Culture Shock: When you’ve killed off drama, where can you go next?

Brian Friel’s death would have been poignant at any time, but it seemed especially so half way through Dublin Theatre Festival. For the festival raised again the question of whether Irish literary drama, the art form in which Friel excelled, is a dying form.

By literary drama I mean a theatre whose primary creator is a writer and whose dominant language is verbal. It is not the only kind of theatre, but it is one in which Ireland has an extraordinary tradition.

For most of the lifetime of Dublin Theatre Festival there was an expectation that it would feature at least one world premiere of a major new Irish play. That expectation no longer operates, and if the festival takes the pulse of Irish theatre, this year’s suggests that the life of the Irish literary play is fading. This is not a sudden development, but it is ever more starkly obvious.

Let's take four of the most interesting and ambitious Irish shows in the festival: Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd's Chekhov's First Play, Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh's The Last Hotel, Arthur Riordan and Bill Whelan's The Train, and Gemma Collins, Grace Dyas and Lauren Larkin's The Game. The most obvious thing about them is that "authorship" in each case is multiple. And none of them is remotely literary: performance art, opera, the musical and the TV game show are, respectively, their touchstones.

In Chekhov's First Play the attack on the literary theatre is taken to literal extremes when a demolition ball is unleashed on the scenery while the dialogue is interrupted by the voice of the director coming through the headphones that each member of the audience wears. Everything about drama is deconstructed, including the audience: the individualised headphones make it disappear as a collective entity.

If we stand back from particular shows, what does this shift look like? How does it change the experience of theatre? First, it makes it shorter. The well-written play can take its time because the writer can build a robust structure within which things unfold gradually. It's harder to do this with devised work; typically the kind of work we're seeing now struggles to sustain itself for more than 70 to 90 minutes. The only one of these four shows that hits the two-hour mark, The Train, does so by shunting into the sidings for long periods: it actually doesn't have two hours' worth of dramatic material.

Related to this shortness is, arguably, a tendency towards bleakness. The structure of the high-level literary play allows a piece to move through chaos, collapse and form into some kind of resolution. In the more concentrated forms of the new nonliterary drama, it is difficult to reach for a resolution that is well prepared and therefore not trite. To their credit, most of the artists involved realise this and don’t attempt uplift. But the result is that things get pretty grim.

The Last Hotel is probably the best example. There is a searing beauty in Dennehy's often superb score and the piercing singing of Claudia Boyle and Katherine Manley. Viewed as a kind of ritual, presided over by Mikel Murfi's wonderfully sinister hotel porter, it has a mesmerising power. But it is a ritual of death: this is a hotel from which you can check out but never leave. There is no drama, and without drama there are no open questions, no glimpses of possibility.

Chekhov's First Play has a remarkably similar feel. Its invention is destructive: how many ways can things and people fall apart? That invention is admirable: there is wit and precision in the staging and a painterly quality to the tableaux that continually emerge and dissolve. As an anti-drama it works perfectly. But when you've killed off drama where else do you go? Again, the overwhelming impression is of being stuck.

The Train, based on the famous trainload of feminists who, in 1971, went to Belfast to buy contraceptives, might seem to be entirely different. It is, after all, the story of a journey. And both Arthur Riordan's sharp lyrics and Bill Whelan's bubbling stew of Kurt Weill, Irish dance music and Broadway show tunes have a bright, largely optimistic energy. There are show-stopping performances from Lisa Lambe and Clare Barrett.

Yet again, however, there is a problem of drama: the story doesn’t really have any. The bad old church is too distant an enemy to offer more than token resistance, and without resistance there is no tension.

Oddly, The Game, Theatreclub's scarifying exploration of prostitution, is more hopeful. Not in the sense that it is anything but bleak – this is a ferocious piece, built on savage experiences – but its brilliant idea is to take an avant-garde cliche (there are no rules) and make it terrifyingly real.

There’s a scary parallel. The show keeps insisting on rules for the performers and the audience, as if rules can create a safe space. Sex workers do the same thing: the rules of the game meld with the rules of being on the game. But this second set of real-life rules falls apart.

That collapse is not an aesthetic pleasure: it’s an atrocity. Yet the seriousness and courage with which it’s played out allow us to imagine that something else might be possible.

fotoole@irishtimes.com