Dublin violence in Shakespearean iambic pentameter

They may count as the foundation stones of western civilisation, but the epic poems of ancient Greece aren't especially civilising. The Odyssey can't get beyond its opening sentence before invoking violence. "Arms and the man I sing," begins The Aeneid, with a revealing order of priority. And the oldest of them all, The Iliad (which starts with a dispute over the right to rape a captive) announces its principal concern from the first word: "Rage."

“If there’s an issue of glibly sensationalising violence, we’d have to put Homer in the dock,” says Paddy Cunneen. Nonetheless, he was a fan.

Cunneen is in Dublin to direct a reworked version of his play Fleeto, here retitled Deadly. He had originally written the piece for a Glasgow audience in an urban Scottish dialect, loosely inspired by Homer's Iliad.

The Peacock Theatre is seldom open to the public these days, but that night it was full to capacity. The Abbey's community and education manager, Phil Kingston, welcomed the audience, composed mainly of Dublin youth groups and Garda youth diversion projects, and pointed out that this production had brought the most first-time attendees to the theatre since Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle's reworked Playboy of the Western World in 2007. For many, it was their first time to watch a professional play.

It erupts with a roiling sea of wrath, when a young man hears that a friend has been stabbed. Yet its voice is noticeably more measured (measured in Shakespearean iambic pentameter, to be precise).

“But Dublin has such skill in stab wound care / For all too much we practise now this craft / That surgeon’s blade and stitch has saved that life / Which thuggish blade last night put under threat.”

The play came as something of a career change for Cunneen in 2008, when he moved to Scotland and found composing work hard to find. So he took a course in screenwriting and was happy to discover it was modelled on the dramatic principles of Aristotle's Poetics.

An early version of the play debuted as part of the Òran Mór arts venue’s popular season A Play, a Pie and a Pint. Soon the full version toured to centres for young people at risk of becoming offenders – “last chance saloons”, as Cunneen quips. “I had a social intention, because I love Greek theatre, and I had a question: how should we live?” he says. “That’s the only question I think that counts for anything.”

Mock heroics

The performance in Dublin had a frantic physicality of mock heroics. Our protagonist, Conor (Seán Doyle), assembles with the violent antagonist Razer (Fionn Walton) and their gang to avenge the fallen warrior. Meanwhile a chorus, in the shape of Joe Hanley’s gruff Garda, narrates and comments on the action, like an omniscient conscience.

When Conor, charged up on booze and rhetoric, fatally stabs a rival, the Garda evokes an unsettlingly intimate act: “the strange brotherly embrace of it, once the blade’s ripped Death into him”.

In a post-show discussion, Doyle elaborates more eloquently on the point when discussing his preparations as an actor. Walking around town, looking like “a rough auld bastard”, as he puts it, he was struck by the psychological effect it had on himself. “You’re like Moses and the Red Sea. You find people parting out of your way. Security guards follow you around. How people react to you is interesting, because you start to become very distrustful of everybody, because everybody is so distrustful of you.”

A few members of Cabra Step Up Youth, a Garda youth diversion project, gather afterwards to talk about the show. “We were told it was about knife crime in Dublin,” says Adam Coulahan, “so we had a little bit of an idea about what it was going to be about.”

AJ Ruth, who should clearly work in marketing, says, "It was like 24 Hours to Kill crossed with Love/Hate."

Morgan Rafferty, who advised on the rewording of the language with her school group, approves of the verse (“They spoke it really quickly and you had to listen carefully to the words”), while Jordan Masterson critiques the play’s realism. “No one gets that pumped on a can of Dutch Gold. You know what I mean?” Good point.

They were stunned to hear about the Peacock’s own history with knife violence, when, in 1998, the actor Michael McElhatton was accidentally stabbed during a performance and lay bleeding backstage until the curtain call. (“Jesus!”)

Otherwise they found the bare-bones theatricality of the show, and its power to solicit empathy, fantastically effective. “It’s not trying to tell you what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do,” says Coulahan.

“It’s to show you the consequences, really. What happens with different people. It’s not telling you, ‘This is good, this is bad.’ It’s just telling you, ‘When this happens, it affects everyone’.”

As first-time visitors, what would bring them back to the theatre? “Just that,” says Yasmin Seky, an actor. “Being drawn in. The way that they grab your attention, you wouldn’t get it from a book, or even from a film. Just seeing someone on stage doing it.”

“You feel like you’re living the moment,” says Coulahan. “You feel like you’re up on stage with them.

“You can imagine him and you’re running beside him, do you know what I mean? When he starts saying his heart’s going to explode, you’re feeling that your heart is going to explode.”

Perhaps the play would dissuade somebody from rash or violent action, more effectively than the ancient Greeks ever did, and perhaps more people would be encouraged to take a stab at play making. One thing is for sure, though. Any show would kill for those sort of reviews.