The global Irish village

FOR most of this century Irish theatre has bee obsessed with a sense of place, and one of the most pertinent questions you could asks about any Irish play was what part of the country it came from. It made sense to talk of Synge's Mayo and Yeats's Sligo, of O'Casey's Dublin and Leonard's Dalkey, of Keane's North Kerry, Murphy's Tuam and Friel's Donegal. Almost everything on the stage - language, character, action - seemed to have not just a setting but a location. Surrounding it was not just a fictional context, but a local habitation with a name. And surrounding that vividly imagined place was a bigger place called Ireland.

This sense of place hasn't evaporated overnight, and it remains obvious in, for instance, the relationship between Billy Roche's plays and the town of Wexford, or between Marina Carr's work" and the Midlands. But even in these cases, there is also a feeling that the individual places have become free floating and disconnected from any larger whole. They have become porous and diffuse, bitterly aware that their apparent stability is maintained only at the cost of the continual export, of instabilities.

In two devised plays for Kilkenny's Bickerstaffe Theatre, True Lines and Double Helix, John Crowley and his actors have taken this process much further, and defined Irishness not as a sense of place but, as a sense of placelessness. In both pieces the main characters are Irish. In neither does any of the action happen, in Ireland. True Lines was set in four continents in Berlin, in Arizona, in Australia, and in Ethiopia. Double Helix now at the Peacock in a co production between Bickerstaffe and the Abbey, takes place in Paris, Montreal, Rome, Turin, New York, Rio and Manaus.

Here, dislocation is so extreme that, there is no real sense of location left at all. Ireland is no longer, for these young travellers, even a stable point of reference from which to measure the distances they have traversed. Their only fixed centre lies in the play of motion and emotion in the confused but still powerful bonds of love that tie them to the people they have left behind.

These are not exiles pining for a native place, but people who exist, as actors, photographers and students within an abstract highly mediated universe. One of the most powerful aspects of the piece, indeed, is the glittering stream of projected images - maps, paintings, photographs - that flows over and around the characters, placing them, if anywhere, in the teeming gush of signs that is the contemporary world. They are inhabitants of a global village where place has ceased to be a physical reality and has become instead a set of visual stimuli emotional connections and professional networks. Even when set adrift in foreign cities, they see familiar faces. In the world of the play, coincidence is not even worth remarking, because it is a world in which random encounters are the norm.

If this were all that is going on in Double Helix, it would be more interesting as a symptom of the times that an exploration of them. But, as with Triie Lines, the drama comes from the filet that for all their homelessness, the characters have to acknowledge one inescapable home - the body.

They carry within them, written into the very genes that make them what they are, connections to history and geography, to their ancestors and their contemporaries. Andrew (Martin Murphy) carries the genes for Huntingdon's disease. Jennifer (Gertrude Montgomery) carries inside her Andrew's child, who may also carry the fatal genes. Sean (Stephen Kennedy) has inherited from his parents both diabetes and an obsession with the Beatles's White Album. Julie (Derdriu Ring) suffers the most inescapable bodily fate of all - death.

THROUGH a simple but beautfully worked set of counterpoints between the intimate and the universal, between the body and the world, the piece asks what the meaning of heredity can be. The only tie to the past, to a sense of place, is what is in the blood: the genetic codes that link one generation to another. And the play follows, in the end quite literally, these blood lines across the continents.

Double Helix explores rather than answers these questions, and indeed it is at its best when it is most content to en joy connections rather than to explain them. The more literal moments - the explanations of basic genetics, the rather undigested chunks of Hamlet - are the ones with the least energy. Conversely, some of the most unlikely visual and verbal conjunctions of private and public space - between a map of the Amazon and a blood transfusion, between Andrew's image of the monster he will become as a result of his disease and the Turin Shroud, between the image that haunts the photographer Jo (Olwen Fouere) of a map of New York tattooed on to a man's body have all the startling clarity of a metaphysical conceit in a John Donne poem. When the play strikes out most boldly for the poetic logic that may be the only kind of logic available in the culture of the 1990s, it can be exhilarating.