A decade framed by playboys

It was a decade of tumult and experimentation in Irish theatre, and Synge's ever-contemporary masterpiece ran like a charged current through proceedings, writes PETER CRAWLEY

THERE'S A GREAT gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed, says Pegeen Mike, and she ought to know. It may have been 102 years since she made her initial discovery in The Playboy of the Western World, but more recently, she has made it again and again, in a wide variety of ways. In fact, for all the innovation, determination and crisis of Irish theatre in the past 10 years, you could be forgiven for thinking that the defining play of this decade was actually written in 1907.

Such is the ephemeral nature of theatre, which only truly exists in the present, that even the dustiest play in the canon acquires new meaning in different contexts. In 2001, Niall Henry directed a version so controlled, physical and psychologically revealing that the play seemed at once canonical and radical, with Mikel Murfi’s playboy tumbling in from above while a boldly cast Olwen Fouéré played a worldly Pegeen against Cathy Belton’s seductively young Widow Quinn.

Tellingly, those roles, together with all their searching spirit, were conservatively reversed three years later for a production directed by the Abbey’s then-artistic director Ben Barnes during the National Theatre’s astoundingly ill-fated centenary programme. When the extent of the Abbey’s debts were finally uncovered, it was the domestic tour of this Playboy that accounted for much of the theatre’s losses.

With the resulting departure of Barnes, and the subsequent overhaul of the theatre's governance system and corporate structure under his successor Fiach MacConghail, it was tempting to think that even if Playboyno longer provoked riots, it could still be at the centre of upheaval and enormous change.

Garry Hynes might have seen it similarly, but the results of Druid's Playboywere dramatically different, bringing a seismic shift in how theatre registered on the cultural Richter scale. Her raw and fast production of Playboy, early in 2004, provided the cornerstone of DruidSynge, a long-held dream of the companys founder members – Hynes, Marie Mullen and Mick Lally – to stage all six of Synge's works together.

First delivered with energy and clarity in 2005 at the Galway Arts Festival, not only did the project give us an all-but definitive version of Playboy, it suggested that Riders to the Seaand The Well of the Saintswere no lesser works, and also created the impression of a careful branding exercise, a major and singular event, and a very tough act to follow.

It was no coincidence, then, that Pan Pan Theatre Company could only make Playboyseem new again by taking it to the Eastern world the following year, when they staged a production in Mandarian for a Chinese cast at the Oriental Theatre in Beijing, later importing Gavin Quinn's contemporary take to Dublin. Pan Pan would continue to explode traditional texts Macbeth, Oedipusand Hansel and Gretelthrough witty, often confrontational means, but by mapping interculturalism with the compass of tradition, they proved that the canon was open, and flexible, to all.

When the Abbey returned to the play in 2007, with a new version co-written by Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle, it reflected a very different National Theatre, cautious and well funded, with Jimmy Fay providing a warm-hearted – and determinedly populist – production. The Abbey continued to engage with established writers, such as Tom Murphy, Marina Carr and Sam Shepard – yet, after Stella Feehily, Stuart Carolan and Hilary Fannin, remarkably few new writers emerged, and fewer still found productions.

So its Synge who provides a plumbline through the noughties; in various different guises, with several shifts in perspective, the Playboyobserved what a difference a decade makes.

JUST AS A play can be reinterpreted almost endlessly, so conditions for Irish theatre in the noughties moved with a sense of cyclical crisis. Although it often seemed like it, controversies at the National Theatre didn't all happen offstage. In 2000, Calixto Bieito's production of Barbaric Comediesprovoked a media storm, with the play denounced as an affront to moral hygiene, while critical opinion advanced the more prosaic misgiving that it simply wasn't very good.

It certainly set people talking, though, much as Sebastian Barry's Hinterlanddid in 2002, when his drama was taken as a thinly veiled portrait of Charles Haughey. By the time Marina Carr took a similar approach, mingling mythic tragedy with recognisably Irish politics in Arielin the same year (with no such controversy), followed by John Breen's biographical Charlie, and, this year, Tom MacIntyre's Only an Apple, Haughey-era politics and their consequences had left an imprint on the Irish psyche and the theatre engaged directly with it.

While the Gate gently coaxed Brian Friel, through various études and adaptations, into producing entirely new works – Performancesand The Home Place– its director, Michael Colgan, reaped greater artistic and commercial success with his large-scale commitment to blue-chip stock, such as a superb staging of Faith Healerin 2006 with Ralph Fiennes, Ian McDiarmid and Ingrid Craigie, while also dominating 2006's Beckett centenary.

Celebrating Harold Pinter's 75th birthday in person and in production, the Gate's celebrations coincided nicely with the playwright's Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, and Pinter attended last year's production of No Man's Landshortly before his death.

With British playwrights thus feted in Ireland, Irish playwrights embarked on a similar journey. Tom Murphy's The House(2000), staged by Conall Morrison, was a significant new work. But Murphy later expressed disappointment that the show had not enjoyed a longer life and, significantly, he offered his next full-length play, 2005's Alice Trilogy, to London's Royal Court first.

It signalled a trend in Irish theatre where new Irish writing from major writers resembled a product for export. Having established his career with Druid, the London-Irish Martin McDonagh saw his only new plays of the decade, The Lieutenant of Inishmoreand The Pillowman, premiere in the UK. Conor McPherson maintained a dual presence in London and Dublin, with Dublin Carol, Port Authority, Shining Cityand the Seafarerall opening in London before reaching Dublin.

It was a similar story for Frank McGuinness, Owen McCafferty, Marina Carr and Enda Walsh, but in an era of globalisation, Irish theatre increasingly seemed to belong to the world.

IN A DECADE of battles for funding, of small advances and major setbacks, and routine turbulence at the Arts Council, the theatre became increasingly politicised, both on and off stage. Lobbying groups and resource organisations such as Theatre Forum and the Irish Theatre Institute consolidated their power and expanded their activities, yet few new production companies could establish themselves.

One that did, however, was Performance Corporation, emerging on the Dublin Fringe Festival – with Candidein 2002 – as a force for wit and innovation, and finally receiving revenue funding in 2006, the only new theatre company to receive such funding this decade. Semper Fi similarly capitalised on great ideas and low-cost resourcefulness, announcing themselves with Ladies and Gents, a play performed in public toilets, which has since travelled the public conveniences of the world.

Companies such as Landmark or Livin Dred, have worked out new approaches, with producer Anne Clarke establishing a canny model that is part commercial and part subsidised, while Livin Dred forged partnerships with regional networks to form the successful touring network Nomad. Several companies didn’t survive the decade (Bickerstaffe, Calypso, Storytellers) and venues such as the City Arts Centre, Andrews Lane and the Crypt are no longer open for theatre business.

With the independent theatre sector almost too crammed to breathe, Rough Magic became an incubator for new talent. Having re-established a connection with audiences through Lynne Parker's productions of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen(2003) and Schiller's Don Carlos(2006), and kick-starting a phenomenon of Irish musicals with Arthur Riordan's brilliant Improbable Frequency(2004), it also launched the Seeds programme in 2002 with the Dublin Fringe Festival. Seeds led to full productions of Gerard Murphy's Take Me Away, Ioanna Anderson's Words of Advice For Young Peopleand Mark Doherty's Trad, and later mentored new directors, designers and producers, with director Tom Creed emerging as one of the most accomplished and productive Irish theatre-makers of the decade.

Selina Cartmell also announced a striking new vision for the stage with her company Sirens' bold new versions of Shakespeare (2005's Titus Andronicuswas a standout), while invigorating the Gate with Festen(2006) and the musical Sweeney Todd(2007).

Meanwhile, Loose Canon's Jason Byrne continued to refine his own directorial signature, Corn Exchange's Annie Ryan set high water marks with Michael West's Foley(2000), Maria Irene Forne's Mud(2003) and the sublime Dublin By Lamplight(2004), while Corcadorca, Blue Raincoatand Bedrockproceeded with increasing experimentation, yielding mixed results and some arresting successes.

With the emergence of Randolph SD, Brokentalkers and Thisispopbaby, younger companies have minted a rough, inventive and disarming new aesthetic, more concerned with startling methods of performance than necessarily generating new texts.

Relatively unchallenged by emerging voices, then, writers such as Enda Walsh and Mark O'Rowe have developed their warped and wilful imaginations, with O'Rowe balancing the gut-tightening horror of Crestfallfor the Gate with, most recently, the exhilarating dark rhymes of Terminusfor the Abbey. Walsh, meanwhile, gave the Dublin Theatre Festival his ferociously intense Bedboundand supplied Druid with his extraordinary The Walworth Farceand its companion piece, The New Electric Ballroom.

“What are we if were not our stories?” asks one of Walsh’s characters, and those plays recognised something constant in the first decade of the 21st century in an exploration of storytelling itself, where methods are endlessly malleable while the theatre keeps pace with human experience.

That was no less a concern for dance theatre, where Dermot Bolger's Coiscéim and Michael Keegan-Dolan's ever-adapting Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre made the body their instrument of writing, re-inscribing old texts with new movements. From Fabulous Beast's contributions to the Dublin Theatre Festival, the ethereal Giselle(2003) or its divisive and vituperative The Bull(2005), it shared a concern with all theatre in this decade, attempting to give some shape to our accelerating reality; to make political points, anatomise the surge and wane of prosperity; forever bridging that great gap between the nation's gallous stories and its dirty deeds.