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Wednesday, October 23, 2002

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

DUBLIN -- Talking with an English critic friend in London, I said I was on my way to Dublin for the theater festival. "I've never been," he said, adding, "That'll be a nice chance to hoist some pints of Guinness."

It sounded condescending, the way the English can be about the Irish. But he proved right: Dublin (and especially the festival's own late-night club) proved to be a very friendly place to hoist a post-show pint or three. And there's no nonsense about the pubs closing at 11.

It was also an invigorating bout of theater. Though it doesn't make as much international noise as the big festivals in Edinburgh or Avignon, the Dublin Theatre Festival is 45 years old and keeps Dublin pulsing for a couple of weeks in October with a concentration of Irish and international theater.

Dublin is always worth visiting, with its accessible size, friendly talk, rich history, lively night life, youthful buzz and determined celebration of the arts. Theater is only one attraction, and even during festival time, Dublin keeps theater within bounds, with matinees generally only on Saturdays. So over a four-day weekend, we were able to see five shows but also to enjoy the bustle of the streets and some non-theater attractions beyond the Book of Kells, Kilmainham Gaol and the Guinness factory, even though we were rising pretty late after those post-show pints.

This year's two-week festival had 16 main attractions, with the international shows clustered in the first week and the Irish in the second. There were also panels, talks, etc., and a small Fringe Festival, little of which we had time for.

We were there the second weekend, fortunately, since Irish theater was what we came to see. But in that first week we missed such international features as, from South Africa, "The Mysteries" ("Yiimimangaliso" in Zulu), a musical version of the Christ story; from Chicago, Steppenwolf in "Glengarry Glen Ross"; and from Infrarouge Theatre of Quebec, Marie Brassard in her own "Jimmy."

The international events included two shows already seen in Pittsburgh: Tom Conti as John Barrymore in William Luce's "One Helluva Life," seen here as "Barrymore" with Christopher Plummer; and, from De Onderneming, Belgium, Agneta Kristof's "The Notebook" and "The Proof," differently adapted at Playhouse Rep in 2001 as "The Third Lie."

So during the festival's first week, you could have Dublin and the world, too -- good advice for a future year.

Equally rich was the native menu, with three generations of Irish playwrights and work from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, Lyric Theatre (Belfast) and Druid (Galway). Add in Dublin's Gate Theatre, doing a new adaptation of a French comedy, and the choices were difficult.

John B. Keane, "Sive"

This was a must. Keane, who died this year at 74, was a Kerry publican who became one of Ireland's best-known writers through reams of journalistic commentary, fiction, anecdotage, letters and plays. The question is whether he was "just" a popular phenomenon or a serious artist, too. "Sive" was his first play, staged by an amateur group in 1959 and refused by the Abbey. Skillfully revived by the Druid Theatre and director Garry Hynes (Tony winner for Druid's "Queen of Leenane") and starring Ireland's famous Anna Manahan, it makes a strong case for Keane as a knowing manipulator of rural stereotypes, not just a purveyor of them.

The story is familiar enough: Impoverished harridan schemes with shifty matchmaker to sell her young stepniece to a rich local farmer. The grandmother and a traveling tinker (the country shaman) are on the girl's side; the harridan's husband dithers in between. It's practically an encyclopedia of leprecorny types and talk, richly comic, darkening toward a tragic ending that is both surprising and inevitable. Imagine Synge's "Riders to the Sea" played partly for laughs.

"Sive" closes Saturday.

Tom Murphy, "Conversations on a Homecoming"

Among fine Irish playwrights little known in the United States (a distressingly large class), Murphy is perhaps the best, as Pittsburgh could see this summer in the Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre's brilliant staging of "The Gigli Concert." "Conversations" is "just" another pub play, but it's a modern classic that nearly defines the genre. Written in 1985, it's all about the loss of the idealism symbolized by a young Irish-American, John F. Kennedy.

Michael (Conleth Hill, half of the original "Stones in His Pocket") comes back to his small Galway town in his late 30s after years of little success in America, nostalgic for the idealism he and his friends felt growing up. Those friends gather in the dingy, bilious green pub where they used to plan big things, led by Tom (Adrian Dunbar), an embittered schoolteacher. Through 93 minutes, past hope and current failure and reality are gradually laid bare. In the consummate Lyric Theatre production by hot young director Conall Morrison, the bar shelves sit like an altar piece above the thickly jokey despair -- but no savior comes. "If Brian Friel speaks to the heart of Ireland," says Ben Barnes of the Abbey, "Tom Murphy speaks to our souls ... to the trouble in our souls."

Marina Carr, "Ariel"

Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre introduced Pittsburgh to Carr through her grimly poetic "Portia Coughlan" in 2001. For a young writer, Carr (born 1964) has already taken the establishment by storm. Though historically resistant to new writing, the Abbey (Ireland's national theater) has made her its own: "Ariel" is the fifth premiere it has staged out of her seven plays.

Directed for the Abbey with operatic size by that same Conall Morrison, "Ariel" is a giant blend of the Oresteia myth with a cautionary tale of a contemporary politician's Faustian pact to achieve power. The language is thickly poetic, the action grandiosely improbable but pulsing with its mythic antecedents. I admired it but never felt engaged by its posturing characters. It may be that in a smaller production its difficult virtues will become clearer.

"Ariel" runs through Nov. 9.

Owen McCafferty, "Closing Time"

The cast featured the marvelous Jim Norton, a London/U.S. Irish actor whom I've seen in the premieres of Conor McPherson's "The Weir" and "Port Authority," among others. This is another pub play, pale in comparison to Murphy's "Conversations" (fortunately we saw it first) but carrying its own conviction as a tale of defeated hopes in the shadows of the recent Celtic Miracle.

Barabbas, "Blowfish"

The attraction here was as much the venue and audience as the show. The Ark in Temple Bar is a purpose-built children's theater, and Barabbas' inventive show (aimed at 6- to 10-year-olds) was a delight for the uniformed-class school groups we watched with as much pleasure as we did the cast of five willing lump-shaped clowns, bumbling through loosely structured discoveries.