Social realism bites the dust

FOR all the variety of forms on show in its first week, this Dublin Theatre Festival has made possible at least one generalisation: the well made play is dead. If there was a time when the Irish productions tended to seem like an island of naturalism in a sea of stylised theatricality, it has definitively passed.

Over recent years the gap in styles between the visiting shows and the indigenous productions has been closing. Now, it is virtually imperceptible. This week up front self conscious theatricality has been just as much a feature of the plays of Stewart Parker Paul Mercier and Tom Murphy, as of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Comedy of Errors or of the Russian clown Slava Polunin's Snowshow.

The striking thing about the first week, indeed, was how little social realism it contained how little it seems to be concerned with simple reflections of contemporary life. Even in Irish work of the 1980s and 1990s, the classical world was more in evidence than the modern world, the 18th century more prominent than the 20th. And very much in the same vein, knowingness has taken the place of naivety, pastiche has replaced sincerity. If you ever wondered what postmodernism is, the first week of the festival provided a crash course.

There could be no more obvious marker of what has happened to social realism than Paul Mercier's new play for Passion Machine, Kitchensink. Mercier's work has never been entirely realistic, and it has always had a strong sense of the games people play, but Kitchensink goes much further into a very obvious stylisation than ever before. It uses the same kind of relay race structure as last year's Buddleia, a single story unfolding in the same place but with different characters. In this case the place is a half built suburban house, at first sight a blankly realistic setting.

But the very fact that the house is unfinished and unfurnished, a stark empty structure, creates an immediate contrast with the realistic living quarters of Mercier's earlier play Honie, or of Buddleia. And from the start, in a significant departure from Mercier's previous work, there is a very strong element of ritual and a very self conscious set of references to Greek myth and tragedy. The play as a whole follows the classical unities of space and time. The classical world is everywhere, from the Greek masks that the characters don and doff to the Greek holidays that in one of the playlets figure heavily in the dialogue. There are allusions to Helen, Apollo, Aphrodite, Eros, Homer and Aeschylus's Watchman.

The effect is strange, at once rich and bleak. The tension between the soap opera playlets and the formality of the style makes Kitchensink quite gripping to watch. But whereas Joyce's ordinary Dubliners in Ulysses are ennobled by the presence of Homeric parallels, Mercier's suburban couples are sometimes diminished by the contrast between their messy, frustrated lives and the heroic figures that surround them on stage. Even so, this is a work of great imaginative ambition, striking into the uncertain territory beyond the confines of complacency.

Mercier's insistence on placing his work in the context of a much older tradition was very much in keeping with the spirit of the imported work in the festival. In their different ways, Snowshow and the RSC reminded us that, in the European theatre, realism is an aberration and the kind of stylisation that we used to regard as avant garde is the mainstream.

For both brought to life a tradition of clowning and commedia dell'arte that is as old as theatre itself.

Slava is one of those clowns who takes the connection between circus, spectacle and theatre for granted. Indeed, his show is at its best when it is least self consciously modern and most unapologetic about the timeless, marvellous vulgarity of a virtuoso showing off. When he tries to be arty and profound, the show is rather thin, fragmented and unfunny. When he gives full rein to his physical skills and his shameless vaudvillean instincts. It has moments of pure magic.

Likewise, much of the pleasure of Tim Supple's splendid RSC production of The Comedy of Errors comes from his willingness to take the play on its own terms. Those terms emphatically do not include either the suspension of disbelief or the attainment of anything approaching realism. The play has not one but two sets of identical twins, not one but two lost parents rediscovered and no tone but a hundred unlikely coincidences in the plot. It is all mechanism, all play for play's sake. It is the way it is because the Roman comedies on which it is based were the way they were. It relies entirely on the idea that the importance of human history is greatly exaggerated and that a comic structure that produced delight in ancient Rome will do the same in Elizabethan England and in post modern Dublin.

Supple's production, if anything, emphasises the play's artificiality. Live music and song, a deliberately declamatory style of acting, a carefree attitude to anachronisms, and a willingness to ignore realism to the point of having identical twins who don't look all that much alike, all remind us that what we are seeing is a show, not a slice of life. And the remarkable thing is that it works, not just in comic terms, but, also in emotional ones. The artificial structures do still produce real feelings, and the ending, with its multiple reunifications of lost families, is still improbably moving.

ALMOST exactly the same can be said of Tom Murphy's She Stoops to Folly at the Abbey, one of two journeys into the 18th century by modern Irish dramatists this week. Murphy's template is Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, but his play, too, resonates with the echoes of an even older literature, in this case the Bible's Book of Job. Behind the facade of Goldsmith's charming tale, dressed up with sumptuous sets and costumes, opulent lighting and Patrick Mason's often spectacular staging, is the familiar Murphy rage of misfortunate man against a careless God, leavened with more than a touch of self mockery.

Charm and entertainment remain dominant, however, not just in the fine performances of Jim Norton and a strong cast, but also in Murphy's warm and playful text. The language is not the visceral cry from the soul of Murphy's great verbal arias. Its key notes are a relaxed elegance, a wry affection for Goldsmith's classical syntax, and a benign but never patronising regard for his characters. You get the feeling of a theatrical master who has created his own world relaxing on the seventh day into the luxurious pile of someone else's.

Perhaps the greatest mark of change this week, though, is how normal Stewart Parker's Northern Star seems in Lynne Parker's fine production for Rough Magic. In his all too short lifetime, Stewart Parker seemed the biggest show off in modern Irish theatre, sometimes more concerned with proving what he could do than with what he was actually doing.

Northern Star, in which his verbal trickery is at its most prodigious, can easily seem too clever for its own good. The story of the United Irish leader Henry Joy McCracken is played out as a series of pastiches in the styles of, successively, Sheridan, Boucicault, Wilde, Synge, O'Casey, Behan and Beckett. These are so brilliantly achieved, so exuberant and witty, that they draw more attention to style than to substance.

Lynne Parker's sensitive and disciplined production, though, vindicates the play by showing that in this case at least the style is the substance, that the cleverness is deployed with a profound sense of emotional and political purpose. The pastiche has a point. It reminds us all the time that the events of 1798 are still being, literally, played out.

An extraordinary tension is created by the way the styles of writing and performance move forward in time from the 18th century to the 20th. In terms of content, we are looking back on Henry Joy's tragic dilemmas. In terms of style, they are rushing forward to meet us. And in this tension, all the cliche's about history as a nightmare from which we are trying to awake acquire a new and vivid force. In the process we are reminded that, in the theatre, the difference between the past and the present fades to nothing, and that people don't have to be alive to be our contemporaries.