Treading the commercial boards

ArtScape: Dandelions at the Olympia Theatre might offer a lesson in how to make and market commercial theatre. Some 1,200 seats in the stalls and circle are already sold out, with seats booked in the gods for this slick package until the end of its first run on November 20th. And this week it was announced it will return to the Olympia on November 28th for 10 shows.

The storyline is almost formulaic: two suburban women, played by Deirdre O'Kane and Pauline McLynn, different approaches to motherhood with new neighbours and a question of paternity thrown into a conventionally plotted structure. But the performance and production values are high, the script is chock-a-block with funny lines, and the theme reflects audiences' contemporary experience and taps into that most topical of issues - how we bring up our children.

Add in Dawn Bradfield, former boy bander and Corrie star Keith Duffy and director Michael Caven and you get a pot pourri that has done the trick for Clarke's Landmark Productions and her promotional partner, MCD, with its relentless publicity machine. The week after she left the Gate Theatre in 2003, Clarke suggested to Fiona Looney that she write a play. She knew from Looney's newspaper columns that she "could make people laugh and then turn the tables and bring a lump to the throat", and thought she might bring that to a storyline about juggling conflicting demands of work and motherhood. In the end, Looney opted to write about stay-at-home mothers, with McLynn and O'Kane in mind.

Although it is common enough in film-making, this commercial approach is unusual in theatre - usually only established playwrights receive commissions. Clarke resists the idea that it was a formula. "Commercial theatre is a good thing, which we haven't had much of in this country. Bringing in an audience that might otherwise go to a gig or the cinema is deeply satisfying, and Fiona has tapped into something meaningful and important in people's lives."

"Commercial theatre can be viable in this town," she says.

The portfolio of Clarke's Landmark Productions has varied from the high art of David Hare's Skylight and Ed Albee's The Goat to the honestly commercial Dandelions, and the upcoming co-production with the Helix of a Christmas production of The Secret Garden. It is a mix she describes as one of the "joys of independent production".

Gods smile on Factotum

There must be some irony in the fact that the Belfast-based "arts collaborative" Factotum (aka Stephen Hackett and Richard West), who made the Belfast City Council get their knickers in a twist earlier this year, have just won a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, the UK's biggest national arts prize, in London. The duo, who adopt various strategies - dance, music, video projections, posters, books, newspapers, talks - to disseminate their work and ideas, were in hot water earlier this year when the city fathers withdrew their funding of £5,000 (€7,500) for their free newspaper, The Vacuum, after unionist members of Belfast City Council condemned an issue it published about Satan.

Still, the £30,000 (€44,700) Factotum has netted for the award puts that loss in the shade. And as a further possible embarrassment to the tender sensibilities of councillors, Factotum represented Northern Ireland at this year's Venice Biennale.

The five winners each receive £30,000 over three years, no strings attached, awarded on the strength of talent, promise and need as well as achievement in the visual arts in their broadest sense. The other winners are Clio Barnard, Ian Breakwell (who died since the winners were decided), Jacqueline Donachie and Michael Landy, the artist who destroyed all his possessions in the window of C&A.

Murphy's London calling

Opening in London next week, Tom Murphy's new play, Alice Trilogy, brings the playwright's career full circle, writes Sara Keating. The cycle of departure and return that structures Murphy's work has also structured his career. While the Abbey Theatre has premiered 14 of his plays over the last 40 years, his first full-length play, A Whistle in the Dark, was premiered at London's Theatre Royal in 1961 and this latest play opens at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea. Emigration has provided the central theme for much of his work, but it is a theme Murphy has used to explore a wider sense of existential homelessness, which resonates throughout his plays, even Alice Trilogy, which remains preoccupied with the idea of inner exile.

Configured as three separate movements of evolution in a single character's life, Alice Trilogy eddies through three ages of its central character Alice, with Juliet Stevenson playing the eponymous heroine at the ages of 25, 40 and 50. Stevenson is complemented by a small cast that includes Derbhle Crotty and Stanley Townsend, whose dialogue provides the dramatic fuel for the monologue of Alice's life - it is discovered in a series of encounters that they are expressions of her own damaged mind.

If The Gigli Concert was a majestic symphony, Alice Trilogy is an understated chamber piece, but the familiar themes of home - in both its metaphysical and its literal meanings - suggest a deeply personal, local interest for Murphy despite the foreign concern of its lead female character and the international context of its premiere. As yet there are no plans for Alice Trilogy to transfer to Ireland - a surprise, perhaps, as Murphy's reputation as one of Ireland's greatest living playwrights was officially acknowledged with the 2001 celebration of his career at the Abbey Theatre.

He is currently working on a new play and was unavailable for comment, but the fate of Alice Trilogy serves as a poignant reminder of the key concerns of his powerful plays: the inevitable cycle of exile and homecoming that defines the existential instability of man's place in the world. The paradox of that cycle acknowledged, one cannot help but anticipate another grand return. Alice Trilogy opens at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, Chelsea, on Wednesday and runs until December 10th.

Meanwhile, the Nottingham Playhouse production of Seamus Heaney's Burial at Thebes opened this week, with Jodie McNee as Antigone and Michael Byrne as Creon. Alfred Hickling in the Guardian gave "Seamus Heaney's outstanding new version" a five-star review, writing,

"Lucy Pitman-Wallace's production, whose signal achievement is to animate the drama in a form Sophocles himself surely would have recognised . . . Yet the real masterstroke is to restore the chorus to its original musical function. Mick Sands's a cappella 10-part harmonies are not only sublime to listen to, but banish all the dreadful, stilted choric speaking that plagues most contemporary productions of Greek tragedy." Sam Marlowe in the Times gave three stars to the "economically eloquent production", and while "it offers plenty to please the head, the production never quite finds its way to your heart and guts." All the same, "it's engrossing to watch - and to listen to".

Seamus Heaney's version premiered at the Abbey last year, and Helen Meany, in her review of Lorraine Pintal's production in these pages, wrote that, aside from the two leads (Lorcan Cranitch and Ruth Negga), "the performances are uncertain and uneven and the pace is static. This plot turns at a breakneck speed yet, as staged here, it all seems inert", concluding that "Antigone will, of course, survive this production, especially in Heaney's new version which has taken Sophocles' dense, concentrated poetry and decanted it into a beautifully transparent contemporary idiom." Could it be that the definitive production of Heaney's version is to be seen in Nottingham, not our own national theatre?