Facing the audacity of despair

One form that a lingering Irish provincialism often takes is the inflation of local heroes into global stars. Another is the opposite: an extreme reluctance to recognise greatness until it is endorsed by London and New York. By placing its superb Tom Murphy season at the heart of an international theatre festival, the National Theatre has challenged that parochialism with bold exuberance.

In presenting five plays from a career that has continued to unfold over six decades, it implicitly poses the question of how many other living playwrights, anywhere, have produced such a rich body of work. The answer that emerges from the ultimate testing ground of the stage is very few.

That Murphy's standing is open to question is due in part to the unease that always accompanies originality. Another part of the explanation is deeply paradoxical, however. Murphy writes so marvellously for actors that certain roles have become almost inextricable from certain performances.

Over the past 25 years, good actors have touched greatness in Murphy plays and great ones have been pushed to the limits of their art. The role of Mommo in Bailegangaire is haunted by the ghost of Siobhβn McKenna. If you close your eyes and think of J.P.W. King and the Irish Man in The Gigli Concert, it is Tom Hickey and Godfrey Quigley that you see. Harry in A Whistle In The Dark is Seβn McGinley; Francisco in The Sanctuary Lamp is John Kavanagh.

The Abbey season stands or falls on its ability to exorcise these ghosts of past performances and come to terms with the nature of Murphy's originality. That it succeeds entirely on the first ground and to a large extent on the second is a cause for celebration.

The performances are not, on the whole, spectacular. What they are for the most part is something that is, in this context, rather more important: clear, compelling and full of integrity. Though they are in general of very high quality, they also release the plays from the need for heroic performance. By making them less awesome, they have also made them more approachable.

What you get with Pauline Flanagan's exquisitely detailed Mommo, for example, is not the baroque opera of McKenna, but a haunting chamber piece. Mark Lambert's J.P.W. King is not the wildly picaresque novel Tom Hickey created from the role, but a beautifully layered story. What's going on is not a reduction, just a change of key.

At the same time, there are performances that bring a memorable new conviction to roles that have sometimes proved elusive. Declan Conlon's account of Michael in A Whistle In The Dark, for example, has a subtlety and complexity that become riveting. Equally, Stephen Brennan catches the mixture of bombast, melancholy and desperate yearning in The Sanctuary Lamp's central character, Harry, with an exemplary combination of technical mastery and emotional presence.

When it comes to getting a grip on what is original in Murphy's work, the season's success is not as complete, but it is real nonetheless. Simply by staging five plays together, it allows us to see more clearly than before what he does with the basic theatrical forms he inherited. It turns out to be something fundamental.

One almost accidental indication of Murphy's ability to plough new ground is available to anyone who comes to A Whistle In The Dark having seen the Gate's recent production of The Homecoming by Harold Pinter. A stream of English theatre in the 1960s, passing through Pinter and Joe Orton's Entertaining Mister Sloan, springs from what Murphy does in A Whistle In The Dark: turn the apparent familiarity of domestic drama into an arena for ferocious psychological and physical conflict. The way the opening moments of A Whistle In The Dark, brilliantly staged by Conall Morrison, almost tear apart the fabric of a naturalistic setting is a momentous declaration of intent.

Essentially, what Murphy does in all of these plays is to bypass the big argument of 20th-century theatre. While the official choice for writers and performers was between naturalism and expressionism, Murphy doesn't accept the distinction. He is neither a naturalist nor an expressionist, but a fabulist: a creator of daringly imagined stories. His work demands that a naturalistic scene be played with a constant awareness of its mythic dimension and that an expressionistic scene be performed with convincing realism.

One person who might be expected to have a feel for this is Murphy himself, which is why his production of Bailegangaire is so fascinating. The play has two quite different textures: the highly stylised story that the ancient, bed-ridden Mommo keeps telling, but never finishes, and the immediate personal and social concerns of her two granddaughters. In his direction, Murphy fuses them together. On the one hand, he disrupts the realistic setting of a country kitchen by allowing Flanagan to incorporate the audience as listeners to her story. On the other hand, he heightens the apparent naturalism of the granddaughters, Mary and Dolly.

While Jane Brennan's Mary remains the still, sad heart of the piece and keeps it grounded in emotional truth, Derbhle Crotty's Dolly is able to spin off into a beautifully controlled wildness. Crotty's rare ability to play a histrionic character without histrionics bridges the gap between Mommo's mesmerising artifice and Mary's emotional paralysis, allowing the play to be poignant without being in danger of sinking into sentiment.

The Morning After Optimism employs the same outward dichotomy between artifice and realism, and Gerry Stembridge's tremendously lively and intelligent production adopts essentially the same way of overcoming it. Here, too, there are two levels: the relatively realistic pimp and whore, James and Rosie, and the fantasy alter egos, Edmund and Anastasia, whom they encounter in a fairy-tale forest. For the play to gel, the performers have to meet in the middle. This is what Stembridge's witty production does.

Mikel Murfi's James and Jasmine Russell's Rosie push their characters towards a cartoonish broadness, while Laura Murphy's Anastasia and Alan Leech's Edmund are filled with as much reality as the roles can bear.

With the mechanical problems of creating a forest in a small, bare space solved by Blβith∅n Sheerin's cleverly stylised set, the result is a wonderfully coherent and direct engagement with what might seem an abstract play.

The Gigli Concert is also rooted in this juxtaposition of acutely observed reality and daring theatrical metaphor. Murphy has imagined the dishevelled English cultist J.P.W. King and the despairing Irish property magnate who is his tempter and his accidental saviour in living Technicolor.

It is not terribly difficult for any good actor to convince us that such people are eminently possible. What is difficult is to retain the element of recognition while pushing beyond such obvious possibilities and into territory the play has to conquer: the impossible. The audience has to take the same journey that J.P.W. King does, from treating the Irish Man's desire to sing like the great tenor Gigli as an expression of dementia to seeing it as an obtainable, even inevitable goal.

Ben Barnes, the director, and his actors, Mark Lambert, Owen Roe and Catherine Walsh (as Mona, J.P.W.'s lover), achieve this in the most obvious but also the bravest way. They trust the story they are telling. The direction and the acting are uncluttered either by a desire to impose an external idea or by the pursuit of some kind of preconceived greatness.

The secret is that the play is so rich and resonant that it requires very little elaboration. Both Roe and Lambert have the nerve to rely on subtle suggestions and avoid grand gestures. Their quiet confidence defies you to take your eyes off them, and you don't.

If these are three almost completely successful productions, for the other two there is a slightly heavier emphasis on the "almost". Lynne Parker's production of The Sanctuary Lamp, arguably the most difficult of the plays, has terrific performances in Stephen Brennan's Harry, Frank McCusker's interestingly sinister Francisco, Sarah-Jane Drummey's watchful, damaged Maudie and James Greene's world-weary Monsignor. It also makes excellent use of the Peacock, benefiting greatly from the intimacy it affords.

Where it does not quite succeed is with the mythic, ritualistic elements of the play. These centre on two wordless physical gestures. One is Harry's mimicking of a dance his dead daughter used to do. The other, after the biblical Samson, is his lifting of the church pulpit. Here, these moments are oddly cramped and almost lost.

The same kind of problem affects A Whistle In The Dark or, more specifically, its pivotal character, the monstrous paterfamilias Dada. It is Dada who pushes the play farthest from its roots in slice-of-life realism and into the territory of myth and archetype. While Clive Geraghty gives a fine realistic account of the role, he is cast too far against type to reach the almost gothic heights the play demands. This is not his fault. Some actors have an intimidating presence; he doesn't.

This leaves Conall Morrison's vividly energetic production slightly off balance. Yet it still gathers a ferocious force that explodes in those brilliant moments towards the end when Don Wycherley's elementally terrifying Harry suddenly exposes the full depths of the hurt that feeds his hatred. In such moments, we come face to face with the quality that makes the Murphy season unmissable: what J.P.W. King calls the audacity of despair.

The Sanctuary Lamp runs until Thursday; The Morning After Optimism runs until October 13th; Bailegangaire runs until October 27th; A Whistle In The Dark and The Gigli Concert run until late November; there is a staged reading of Famine, directed by Patrick Mason, on October 14th (bookings at 01-8787222)