy@independent.ie
Irish Independent
