The salvation of home grown theatre?

Dublin Theatre Festival suggests Irish drama's future lies as much outside the national theatre as within it, writes Fintan O'Toole

Dublin Theatre Festival usually provides some kind of benchmark against which to measure contemporary Irish theatre. Ideally, the imported productions give a flavour of what's happening beyond our shores, and the weaknesses and strengths of the home-produced work stand out more clearly against this background. This year's festival was unusual in that this didn't really happen. Instead it offered something arguably even more interesting: a chance to judge contemporary Irish theatre against the internal baseline of the Abbey's history. The national theatre's centenary festival within a festival defined a classic Irish repertoire and allowed audiences to place the new Irish work in the context of the "high ambition" proclaimed by its founders. What emerged was both a challenge and a few reasons to be cheerful.

One of the things the festival highlighted, of course, is that the national theatre is not the national theatre. In the first place the classic Abbey repertoire, including the work of its greatest dramatist, John Synge, is no longer the Abbey's property. Druid's continuing Synge project, in which it will stage all of the writer's plays, makes its own kind of statement in that regard. In bringing her productions of The Tinker's Wedding and The Well Of The Saints to the festival, and placing them alongside the Abbey and Ireland season, Garry Hynes confirmed what has been obvious for 25 years: she is the most exciting contemporary interpreter of Synge. Those productions also suggested that the great Synge actor of our times is another of Druid's founders, Marie Mullen.

The second sense in which the Abbey's role as the national theatre was challenged during the festival is less obvious to audiences but must have struck anyone concerned with theatre policy. Aside from its classic repertoire, what Americans would call the Abbey's unique selling point is its ability to nurture the long-term development of a play or a writer. Its literary department can commission writers and help them to develop their work. Yet the two best new Irish plays in the festival were nurtured not by the Abbey but by Rough Magic.

Rough Magic, indeed, could take a double bow, once for a work developed under its wing by one of its veterans and once for a play it declined to produce. It commissioned Improbable Frequency, Arthur Riordan's richly enjoyable musical, four years ago. But Galway Arts Festival's splendid production of Mark Doherty's Trad also had its ultimate origins in Rough Magic's Seeds project, at Dublin Fringe Festival, two years ago. As well as giving an earlier draft of the play a staged reading, the project assigned the director Conall Morrison as a mentor for Doherty's development of the play.

These points are worth making not to knock the Abbey but to suggest how much is at stake in its current crisis. With at least one other company able to approach the traditional Abbey repertoire with consummate confidence, and with others also willing to nurture new writers, the Abbey can't make assumptions about its indispensability. The notion that the national theatre can afford to ditch its literary and outreach departments, cut back on its work at the Peacock and still claim a unique right to large-scale public subsidy is simply stupid. The theatre now has to earn the affection and respect of the public, and the Abbey and Ireland season was therefore a crucial moment.

If its ambitious approach failed, the case for saying that a century is long enough would have been immeasurably strengthened. As it happened, the season was a superb achievement. At the simplest level, five full productions and 10 staged readings in a fortnight is a serious job of work, and the Abbey managed it with considerable style. To see the rehearsal room full in the afternoons for the readings and the two theatres full at night must reminded the theatre that there really is an audience hungry for what it can do when it gets its act together.

I saw three of the full productions, Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme, The Gigli Concert and the triple bill of The Dandy Dolls, Purgatory and Riders To The Sea. (The others were I Do Not Like Thee, Doctor Fell and Portia Coughlan.) Each attained a very high standard while replenishing the Abbey repertoire in a significant way.

Robin Lefevre's production of Observe The Sons, with its splendid performances from Risteard Cooper and John Kavanagh, established the play as one that transcends the impulses that gave rise to it and is likely to survive the emergence of a peaceful Ireland.

Ben Barnes's remounting of his 2001 production of The Gigli Concert confirmed the extent to which a play that had been locked into its magnificent original production, 21 years ago, has been made available again by Mark Lambert and Owen Roe's distinctive performances. Especially in the context of Conor McPherson's ultimately disappointing Shining City, at the Gate, which repeats the basic situation of The Gigli Concert, it was good to be reminded of just how high Tom Murphy set the bar for Irish dramatic genius.

The most intriguing of all the Abbey shows, however, was Morrison's triple bill of early Abbey one-act plays (which is well worth seeing when it returns for four nights next week). While there was some irony in the fact that W. B. Yeats, the theatre's presiding deity, was poorly served by a rather perfunctory production of Purgatory, that just might have been intended as a well-deserved punishment for Yeats's disgraceful treatment of the wild and wonderful George Fitzmaurice. The Dandy Dolls, whose fabulous staging by Morrison was a highlight of the festival as a whole, was rejected by Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1913, and Fitzmaurice was consigned to a purgatory of appalling neglect until his death, a full 50 years later.

By sneaking it in Morrison was perhaps slyly reminding us that a season of plays rejected by the Abbey would contain at least as many great works as the official season did. The triple bill, however, also set down a mark of how misplaced much of the debate about the Abbey's place in Irish theatre continues to be. It is far too easy to get hung up on the notion that the Abbey represents a traditional mainstream repertoire that is there to be challenged by the avant-garde.

Anyone looking at Observe The Sons, Gigli, Portia Coughlan or the plays given readings, such as M. J. Molloy's The King Of Friday's Men, Tom MacIntyre's The Great Hunger or Sebastian Barry's Prayers Of Sherkin, could only laugh at the notion that all of this is traditional. What are they about, these traditional plays? Death, starvation, sexual frustration, incest, collective and individual suicide, a man who has killed his father and now kills his son, an old woman whose sons die one by one, a landlord who exercises droit de seigneur, a man who asks a pathetic loser to teach him to sing like Gigli, a strange English sect withering away on an Irish island.

This tradition, if such it can be called, is so far out that it is often out of sight. It is wild and mad, full of strangeness and disturbance. Even the most mainstream play in the Abbey's season, Bernard Farrell's I Do Not Like Thee, Doctor Fell, is about an apparent maniac threatening to blow up a group of people recovering from nervous breakdowns.

Morrison's triple bill made this point with a subtly polemical edge. By staging Riders To The Sea in Irish he reminded us of its exotic place in the Western literary canon. Joan O'Hara's wonderful performance as the old woman Máire shook all the old weelyah-wallyah whingeing from the role and gave it back the stark dignity of a woman so numbed with grief that she can but wait for the last blow to fall. The clarity of Tomás Ó Flaithearta's Irish text brought the play back to its literally edgy place of origin, a world on the extreme of modernity.

For anyone who is still working off a dichotomy between the traditional and the avant-garde, it would be instructive to compare Morrison's production of The Dandy Dolls with the festival's most self-consciously strange production, Romeo Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia. Castellucci bombarded his audience with white noise, flashing lights, a long sequence in which a man is beaten to a pulp and a range of obscure gestures and movements that were occasionally haunting but for the most part merely obfuscatory. Yet if you wanted weird, The Dandy Dolls left Castellucci in the halfpenny place. A short, intense, fabulously deranged play about a man obsessed with making dolls and devouring live poultry who is tormented by the satanic son of a magical hag, it suggests both that LSD was invented in north Co Kerry long before it hit California and that the way to an Irish avant-garde probably lies through a real engagement with our supposedly traditional repertoire.

What's cheering is that the festival also provided evidence that Irish writers and companies are well into the process of testing ways to tell theatrical stories about the cruel, messed-up and often bizarre place that spawned imaginations such as Fitzmaurice's. The three best examples of new Irish work in the festival all eschewed naturalism in search of a form that can contain the layers of experience they reflect. Each came up with a very different form to capture moods that ranged from the savagely serious to the joyously absurd.

Gerard Mannix Flynn's James X, which came embedded in his multimedia project Safe House/Safe Place, is a much more radical piece of work than any simple summary can convey. It is at one level a political discourse about the State and its treatment of the vulnerable children it claimed to care for. But it is vastly more than a polemic. Flynn also questions the nature of our collective reality by presenting it through a series of cross sections. He gives us the story of himself the performer and that of the man behind the actor; the official documents that form the hidden history of a life and a present-day commentary on those documents; the revelation of a truth and the courageous exposure of the further truth that lies behind it. All of this is at least as artful as any avant-garde exploration of text and performance yet is also utterly and ferociously realistic. It shows that new ambitions in the theatre don't have to choose between form and content but can fuse the two in new ways.

Riordan's Improbable Frequency is on the surface about as distant from James X as it is possible to be, and yet it, too, is an attempt to find a form in which to explore an awkward aspect of Ireland's past, in this case our ability to pretend that the Second World War wasn't happening. Improbable Frequency is in fact doubly improbable: the chances of a decent Irish musical are about as small as the chances that any musical these days will be intelligent, witty and funny. The probability of both happening at the same time must be close to zero, but Riordan and Bell Helicopter, who wrote the music, pulled it off.

Improbable Frequency isn't perfect, and its last 20 minutes become a bit ragged. But it is nevertheless immensely impressive and, more importantly, enormously entertaining. Riordan knows how to write a musical book, which is a hell of a lot more than most people who write the books of Broadway musicals do. His cool wit and shapely lyrics put manners on a madcap plot about British and German spies in wartime Dublin and keep it moving forward until well into the second half. Bell Helicopter's score, though somewhat uneven, has some fine moments and otherwise makes up in period resonance what it lacks in originality. It turns out that Irish actors can handle songs. And, rather amazingly, Rough Magic has also discovered in Lisa Lambe a bona-fide Dublin diva in the making, around whom a new tradition of Irish musicals could be built.

Just as Improbable Frequency showed a way to draw the energies of music into Irish theatre, Doherty's Trad emerged from a popular form, in this case stand-up comedy. Doherty's origins as a comic are discernible in the timing, the loopy logic and the tart understatement that make so many of his lines explosively funny. Much more surprising, however, is the way this skill has been honed into a beautifully shaped dramatic parable that shifts easily from absurdity to pathos and from Beckettian starkness to rich social commentary. Doherty's sharp ear for a fast, minimal language that is at once self-consciously hollow and oddly resonant is matched by his brilliant eye for details too true to be entirely strange. Mikel Murfi's superb production, with terrific performances from Peter Gowen, Frankie McCafferty and David Pearse, is pitch perfect.

Doherty's tale of an ancient man and his very old son looking for the latter's lost boy, himself now 70, is, as the title suggests, a fable about tradition in a mad place, the fractured shards of memory and invention that nevertheless give some meaning to who we are. As a metaphor for where Irish theatre is now, trying to make sense of the present with the help of a past that is just as disturbed, it couldn't have been better placed than up against the Abbey's centenary.