Kavanagh without tears

"THE best way to love a country like this," Tarry Flynn's Uncle Conall Morrison's often delightful new adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh's novel at the Abbey, "is from a range of not less than 300 miles". Or, he might have had added, from a distance of 60 years. Time separates more profoundly than space, and the world of Tarry Flynn is oceans apart from ours.

When it was first published in 1948, Kavanagh's novel was invigorated by the shock of recognition. It presented a glimpse of the real rural Ireland that lay behind the official Utopian idyll. That realism was too much to take the novel was banned and remained out of print until well into the 1960s.

But now, the edge of reality has been blunted by the mushy accretion of nostalgia. As Kavanagh's friend Anthony Cronin put it so well:

The endurance of the rural breed

Seems, like the rugged landscape, stoical.

Rural grasping, rural greed,

Are somehow, unlike ours, heroical.

In the 1990s Tarry Flynn, rather than seeming like a work of realism looks much more like a softer, more sentimental and less ferociously honest version of his magnificent poem The Great Hunger. And this applies in the theatre, too, for after the brilliant extremism of Tom MacIntyre's stage version of The Great Hunger, Tarry Flynn is in danger of coming across as Kavanagh Without Tears.

Conall Morrison's very impressive production of his own adaptation doesn't quite escape this danger, but it does at least acknowledge it. It doesn't manage to come to terms with the book's evasion of the dark side of sexuality. The play, after all, starts with a young girl being indecently assaulted by a large gang of young men, but it then simply drops this thread of the plot, as if in terror of where it might lead.

In this it is faithful to the book's weaknesses where a greater willingness to take liberties might have made for a more coherent piece. By carrying over, for instance, the book's use of Uncle Peter as a deus ex machina who comes from nowhere to show Tarry the path to salvation, the adaptation runs the risk of reproducing the novel's episodic structure with out matching its stylistic unity.

The big task for Morrison as director, then, was to find a theatrical language that could be the equivalent of Kavanagh's written language in imposing a unified vision on a slippery and often ramshackle story. And his great achievement is in managing to do so.

His production in fact owes more to Patrick Mason's production of The Great Hunger than it does to previous stagings of Tarry Flynn in J. O'Connor's original adaptation. Through movement and dance, through visual and physical images, it manages to create its own theatrical world rather than attempting to recreate that of rural Cavan in the 1930s. If at times the movement sequences created by choreographer David Bolger are uncomfortably reminiscent of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers or of the fight scenes from The Quiet Man, at others they are both stark and startling.

Morrison picks up on one of the underlying aspects of Kavanagh's vision, the way in which, in his world, animals are next of kin to humans. One of Kavanagh's enormous strengths is the way he takes the Romantic pose of man contemplating nature, and turns it into something much more intimate, more surreal and more disturbing. In Kavanagh's work the relationship between man and beast, man and field, is almost sexual, and much of the hidden charge of his writing lies in that relationship.

This, above all, is what Morrison, revelling in the bountiful spaces of Francis O'Connor's set, explores and exploits. He relishes the comedy of actors playing animals - insidious hens, a tenaciously vicious dog, a sexually reluctant heifer, a new born calf taking its first steps. And the excellent James Kennedy, in the title role, also captures, behind the deadpan bemusement of his face, the disturbance at the heart of Tarry's love affair with the clay, the spuds and the ditch.

By surrounding the by now familiar stereotypes of Tarry, his mother and his sister with these elements of surrealism, the production allows them to be recognisable without being cliched. Kavanagh's sexual politics are not what might be called sophisticated and it is important in this production that the casual relegation of Tarry's sisters to the sidelines of his selfish consciousness is counteracted by strong performances from the women.

Pauline Flanagan as Mother manages the difficult feat of being domineering without being just a bossy old harridan and remains, even at the peaks of her high dudgeon, an engaging, complex and always sympathetic character. Equally, without disrupting the comedy, Helen Norton, Cathy White and Deirdre Molloy as the sisters radiate a strong sense of the awful entrapment of young women caught between the options of domestic drudgery, loveless marriage and emigration.

All of this adds an immense richness of invention and entertainment to Kavanagh's somewhat scattered story. If, indeed, there is a final sense of frustration, it is that such an impressive theatrical structure has been built on a foundation that is never quite broad or deep enough to bear it.