Can Irish dramatists tackle the big questions again?

Ireland is full of ambitious playwrights. But it has been rare for them to take aim at the Establishment, even with society in the throes of collective madness. Can our national despair now produce the public theatre that prosperity and smugness discarded, asks FINTAN O'TOOLE, who has just made a documentary on the subject

IN THE late 1990s I spent three years as drama critic of the Daily Newsin New York. The experience taught me something about American theatre but perhaps more about Irish theatre. As someone who first went to see plays in Dublin in the early 1970s, I had come to take certain things for granted. One of them was that the theatre was a place in which a society confronted its conflicts. Playwrights regularly dealt with the stuff that mattered: violence, class, sexuality, power, money, religion, history – occasionally all at the same time.

It wasn’t until those years in the US that I appreciated how unusual this experience was. American theatre has its marvels, but it seldom produces large-scale, ambitious social and political drama that tries to engage with American society as a whole. What was the norm in Ireland was the exception elsewhere. And yet those years in New York also prepared me for the way Irish theatre came to be during the boom years. If Ireland in general became more Americanised during the boom, Irish theatre shared in this condition. Big social drama became almost as rare here as it was in New York.

This question is worth raising now, and not in any spirit of middle-aged nostalgia for the imagined riches of one’s youth. Apart from anything else, lots of things got better in Irish theatre in the boom years, the variety of forms and companies and the overall standard of production included. It is obvious, nonetheless, that something happened to Irish culture in the era of seemingly endless economic growth. It failed in the most basic way. It was unable to create for Irish people even a vaguely accurate narrative or image of who and where they were.

Mainstream culture ceased to be challenging or confrontational. There were heroic exceptions, but art in general failed to burst the bubble of self-delusion that had such catastrophic long-term consequences. And it mattered that theatre was part of this failure precisely because theatre had been so good at bursting bubbles in the past.

The distinguishing characteristic of the Irish theatre that emerged from the ferment of the late 19th century was its close connection to the public world. When WB Yeats asked later in life, "Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?" the smart answer was, "No – and, by the way, didn't Lady Gregory write most of Cathleen Ni Houlihan?" But the question was not ridiculous. Most of those "the English shot" – the leaders of the 1916 Rising – were deeply engaged in theatre, and it helped to shape their imaginations. Patrick Pearse even wrote a play, The Singer, anticipating his own martyr's death.

This in itself is not unique: writing and politics get mixed up in revolutionary times and places. What is remarkable is the sheer degree to which theatre also challenged the mythologies of the revolutionary movement itself, as Synge's The Playboy of the Western Worldand O'Casey's The Plough and the Starsdo in literally riotous ways. And even when the theatre was effectively censored by being placed under the control of the deeply conservative Ernest Blythe, playwrights didn't stop asking awkward questions. Even Blythe's own former secretary Máiréad Ní Ghráda suddenly emerged with a ferocious feminist attack on sexual hypocrisy and the subjugation of women in An Triail.

I was fortunate to start going to the theatre at a time when large-scale, ambitious social imaginations – those of Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, John B Keane and others – were at work in Irish theatre. Those imaginations engaged in many things, pure questions of form and language among them. But the plays always had a desire to connect to the large questions of morality and identity, of history and economics. They were political not in the stupid sense of seeking to hammer home messages but in the much more important sense of being plugged into the collective physical and psychic conflicts that were part of the audience’s contemporary experience.

I’m not suggesting that, over the past 15 years, Ireland ceased to produce playwrights of ambition and of international standing. On the contrary, the generation of Marina Carr and Sebastian Barry, of Conor McPherson and Mark O’Rowe, of Martin McDonagh and Enda Walsh is in many respects a golden one. But this very strength intensifies the strength of the question of how come no one managed to write a big public play that really touched the rawest nerves of a society in the throes of collective madness. Part of the answer lies in another question: who were the playwrights supposed to be against? The previous century in Ireland was a target-rich environment. The enemies were both large and static: the British Empire; the new Free State; the Catholic Church; the Irish version of the American dream. There were big narratives to draw on or to subvert: Irish freedom, emigration, the struggle between tradition and modernity, the sexual revolution, the Northern conflict.

In the course of the 1990s all of these narratives seemed to have reached their conclusion. The “national struggle” was ended by the peace process. The war between tradition and modernity ended in apparently total victory for the modernisers. Putting sex on stage no longer shocked anyone. Emigration seemed to be gone for good, replaced by the more difficult story of immigration. The church was doing such a good job of self-destruction that it seemed a little cruel to kick it. There was a big theme – money – but it was too fast-moving and ambivalent to be easily dramatised. And playwrights weren’t outsiders any more. The previous generation of dramatists had little choice but to be at an angle to power. The Establishment had no great desire to assimilate them. By the 1990s, however, art and literature had become a central aspect of official identity. The stimulus of rejection was lacking. Mainstream theatre drifted away from two simple notions: the idea of saying something and the commitment to playing out conflict.

What do you do if you're not sure what to say? You dance. The great innovation of Irish theatre in the boom years was the dance spectacular. It began brilliantly with Riverdance, which created a new myth for a new Ireland. In the old course of Irish culture, this would have been followed by an urge to demythologise. Instead, the dance spectacular degenerated into ludicrous bombast. Michael Flatley's Celtic Tigerwas a perfect mirror of the fatuous creation from which it took its title.

And what do you do if you can’t figure out how to dramatise the conflicts in your society? You write monologues. The monologue form, with its quietness and simplicity, can be seen as a response to the razzmatazz of the dance spectaculars. But it is also a way of not having to enact a conflict. By definition, the monologue tells a story that has already happened.

Perhaps, in any case, the mainstream theatregoing public simply didn’t want to know. It is instructive now to look back on the hysterical reaction to Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland, at the Abbey in 2002. It was not a perfect piece by any means, but it did try to do something of real public importance: to confront the toxic psychic legacy of Charles Haughey. The astonishing vitriol that was aimed at Barry pointed to a culture that preferred to let sleeping kleptocrats lie.

What we need to know, of course, is whether the Irish tradition of big, ambitious public plays can be revived in our current predicament. There are those who argue that this question is passe. Perhaps theatre no longer occupies the place in our culture that made it so important. Perhaps the kind of unified dramatic vision that comes from a literary playwright labouring over a text is not available in a context in which younger writers think of themselves more as “theatre makers” than as dramatists. My hunch, though, is that crisis and despair will produce the kind of ambitious public theatre that prosperity and smugness discarded. As Jonathan Swift put it, no nation needs it so much.

Fintan O'Toole's documentary Power Playsis on RTÉ 1 at 10.15pm tonight