Embodying Individualism, Re-Imagining Community: Irish Theater in 2005

Quite often, after a long altercation, it will become apparent that it's not really the argued-about thing itself that is at issue, but the way it has been perceived. The same could be said of attitudes toward Irish theater. If anything, the year 2005 taught us lessons in seeing, and revealed the blind spot to be a consensus on how we want others to see us—right now, at the present moment, right here. The difficulty for contemporary playwrights seems to lie in establishing an equilibrium between social commentary and analysis and creating credible characters and personal narratives. In Irish theater in 2005, Elizabeth Kuti's The Sugar Wife suffers from too much of the former, while Monged, by Gary Duggan, suffered from an overdose of the latter. Still, encouraging people to turn their heads a little to look in another direction is a remarkable victory. The pain and suffering we witnessed on the Irish stage in 2005 was no longer portrayed as the national condition, but rather as an affliction that, from time to time, inescapably finds us out—simply because we are men and women and tragedy requires no further provision.

Speaking of afflictions: I hate to talk about other people's money trouble, but I'm afraid there's just no getting round the terrible year experienced by Ireland's national theater. The Abbey's money troubles remained big news in the Irish dramatic world. It turns out an archaic accounting system had under-reported the company deficit, which was later revealed to ring in at around one million Euro—not a sum likely to be made up by digging down the backs of theater seats. The office abacus was dismantled and Ben Barnes resigned ahead of schedule. His successor, Fiach Mac Conghail, has had some early financial successes: he persuaded the Irish government to waive the theater's four million Euro deficit, and the Abbey has received the largest grant awarded by the Arts Council, a sum of 25.7 million Euro to be issued over three years. In terms of artistic motivation—rather than financial hand-wringing—Mac Conghail's mission is to revive the Abbey's status as a politically relevant national theater, a responsibility that is a part of the theater's legacy. Invoking one of the theater's founders, Mac Conghail described his challenge as "what Yeats called offering a mirror to its citizens."

One company in the business of offering up mirrors in 2005 was Ballymun's Performance Lab@Roundabout Youth Theatre, located in Dublin's poorest district. (The neighborhood's residents might have a few words to say to the Abbey about living on a tight budget.) Unlike the Abbey, though, almost all of the residents of Ballymun's thirty-eight tenement tower blocks have found themselves rehoused, and initiatives to regenerate the area have been, ostensibly, successful. This social atonement was the subject of Dermot Bolger's From These Green Heights, which won numerous accolades at 2003's Irish Theatre Awards. Last year's Tumbledowntown goes one step further in chronicling the regeneration project and its residents; the audience was invited to walk through one of the abandoned flats and encounter childhood memories recorded from the young people who make up the local youth theater. Their stories are often tragic, and at first seem to confirm every stereotype about the urban poor: the unwanted pregnancies, the absent fathers, the alcoholic mothers and so on, and one begins to wonder why the residents should be resistant to an upgrade in their housing situation. Soon, though, we see the absurdity of believing that peoples' fortunes will improve if they are popped into a nice house with pine flooring and uplighting, which makes itself felt as a shallow and middle-class remedy. The people of Ballymun certainly aren't buying it: their vulnerability is exposed as they find themselves disenfranchised from familiar, often inherited, surroundings. As they recount the dreams, nightmares, birthdays, and rows embedded in the walls of the Ballymun flats, one realizes the extent to which a sense of "belonging" both empowers the...