Intellectual show of cruelty

IN one sense, Bedrock's Theatre of Cruelty season at the Project (currently located at the Mint in Henry Place, Dublin) is misnamed. The title comes from the French poet and director Antonin Artaud, but the style, so far, is not quite what Artaud had in mind.

He was thinking of a kind of theatre that would break once and for all with psychological investigation and that would assault the senses of the audience, so as to wake up the nerves and heart". The play itself would be an act of cruelty on the audience, a bolt of lightning that would scorch and electrify at the same time.

The first instalment of the Bedrock season - made up of two Samuel Beckett plays, Catastrophe and What Where; Mark O'Rowe's Anna's Ankle and Heiner Muller's Obituary - has clear points of contact with Artaud's vision. It is certainly not psychological theatre. It places, as Artaud does, the body itself at the centre of everything. But it gives the idea of cruelty a different, more intellectual, meaning. It is less an assault on the audience's senses than an exploration of the place of violence in 20th century culture. And in terms of form, it is based, as Artaud's ideal theatre is not, on written texts.

The closest the show comes to Artaud is in Heiner Muller's short but dense Obituary. The play provides a kind of compact history of the relationship between political violence - most explicitly that of the Nazis - and personal breakdown. A woman's successful suicide, after many attempts, is played against images of imprisonment, torture and murder.

The play's structure, for all its deliberate fragmentation of time and place, is actually rather schematic. But Caroline McSweeney's fine production manages to give it both formal coherence and intellectual conviction, and in her direction of the movement of Karl Shiels, Michelle Read and Shane Lynch, the idea of the body in the theatre is given an expression that is closer to Artaud's vision than any other part of the evening.

What is so impressive about this first group of plays, though, is that the departure from Artaud results not from a misunderstanding but from a sense that there is more to be understood now than when he wrote in the 1930s. He developed his notions before the Holocaust, before snuff movies, before we entered a world in which everyday life is saturated by images of violence.

His belief that exposure to images of violence would restore his audience to full humanity has been challenged by the actual experience of living in the second half of the century. If anything, we have lost the ability to be shocked, and every new image of violence merely takes away another bit of our humanity.

This is where Anna's Ankle the one new play in the sequence, comes in. Though it is not a piece of art of the same order as the other plays, this monologue (performed by Patrick Leech with a fine sense of pace and control), has a critical place in the project, for it poses in stark and brutal terms the question of whether avant garde explorations of cruelty may themselves merely add to it. The speaker is an "avant garde" and "experimental" film maker whose pretentious ramblings about fetishism are at first humorously satirised and then become no laughing matter. The framing of horror, the concern for the right shots, tips over into horror itself.

O'Rowe is saying explicitly and literally what Beckett says with such economic indirectness in Catastrophe, directed here by Jimmy Fay, where another director is seen in the act of planning his show. Unlike What Where, in which the references to cruelty and torture verge on the explicit, Catastrophe refracts violence through the prism of theatre itself. The theatre director issuing orders for the disposition of his actor's mute body acts as a metaphor for all the forms of power in which the human body becomes an object.

IN this, the play questions not only violence but also the notion that art can make the world less cruel merely by showing images of cruelty. In one sense, Catastrophe is a questioning of Beckett's own theatre in which actors are so often forced toe use their bodies in painfully distorted ways. At the core of the play is the fear that what happens when violence is given an aesthetic shape may be, not a jolt to the moral system, but an act of sadism.

And yet, both in Fay's splendid production of Catastrophe and in Jason Byrne's hypnotic staging of What Where, there is a kind of answer to the questions that the evening as a whole raises. With his scrupulous, relentless, fiercely honest, moral vision, Beckett did find ways of showing cruelty without adding to it. By never showing, saying or moving one fraction more than is strictly necessary, he managed to create metaphors that, instead of evading the reality of cruelty, discover its awful essence.

For the intellectual honesty with which it has raised these questions, as well as for the theatrical skill with which it has enacted them, Bedrock's season deserves to be seen. The second show, made up of Heiner Muller's Waterfront Wasteland and Gavin Kostick's Forked, opens tonight.