My new radio documentary, ‘My Name is Lydia Foy’, is available now for podcast from RTÉ Radio 1.

You can listen at http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/radio-documentary-my-name-is-lydia-foy-transgender-transsexual.html

Lydia Foy was born in 1947, in Athlone; she was, as far as anybody could tell, a boy. She went to boarding school, university, married and had children. But throughout, she knew she was actually female. Eventually, she had gender reassignment surgery. And then, she discovered she faced another odyssey, this time a legal one: according to her birth certificate, she was still male.

This documentary follows Lydia’s journey through life, and through the courts, in pursuit of her right to be the woman she always knew she was… To a soundtrack of “the songs that won the War”.

You can also podcast it via iTunes (under RTÉ Documentaries), or via the free RTÉ Documentaries iPhone app.

If you have time to listen, I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for your interest.

Colin

087 122 6716
colinmurphy@me.com

(I’ve sent this to all the contacts in my address book, using ymlp181.net. You can unsubsribe below, or simply reply with an expletive. Apologies for any inconvenience.)

The new site contains all the material from this one. This site is no longer being updated.

Thanks.

Mike Daisey’s bid to understand the global financial crisis took him not to the heart of Wall St, or the City of London, or the hedge fund mecca of Dublin’s IFSC, but to a tiny volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific.

The story of how, and why, he got there makes up what is likely to be one of the most intriguing shows of the summer, as Daisey, a sort of Michael Moore-on-stage, takes his one-man roadshow to Cork, Clonmel and Donegal in the coming weeks (details below).

It took Daisey a series of flights to reach the South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, and a further island-hopping plane ride to get to the tiny island of Tanna. There, on the rim of a live volcano, he found the islanders celebrating their annual feast, John Frum Day.

In the islanders’ lore, John Frum (“from”) is a saviour figure who represents a bizarre hybrid of traditional culture and American consumerism. He is the figurehead of the island’s “cargo cult”, a sort-of religion inspired by the island’s contact with the US military during the 1940s.

Prior to World War II, the island had had little contact with Western culture. A thousand miles east of Australia, its remoteness and hostility to outsiders had helped it preserved its traditions to an unusual degree. Missionaries were wary of it, and it acquired a reputation for cannibalism.

Today, there is some tourism, but the cargo cults persist. Another tribe on the island reveres Prince Philip as a divine being, and brother to John Frum. (Google it: I’m not making this up. )

Though the cults fetishise aspects of American and British culture, they also call for a rejection of Western values – including money. Many communities on the island do not use money, and will not accept it.

Daisey spent a month living with the islanders to research his new show. Malaria and dengue fever were endemic on the island. (Fortunately, cannibalism has largely died out.)

When he arrived, Daisey visited the impoverished two-man hospital. “If you do get sick,” they told him, “don’t come to the hospital. Leave.”

The natives spoke a pidgin that sounded “as if French and English had a baby, and it was raised by sailors from the 1940s,” and he hired an interpreter to help things along.

He hunted wild pig, slept on grass mats and drank fermented yam’s milk.

“It tastes as if a rat has died in your mouth… which is a very serious social issue if you’re at dinner in a sacred hut.”

But Daisey’s point wasn’t merely to record some quirky Rough Guide-type adventures.

Daisey is a theatrical storyteller, who has become something of an international, low-fi star with his one-man shows. His stories blend personal experience with journalistic research and wacky tangential anecdotes in a bid to illuminate the great issues of our time.

Daisey found his way to the island in search of the perfect analogy for the cult of derivatives and financial instruments.

“The belief system on island seems absurd to us. But the religion of high finance is equally capricious.”

For someone whose research is so exotically intense, Daisey’s performance style is surprising simple. He has no set, no cast, no costume… and no script. All he has is a table, chair, glass of water, and some notes, from which he improvises his stories each night.

“If you can’t think on your feet, then you can’t think.”

So is he a sort of stand-up comic?

“I think I’d have to stand up, for starters,” he quips. (One US critic called him “the best sit-down comic you’ll ever see.”)

“I try to alternate comedy and tragedy, as quickly as possible. I tell stories that have the depth and complexity of a novel.

“I have much larger concerns than whether the audience is laughing.”

Is he then, a sort of stage version of Michael Moore, using humour and direct address to highlight injustices?

“I’m much more intellectually rigorous than Michael Moore – and I think I’m funnier too.”

Luckily, he’s not the only one who thinks he’s good. His show based on the island experience, The Last Cargo Cult, is “an incredibly ballsy and humble indictment of the banking system, American materialism and the audience,” said the entertainment bible, Variety. It’s at the Half Moon Theatre in Cork from Tuesday to Thursday, as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival. (See box for details.)

But Daisey won’t merely be performing in Cork – he’ll be researching, too. (Clearly, he has a taste for idiosyncratic islands.) He is of Irish-American heritage, but had no exposure to Irish culture in his upbringing, and is using this first visit to Ireland to write and perform a new show about identity and belonging, From Away.

In Daisey’s home place, north Maine, being “from away” means something similar to being a “blow-in”, and he plans on spending his time in Cork interviewing a wide range of people about their lives in, and stories of, Ireland.

“Storytelling is hardwired into the human consciousness,” he says. If you’ve a good story hardwired into your own, contact Daisey via his website, www.mikedaisey.com, to tell it to him.

From Away premières in Cork on June 27. It then tours to the Clonmel Junction Festival on July 3 (www.junctionfestival.com; 052 61 28521) and to the Earagail Arts Festival on July 7 (www.eaf.ie; 074 9120777).

Published in the Irish Independent, June 19

]]> http://colinmurphy.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/mike-daiseys-theatre-of-protest/feed/ 0 colinmurphy http://colinmurphy.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/truckers-gamers-rimini-protokoll/ http://colinmurphy.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/truckers-gamers-rimini-protokoll/#comments Wed, 23 Jun 2010 01:13:26 +0000 colinmurphy http://colinmurphy.info/?p=605 ]]> What do a pair of Bulgarian truckers and a female Indian call-centre worker have in common?

And what have they got to do with the theatre?

They were three of the most disarming performers I’ve seen in recent years. And they were brought to the Dublin stage by the same theatre company, an intriguing German outfit called Rimini Protokoll.

“Stage” isn’t quite the word, though. The truckers (actual drivers, not actors) took me on a truck ride through Dublin’s docklands, in a show called Cargo Sofia, recreating the story of their working journey across Europe.

In a subsequent show called Call Cutta In A Box, I was brought into a nondescript office for a private conversation, via Skype, with a woman in a busy Calcutta call-centre, where she was working the “theatre shift”.

Both shows strained the boundaries of what we think of as theatre, but they were entertaining and thought provoking while they did it.

Now, Rimini Protokoll are back. This time, they promise to take their audience not to the underbelly of globalisation, but to a better world – a virtual one.

And the star of the show won’t be ordinary people from elsewhere – it will be ordinary people from here.

Rimini’s new show, Best Before, casts the audience as players in a massive video game unfolding on a screen before them. It’s one of the headline acts at this year’s Cork Midsummer Festival – surely the most exciting and distinctive arts festival in Ireland today.

Smaller than the Galway Arts Festival and Dublin Theatre Festival, the Cork Midsummer benefits from a more focussed directorial vision. Its brief is cutting-edge performance – but unlike much of the cutting edge, often blunted by being too abstract, this one is sharpened by audience engagement.

Its shows are as likely to take place on a street or in a disused building as in a conventional theatre. The audience is more likely to be asked to join in than to stop coughing.

Which brings us back to Best Before, a show that is part-theatre, part-video game.

The audience sits in a regular theatre. On the stage, a large screen shows images of a virtual world, BestLand. Everybody gets an “avatar” – a virtual character that they control. For the next two hours, they guide their avatar from birth to death, through BestLand, competing and cooperating with the avatars of the rest of the audience.

A typical audience member may choose to start their virtual life as a girl, but later get a sex change. They may struggle to find a life partner, have a child, get caught up in a car accident, be attacked by another avatar, run for election.

The point, says its creator, Stefan Kaegi, is that “you bring the theatre that you already have in your head out into the environment.”

Whether the audience feel like they’ve experienced a game or a drama doesn’t matter, he says. What’s important is that they get a chance to be an actor.

And though Rimini Protokoll is “trying to expand the concept of what theatre has been for the last 3,000 years,” it still relies on two crucial aspects: “it’s still live, and it’s still very social.”

That latter is confirmed by the “huge” amount of noise the typical audience generates, says Kaegi, as they goad and encourage each other through “life”.

Is it theatre? Whatever it is, it sounds like fun.

Best Before is at Stack Theatre in the Cork School of Music, June 23 to 26, with a post-show talk on June 25. See www.corkmidsummer.com for more on the festival, or call 021 4215131.

Published in the Irish Independent, June 12

There were raised voices, and a knot of people pushed against the glass doors.

It looked like it could get ugly. But it was simply the free market in action.

At the centre of the group, a man was selling prescription medicines. The others were junkies, thrusting cash at him, craving a slow-release hit.

The guards let them be. Inside the Abbey, the staff were nonplussed. And in a rehearsal room looking out onto the street, David McWilliams was making mental notes.

“I’ve been watching them all week,” he says, later.

“Economics is like drug dealing. At the very bottom of the market, down here outside the Abbey, they’re selling the worst quality at the worst price, and taking the biggest risk. That’s like people going to loan sharks, or taking subprime mortgages because they can’t get anything else.

But at the top, there’s the golden circle, where the drugs are pure, or the credit is free, and there’s no repercussions when things go wrong.”

The Abbey Theatre may not be the most obvious place for David McWilliams to be rehearsing his peculiar brand of popular economics, but his arrival there is simply the latest turn in a peripatetic career.

From mainstream economist, to TV and radio host, to cabaret compere (of the monthly “political cabaret”, Leviathan), to record-breaking author (of The Pope’s Children), McWilliams’s career path has been defined by his twin passions of economics and communications, and steered by a keen instinct for self promotion.

On Wednesday, McWilliams takes to the stage of the Abbey’s studio theatre, the Peacock, to perform a 70-minute theatrical monologue – about, literally, the state we’re in – called Outsiders.

(Outsiders runs till July 3, with Saturday matinees at 2.30pm. Further information from www.abbeytheatre.ie or (01) 8787 222.)

The title is apt. It comes from McWilliams’s most recent book, Follow the Money, in which he develops the argument that Irish society is divided not amongst class lines, but between “insiders” and “outsiders”.

The division cuts deep into Irish society and back across the generations, he believes.

Working in the Abbey, he’s been reading JM Synge, and was struck by Synge’s description of the “gombeen men” of rural Ireland at the start of 20th century.

“They were the middle-men in Irish political and economic life. Their whole raison d’etre was extracting money from the peasantry.

“We have the same guys today, but they’re wearing Hugo Boss suits.”

In other countries, crises give the outsiders a chance to displace the insiders. But in Ireland, in the 1950s, 1980s, and again today, the insiders have used the crisis to cement their hold on power, he says.

McWilliams himself came through “the machine that produces the insiders,” from Blackrock College to Trinity to the Central Bank. Yet he both sees himself as an outsider economist – somebody able to cut through the guff – and appears to have a genuine empathy with the outsiders of Irish society.

His interest in the junkies outside the Abbey isn’t merely academic: he has worked in Mountjoy Prison and with the Merchants Quay drugs project. The characters that people his books, from Breakfast Roll Man to Miss Pencil Skirt, may come across at times as glib caricatures, but his creation of them is driven by a desire to make economics less of a dismal science and more of a tool for DIY.

“One of the reasons that I got into the media was that economics was never communicated properly to people.”

And, of course, McWilliams is an outsider in the theatre. He is working, though, with a consummate insider.

Conall Morrison is one of the leading Irish directors, known for his inventive, muscular, large-scale productions.

He made his name over a decade ago with an acclaimed adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn, and went on to direct on the West End and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

That’s a far remove from working with a solitary economist on some kind of cross between a lecture and a monologue. But for Morrison, the time is right.

“There are certain times when reality supersedes imagination – when the current situation demands to be addressed.”

There won’t be gimmicks, he promises.

“You won’t see David in a tutu.”

Instead, Outsiders is simply the story of how the country came to be in the state it’s in, and how it might climb out of it. It is, as McWilliams says, “testament,” not fiction.

That’s the approach the Abbey took recently to marking the report of the Child Abuse Commission, with journalist Mary Raftery’s dramatised redaction of the report, No Escape.

And in London earlier this year, the National Theatre staged a documentary play by David Hare called The Power of Yes, which was subtitled “a dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis.”

As McWilliams says, “there’s an almost electric interest in economics now.” Whether he can convert that into electrifying theatre remains to be seen.

But as always, it seems, his timing is right.

Published in the Irish Independent, June 12.

One of the most famous lines in theatre is just two words long: “A handbag?”

It comes early in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a masterpiece of comic wordplay and barbed social satire. (A new production by Rough Magic is in preview at the Gaiety from Tuesday.)

And yet the line isn’t particularly funny, or obviously satirical.

Jack Worthing is determined to marry Gwendolen, but first has to survive an interrogation by her mother, the formidable Lady Bracknell.

“Do you smoke?” Lady Bracknell asks him. Yes, he admits.

“I am glad to hear it,” she replies. “A man should always have an occupation of some kind.”

Then she asks him about his parents. He has lost both of them, he tells her.

“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune,” she replies, “to lose both looks like carelessness.”

Jack didn’t quite lose his parents, however: they lost him. He was a foundling, he tells Lady Bracknell.

Where was he found, she asks. In a cloakroom at Victoria Station, he says. In a handbag.

“A handbag?” she exclaims. She is, to put it mildly, unimpressed. As she says, she doesn’t intend to let her only daughter “marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel.”

Jack is dismissed, and with that, the drama is set: Jack’s pursuit of Gwendolen will have to overcome the obstacle of Lady Bracknell’s objections.

The interrogation scene is comedy gold: almost every line contains a joke, and many of them live on in their own right as comic aphorisms.

But there is nothing aphoristic, or even witty, about the line, “A handbag?” So why is it the most famous?

There is a dramatic reason. Wilde, like Shakespeare, knew that a play couldn’t consist merely of memorable lines. Jokes, like philosophy, rarely serve the drama of a play; mostly, they’re enjoyed in their own right. And sometimes they go over people’s heads. So the writer has to insert simple lines amongst them that make it crystal clear what’s happening.

“To be or not to be,” says Hamlet, at the start of a long and complex soliloquy: even if you miss the meaning of some of his subsequent musings, it’s obvious what the dramatic point is.

Lady Bracknell and Jack Worthing enjoy a repartee that is dazzling but too quick to be fully appreciated at one hearing. But at the turning point of the scene, Lady Bracknell gives vent to her astonishment at Jack’s apparent unsuitability in those two, simple words.

It was the English actress Edith Evans who made the line immortal, however. Playing opposite John Gielgud’s Jack Worthing in the late 1930s in London, her high-farce delivery of “handbag” soared across octaves. (Search YouTube for “Edith Evans handbag” to hear a wonderful, crackly recording of it.)

Since then, every great actress has been measured against Evans. Penelope Keith described the line as sitting “like a monkey on your shoulder.”

And it’s not just the actress’s shoulder: the director, too, struggles under its weight. If half your audience expects to hear a line delivered a certain way, it cuts down your options badly.

That’s why these two words are at the heart of the challenge facing Rough Magic. As producer Diego Fasciati puts it, “Lady Bracknell has become a caricature rather than a character.” So how could they “refresh” the character of this quintessential English lady? Their solution was counter-intuitive: cast an American.

The American in question has star power, but couldn’t be glibly dismissed as a celebrity. Stockard Channing is famous here for her two previous roles as ladies: as the First Lady of the US in the TV series The West Wing; and as Betty Rizzo, the leader of the Pink Ladies, in the original film of Grease.

Channing is an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning screen actress, but she has been yet more successful on Broadway. She won a Tony award in 1985, and has been nominated many times since, most recently last year.

Channing should “bring a different sensibility” to Lady Bracknell, as Fasciati puts it. But she should also help bring a different, larger audience to the play.

Rough Magic has taken the 1200-seat Gaiety for three weeks, and needs to achieve 55 per cent occupancy to break even.

This is an audacious move by the company at a time when most theatre companies are retrenching.

Hit by a 9.5 per cent cut in Arts Council funding this year, down to €615,000, their response has been to scale up their ambition, to commercial levels.

Rough Magic typically stage their shows at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, which has a capacity of just 220. That means that even a show that sells out loses money, says Fasciati, restricting them to short runs.

“We’re not a commercial organisation but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to reach large audiences.”

This may be an auspicious time for such ambition. The new Grand Canal Theatre is currently creating and serving an audience for large-scale commercial theatre, largely in the form of West-End touring spin-offs.

That audience is unlikely to start checking the listings for the Project Arts Centre any time soon. But a billboard featuring an American TV star in a classic comedy may just bring them into the Gaiety. And they may then coming looking for more Rough Magic.

Assuming, of course, that Stockard Channing isn’t handbagged by Lady Bracknell.

Published in the Irish Independent, June 5.

Then, in his late twenties, he seemed to get a break. The Royal Shakespeare Company liked a play he had submitted, and decided to put it on in a small studio production. But their funding fell through, and the play got passed on, ending up with a student group, the Oxford Players, who said they’d do it at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Stoppard arrived in Edinburgh a few days before the play opened, to see how rehearsals were going. They weren’t. The director had had a fight with the leading lady – his girlfriend – and both had left, taking other friends in the cast with them. The stage manager had taken over, and some drama students were recruited to plug the holes, but nobody could make sense of the script.

The play was called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and was a riff on the fate of the two hapless, minor characters in Hamlet. But the script was bizarrely full of repetition: whole passages and pages seemed to repeat themselves. The students thought this was some kind of Beckett-like device, and were earnestly trying to interpret it.

It didn’t take Stoppard long to spot the problem: whoever had typed up the script had accidentally copied out some sections a number of times over.

Stoppard cleaned up the script and helped knock the production into shape. Nonetheless, when it opened, a few days later, the reviews were dreadful. Stoppard, though, was unperturbed. His novel, finally completed, had been published in that same week. It was, he believed, going to make him famous.

On the Sunday morning, Stoppard took the train back to London, and opened the Observer newspaper. There was a photograph of himself, with the caption, “most brilliant debut since John Arden’s.”

Back in Edinburgh, the play started to pack out. In London, the National Theatre said they wanted to do it. In the meantime, his novel sold 681 copies.

And so, on the cusp of his thirties, Tom Stoppard became a playwright. (His celebrated later play, Arcadia, is in preview at the Gate this weekend, and opens on Tuesday.)

Rosencrantz and Guidenstern was a hit at the National, and transferred to Broadway. Stoppard was accosted by a woman after the show one night. “What’s it about?” she demanded.

‘It’s about to make me rich,” he replied.

Rosencrantz and Guildestern made Stoppard famous, and he followed up with a series of similarly clever, funny plays: The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers and Travesties, amongst others.

But even as his reputation grew, it consolidated around an apparent limitation: his plays were clever at the expense of being cold. His characters indulged more in repartee than revelation.

In his scripts as well as in interviews, that repartee was often dazzling (a favourite: “If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music… and of aviation”) but there was a sense that he was holding back.

The watershed came with The Real Thing, in 1982 (which the Gate revived last year). A play about a playwright who has an affair and leaves his actress wife, it was seen as being, in part, autobiographical: Stoppard had left his wife for the lead actress in the play, Felicity Kendall. (He subsequently said the play had been written before meeting Kendall.)

The play was noted for its richer emotional landscape than earlier work, and Stoppard won plaudits for grounding his trademark verbal and intellectual dexterity in characters that were more credible and compelling.

Arcadia, in 1993, was a subsequent high point. Audaciously tackling the subject of chaos theory, it won Olivier and Tony awards, and huge critical acclaim. Revived in London last year, the Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote that it “gets richer with every viewing” and “makes us think and feel in equal measure.”

Since the early 1990s, the Gate’s artistic director Michael Colgan has followed an astute policy of associating the Gate with key playwrights: Beckett and Pinter, most notably, but also Brian Friel and Conor McPherson.

The Gate’s Beckett and Pinter festivals won it deserved plaudits internationally, but in committing so much to them, the Gate risked becoming predictable. With those canons now largely exhausted, the theatre may be in need of new figureheads.

(Though Colgan is currently considering a mini-festival of plays by Beckett, Pinter and David Mamet, which may breathe new life into the work.)

In this context, the Gate’s apparent courting of Tom Stoppard is intriguing. Stoppard’s work has been relatively little staged here, and, at 72, he is still at the top of his game. Arcadia is an enticing prospect in itself. All the more so would be an Irish premiere of a Stoppard play. That would be a tall order for even Colgan. But I wouldn’t put it past him.

See www.gate-theatre.ie for more or call (01) 874 4045 for tickets.

Published in the Irish Independent, May 22.

He brought his theatre group to a rural village, where the people were mired in poverty. In the village square, they put on a play.

It was a simple fable of how the rich oppressed the poor. The village audience was roused and inspired by it. And then came the play’s turning point. The hero – a poor man – was being beaten down by the rich man. The director stopped the play, and turned to the crowd.

“What should the hero do now?” he asked.

“Revolution!” cried a man in the audience. “Revolution!” the others cheered. They started to run around the village, seeking weapons.

The actors were aghast. The director was terrified. Hastily, he tried to explain that that wasn’t quite what he’d been thinking of. His group abandoned the play, and bid a hasty retreat back to the safety of the city.

The theatre director was a Brazilian named Augusto Boal, and he went on to become perhaps the most influential voice in “activist” theatre in the world. After his humbling early experience in rural Brazil, he came up with a careful new system. He called it “theatre of the oppressed”. It was a way of using theatre to explore the problems facing people, and help them find practical solutions.

Boal visited Ireland often, leading workshops with theatre folk and community workers; I interviewed him in the late 1990s. He died a year ago this month. His legacy lives on, though, and last week, his theory was put to the test in Temple Bar.

That may not be an obvious site of oppression. Eustace Street, though, is home to a café and day centre run by the homelessness charity, Focus Ireland, and it was there that the theatre company Gúna Nua chose to debut their first venture into Boal’s “forum theatre”.

It wasn’t much of a play, in the conventional sense. There was no set, except for a few ordinary chairs. The actors competed with the noise from the kitchen behind. People wandered in late, or got up during it and went out for a smoke. This was as far from the bright lights of Broadway, or even the bohemian cool of the London, New York and Edinburgh fringe scenes, as it gets.

Which is why it was intriguing that the company involved was not simply a group of well-intentioned volunteers, or low-key community arts workers. Gúna Nua is one of the most successful small Irish theatre companies of the moment, and this venture was sandwiched neatly between runs of their international hit play, Little Gem, by Elaine Murphy.

If Gúna Nua seems, at first glance, an unlikely company for this ground-roots political theatre, writer Gerry McCann admits he was an unlikely candidate for playwright. An actor by profession, he had grown “very cynical,” he says.

“Acting grinds you down. You just want to make a living.

“If I’d met somebody before doing this who’d told me they were in a play for homeless people and drug addicts, I’d have thought they were daft.”

But Gúna Nua was interested in trying out Boal’s method, and they offered to send McCann, and another company regular, Jenny O’Dea, to London for a weeklong training.

For McCann, the enthusiasm and innovation he encountered was a revelation. He and O’Dea came back “fired up”, and Gúna Nua moved quickly to develop a production, finding a willing collaborator in Focus Ireland.

In the café last week, the small cast tripped lightly through a short play about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and is thrown out of home, and then one about a pair of drug addicts on a recovery programme who fall for each other, and compromise their recovery. Both were tragi-comedies, in miniature, with sad endings.

Afterwards, the audience were asked to suggest where the characters could have made different choices, and then asked up to improvise scenes with the actors.

One man found himself playing the part of the addict wrestling with the conflict between his recovery and relationship.

“We’ve lied all our life,” he said, to the gorgeous young actress opposite, Charlene Gleeson. “Lying got us into drugs. If we tell more lies we’re going back.

“I love you, but I don’t want to tell lies and wreck the whole lot.”

He acted simply and unselfconsciously, improvising with searing honesty. As raw drama, it was mesmerising. As an act of political theatre, it was potentially transformative.

“I’ve seen my best of mates dying of overdoses,” he said, afterwards.

It would be glib to suggest that an afternoon of theatre can prevent that. Gerry McCann explains its intent in more modest terms.

“It helps you to think in terms of options and choices, in a situation where you may think you don’t have any options, where you feel trapped.”

But it’s not just about “helping”. For Paul Meade, Gúna Nua’s director, this experiment will feed back into the company’s mainstream work, lending it authenticity and urgency.

They’re two of the qualities that their hit play, Little Gem, has in spades. For Gúna Nua, the synergy between political theatre and popular theatre could yet prove a fruitful one.

Little Gem returns for a further national tour in the autumn. See www.gunanua.com.

It was “the affection of the hugging,” that O’Grady particularly enjoyed; it “awakened within me urges to be affectionate in return.” When an altar boy he liked, aged ten or eleven, arrived at the sacristy, he said, “I might go over and give him a hug, and if he responded by allowing me to hug him and offered to hug me in return, that sort of gave me permission to continue at that point.”

The barren honesty of it was striking. O’Grady’s voice was that of a pathetic, deluded, lonely man; the fact that we had his voice at all made the article extraordinary. And it answers, in part, a question I had asked myself about the Irish theatre.

A year ago this month, Judge Sean Ryan published the final report of the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse. In over 2,000 pages, the Commission laid bare the extent and nature of abuse in Ireland’s religious-run residential institutions. This abuse amounted to the gravest ever scandal to afflict the Irish state; the neglect of children by the state over decades was a crime perhaps only matched in recent history by the colonial power’s earlier neglect of the children of famine-struck Ireland.

The report didn’t merely document the abuse, it gave voice to the previously voiceless, allowing the victims and survivors to speak for themselves.

In this, it was fundamentally a piece of storytelling. It both comprised hundreds of individual stories, and sought to bring them together to tell the overarching story of systemic neglect.

Storytelling is at the heart of our theatre tradition. So, a year on, how have the protectors of that tradition, the theatre community, responded to the Ryan report?

The Abbey’s response has been notable. Thomas Kilroy’s play, Christ Deliver Us!, had been commissioned years earlier, but its thematic focus on chronically repressed sexuality resonated with the wider debate post-Ryan.

Then the Abbey brought us the just-concluded Darkest Corner season. At its heart was Mary Raftery’s theatrical presentation of the Ryan report, No Escape.

It was revealing that the Abbey’s director, Fiach Mac Conghail, had initially considered simply reading the report, from cover to cover, on stage. (This idea was also explored by some in Dublin’s fringe theatre community.)

That ethos was what drove No Escape: it was at heart both a tribute to the monumental achievement of the report, and to the dignity of the individual stories told within it.

Mary Raftery’s economic synopsis of the report found some drama in juxtaposing its damning conclusions with re-enactments of the testimony of religious leaders at the Inquiry, thus exploring as well as exposing their deceit. But its form was essentially that of illustrated lecture rather than drama. It was a very pure response to the enormity of Ryan’s report: a recognition that the report needed to first be recognised, and read, by the theatre community, before it could be artistically explored.

The question it raises now, for the theatre, is, “what next?” On a practical level, No Escape should now tour. On the artistic level, it now falls to our theatre makers to mine the stories presented by Ryan/Raftery further, and to find drama in them.

Mannix Flynn has probed this area previously. And the young company Brokentalkers are working on a new documentary play about the Irish care system, to include the residential institutions.

But the dark heart of drama to come will lie in the characters of those who committed these acts, and those who covered up and tolerated them. That will be risky territory for playwrights. But it will be necessary artistically, and necessary to understand.

Mary Raftery’s play cites an incident where a young Christian Brother at Letterfrack, Br Sorel, made a boy eat his own faeces. The question that confronts us as citizens, and as artists, is now merely how best to make reparation or to apportion blame, but what happened in the mind of that young man to make such behaviour seem normal?

Ali Bracken’s extraordinary story in the Tribune last week, based on an affidavit by O’Grady that she obtained, provides a journalistic step in that broad direction. On stage, Michael Harding ventures there also, with a timely revival of his 1994 play, The Kiss, at Bewley’s Café Theatre from Monday (1pm, booking at 086 8784001 or info@bewleyscafetheatre.com).

Harding journeys into the mind of an abuser with courage and sensitivity. His priest, played by the wonderful Tom Hickey, is a man corrupted by solitude, loneliness and sexual frustration. He is “a sad young man”, passing his days as chaplain in an old folks’ home, and his spare time following women, discreetly, in shopping centres, eventually allowing his repressed sexuality to overwhelm him, tragically.

Harding’s priest reflects that his predecessors as Irish clergy, hundreds of years before, “lived a raw, physical, earthy life, and in that sense their sensuality was cared for, managed.” In a line in an earlier draft of the play, he describes his story as “the anthropology of chastity.”

The anthropology of abuse is at the core of the Ryan Report. Who are we, as a people, that we allowed this happen? And what relation do we bear to the people who commited these acts? The answers can only come by exploring the characters and circumstances of those people themselves.

This is the territory into which Irish drama will have to venture now. The journey won’t be comfortable. But in the hands of such as Michael Harding, it will be profound.

Published in the Irish Independent, May 8.