"It's a morality play." "Or a Jacobean tragedy." "It's like a Fellini film." "It almost becomes opera."
After six weeks' intensive rehearsal of the Barbaric Comedies trilogy, the cast members are still eager to tease it out. What exactly was its Galician author, Ramon del Valle-Inclan, up to? How will Edinburgh Festival audiences react to Calixto Bieito's production of this full-blooded, four-hour spectacle of rural Spain, in a new version by Frank McGuinness?
"People are going to be shocked by the basic, primal quality of it", says Mark Lambert, who plays the trilogy's central figure, Don Juan Manuel Montenegro, a Galician nobleman. An almost Lear-like figure, but lacking the capacity to learn from his experiences, Montenegro is full of self-pity and self-aggrandisement. "I am poor and naked and cold as the sea," he laments in the final play of the trilogy. "If death doesn't take me, I will beg my bread walking the roads." Written between 1907 and 1922 and loosely set, in this production in 1930s Galicia in north-western Spain, the Barbaric Comedies presents a parade of landlords and peasants, cattlemen, clerics and beggars, foulmouthed rakes, thieves, lepers, servants, madmen, concubines and prostitutes.
Some are archetypal figures or grotesques, most are extreme portraits of venality and human frailty. Brutal male-female relationships, father-son conflicts and the twin bogeys of sin and guilt are mercilessly laid bare. There is no late-Romantic cult of the peasant here, no bucolic kitsch: we are shown robbery, assault, murder, rape, gambling, whoring, bodies being boiled in pots . . . This is not theatre to be slotted in as a prelude to a festival supper: it aims to grab the audience by the throat. "Or maybe it will send them running for the door at the interval", Eamon Morrissey says, laughing. "At this stage, we just can't tell."
On the eve of their departure to Edinburgh, the 22 members of the cast, who double up as beggars, horses and dogs, still hadn't seen the entire trilogy performed straight through. The five actors I spoke to - Eamon Morrissey, Eleanor Methven, Mark Lambert, Janet Moran and Karl Shiels - were conscious of the scale and ambition of this Edinburgh Festival/Abbey Theatre co-production, which was initiated by the Abbey's former artistic director, Patrick Mason and Edinburgh Festival director, Brian McMaster. They were looking forward to seeing the set, designed by Alfons Flores - a huge overhead metal grid - in place in Edinburgh's King's Theatre and fired up by their experience of working with the Catalan theatre and opera director, Calixto Bieito.
For Bieito, Valle-Inclan (1866-1936) is one of the great Spanish writers. He mentions him in the same breath as Cervantes and Calderon, whose Life Is A Dream he directed, memorably, at the Edinburgh Festival two years ago. "Valle-Inclan was part of the important group of Spanish writers, the generation of '98, who were breaking new ground. He wrote everything: poetry, plays, novels. He was very avant-garde, a precursor of Expressionism, the Theatre of the Absurd, or even the Theatre of Cruelty. He was extreme and radical.
"I have wanted to direct Barbaric Comedies for a long time: the first play in the trilogy, Silverface, is a spectacular theatrical game. The second, The Romance of the Wolves, is very existential, almost nihilist, and in this respect is very modern. The trilogy is a fantastic piece of theatre, commenting on the human condition." Commenting bleakly, that is. On the basis of these plays, the human condition hasn't much to commend it. "The plays are brutal, yes, full of contrast, very harsh. They are also coloured by a complete lack of compassion. For the characters in the play the border between life and death is not clear.
Valle-Inclan was pushing everything to extremes. Why? To bring out the very essence of life, of existence, I think." In the world of the Comedies, Catholicism and a sense of sin are superimposed on deeply ingrained, atavistic superstitions and fears. "I am a great sinner," Montenegro says, "my life is one long night of thunder and lightning. For that reason I see myself punished in my old age."
"It's not specifically about Catholicism," Bieito says, "but religion gives it its context. Valle-Inclan was heavily influenced by Catholicism - as we are still, in Spain. Even me." He laughs and shrugs, looking convincingly clerical in a black jumper, trousers and shiny black raincoat on one of the hottest days of the summer.
In the trilogy, Montenegro is struggling to protect his power, privileges and wealth from the grasping peasantry, from the Church and above all, from his covetous, unscrupulous sons. His favourite son, Silverface (Karl Shiels), tries to distance himself from his brothers' outrageous behaviour but is tripped up by his own weakness. The "pure" young woman he is infatuated with, Sabelita (Jane Moran) becomes his father's concubine, while Silverface consoles himself - enthusiastically - with a prostitute who falls in love with him. "There's no hope for you if you're a woman," says Eleanor Methven. "The peasants are the underclass and women are a further underclass. As a woman you can either be a virgin or a whore, but you're definitely a victim."
"Irish audiences will recognise a lot of this", Eamon Morrissey says and the others nod furiously. "It shows how people are affected by oppression or dictatorship. It could be the story of Ireland in the past 50 years, with Church and State collapsing, and a society turning in on itself. But it's also very, very timeless. Some of these scenes and characters are fundamental, they're fools and jesters, Harlequin figures. It's as old as theatre itself."
"There's a death culture in these plays that Irish people can relate to", Eleanor Methven says. Up to a point, certainly, but we've never been quite as full-blooded and hedonistic here, surely, even in our theatrical fantasies? "We've had a northern version," she concedes, "less passionate."
Passion is what Calixto Bieito has demanded of the cast during the long hours of rehearsal. "Passion and energy," Karl Shiels says. "On the first few days we were running around screaming our heads off. There were no scripts allowed into rehearsal, you did your work beforehand. You break through barriers of exhaustion and Calixto demands in such a subtle way that you give."
"He's most persuasive," agrees Eamon Morrissey, "and encouraging. `Come on my boys', he says, when you're playing a scene - like a football coach. `Come on, give me pleasure.' We had to point out to him that this has a sexual connotation in English . . ."
"He won't allow you to think, or analyse the text," Mark Lambert says, "and for me that's a big difference between him and other directors. I've learned so much from him. He wants you to show him what's possible. He wants to unlock the meaning of a scene by performing it. He says `I don't know what this scene should be like but when I see it, I'll know.' "
Bieito's work in opera has influenced the way he works in theatre. "When everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing, I begin to orchestrate, or conduct," he says. "Actors in Ireland are used to working in a literary tradition, with the text. They have a tradition of speaking the lines and their voices are their great instrument. I just add some instinctual bits, some physical work."
And pace. "It's really fast moving. Calixto doesn't want any lyricism," Eleanor Methven says. "He builds up the scenes really quickly, like a film, with image after image piled on. Film language kept coming up in rehearsal, he uses phrases like long-shot and close up."
They'd all jump at the chance to work with Bieito again. "Absolutely. This is storytelling as it should be done," Karl Shiels says. "The fact that we're still so excited says a lot," Mark Lambert says. "I just wonder if the excitement will catch - come back and talk to us after Edinburgh."
Barbaric Comedies opens at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh on Monday, August 14th and at the Abbey Theatre on October 2nd, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival.
