David McWilliams: An outsider at the theatre

There was a scrum outside the entrance to the Abbey Theatre, but it wasn’t for tickets.

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.

Review: Bernard Farrell’s Bookworms

Bernard Farrell launched his career over 30 years ago with a farce about six people at a group therapy session, I Do Not Like Thee Dr Fell. In Bookworms, literature has replaced therapy, but the form is the same, and so is the intent: to poke fun at the foibles of the age.

The book club is a worthy setting for a farce, and Farrell cracks his best jokes out of the contrast between the sedate stereotype and the reality: a smalltown bear pit of social one-upmanship and sordid pasts.

The play’s successes lie in its conventionality.

The Theatre Upstairs: Au revoir

Karl Shiels is a broken man.

It wasn’t the six-month, unpaid labour of love installing Dublin’s newest fringe theatre, the Theatre Upstairs at the Plough pub on Abbey St, that broke him. The excitement in the theatre community and rave reviews had long since repaid that.

It wasn’t the bleak midwinter, when burst pipes cut the water supply, and closed the theatre down just after it had opened, that broke him. He gritted his teeth and, eventually, like the rest of the country, his theatre was back on the road.

The Evidence I Shall Give at the Abbey

One day at the dawn of the 1960s, a remarkable script landed on the desk of the director of the Abbey Theatre, Ernest Blythe.

Blythe was in his 70s. He had retired from politics almost 30 years earlier, and had been managing director of the Abbey for 20. His was a staid directorship, and the Abbey survived his reign on a diet of “forgettable and now forgotten farce, melodrama, and Irish-language pantomimes,” as the Dictionary of Irish Biography pithily records.

But this play was to be different. It was by a judge, first of all: Richard Johnson of the District Court, Tralee. And it tackled an issue of then rising controversy: the breaking up of families by the state-supported system of industrial schools, orphanages and reformatories.

Review: Macbeth at the Abbey

‘Macbeth’ is the everyman’s tragedy. He lacks the nobility of Othello, the intellect of Hamlet, the authority of Lear. He is Shakespeare’s premonition of Tony Soprano – always in slightly above his head, struggling to catch up, resorting to horrific violence in a bid to assert himself over a fate he can’t quite master. For someone who orders the murder of children, it is extraordinary how sympathetic he is.

Dublin’s new Grand Canal Theatre: a public-private partnership

They say you need your bad luck to strike during the dress rehearsal, at the latest. The dress rehearsal for Swan Lake went smoothly.

On opening night, over 2,000 people mingled in the foyer and bars of the new Grand Canal Theatre, celeb-spotting or simply being celebs.

The staff, who had been practicing their drills for two weeks in an empty theatre, wore an air of nervous, earnest excitement. Tailbacks formed at the entrance to the auditorium, as people stopped sharply, struck by the scale and elegant lines of the stage and theatre.

The authenticity of Macbeth

Aged 16, I got my break in the theatre. Playing a broom carrier in the school production of Macbeth, I arrived for the performance to find myself promoted. A classmate had fallen ill.

My new role was that of the Captain in the second scene: gravely wounded from battle, he reports to King Duncan how bravely Macbeth has fought. For a tortured hour, I frantically paced the school corridors, feverishly trying to learn my newly acquired lines.

When my moment came, I stumbled on stage, convincingly dazed. “Doubtful it stood,” I intoned, without the first idea of what I was talking about, and promptly forgot the entire remainder of my short speech.

Time for a new Tribunal

Eamon de Valera once said that if he wished to know what the people of Ireland were thinking, he had to simply look into his heart. Today, the politicians prefer to rely on polls to know what the people are thinking, while de Valera’s role as a moral grandstander has been largely usurped by my colleagues in the media.

Both polls and pundits are mired in the same miasma, however, and it is one in which our politicians languish also. What people “think” typically means what they think in passing about an issue of the moment. Public “opinion”, and how to predict, reflect and marshall it, is the core concern of both pundits and politicians. Less considered are public values.

Review: Christ Deliver Us! by Thomas Kilroy

Thomas Kilroy’s new play for the Abbey is an awkward work, marred by obviousness and by the tired, cumbersome conceit of relying on twentysomethings to play fifteen-year-olds.

And yet it is also a foundation myth for 21st century Ireland, eschewing the minor notes of nuance in favour of the major chords of sweeping social drama.

Kilroy’s play tells of the travails of a group of teenagers in a small Irish town in the 1950s. The boys get lathered by the Christian Brothers, the girls beaten by their parents; and all are terribly afraid of their bodies.

(Aaron Monaghan excels as the most mature of the young men while, opposite him, Aoife Duffin has moments of startling brilliance.)

Street poetry in Ballymun

A century ago, at the Abbey, a young writer mentioned women’s underwear in a new play, and the audience rioted.

Fifty years ago, in the Dublin Theatre Festival, a young director staged a play that involved a condom being thrown on stage, and the director was arrested.

Then, last year, in the Dublin Fringe Festival, a young theatre maker wrote a play about casual sex and hard drinking. She won a new writing award, and has been busy visiting schools to talk about it.

Grace Dyas is a college drop-out, a youth theatre veteran, a theatre company founder, a producer, a director, an actor and a playwright. She’s 20. She talks too fast to take notes and, to judge by her script, has no idea how to use an apostrophe. But she can write like a fallen angel.

Dyas’s play, Rough, gets a welcome revival at the Axis in Ballymun next Thursday and Friday (tickets from (01) 883 2100 and www.axis-ballymun.ie). It’s a gutsy piece of street poetry, a litany of confessional insights into what people older than Dyas (like me) would call “youth culture”, and what Dyas and co would likely call “life”.

A new theatre in Dublin: Karl Shiels & the Theatre Upstairs

Karl Shiels was very nearly famous.

Eleven years ago, he was cast in a new play by an obscure young playwright that was to open the new theatre in Tallaght. Shiels starred alongside Aidan Kelly; the playwright was Mark O’Rowe and the play was Howie the Rookie, and it was the most ferocious piece of new writing from Ireland since Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark.

After a run at the prestigious fringe venue in London, the Bush, they played the Civic in Tallaght, to opening night acclaim and then empty houses. But then they toured to New York.

David Hare: putting the banks on trial, on stage

Do you believe Brian Lenihan or David McWilliams? IBEC or the Unions? Were the bankers gangsters, or simply suffering from hubris?

If conflict is at the heart of drama, then the collapse of the Irish economy should have proved a goldmine for dramatists. A society swept up by irrational exuberance; lone voices shouting stop; pantomime villains; and as many different interpretations of the crisis as there were characters: all the ingredients of good drama were there.

We’ll see the social effects of the downturn on the Irish stage soon, no doubt: Irish theatre has always been good at documenting the intimate minutiae of Irish lives and communities. But it has rarely risen to the challenge of responding rapidly to great political and cultural events.

Sam Shepard at the Abbey: glamorous import?

In Sam Shepard’s ‘Ages of the Moon’, not a lot happens. Two men drink, sitting on a porch. Nobody else comes along. One of them leaves, briefly. Most of what they talk about is objectively meaningless: rambling musings on life, alcohol, women; shared memories of past misadventures. A fan hums above them erratically, till one of them shoots it. They have a fight. One of them is hurt. It seems bad. They watch the moon.

The play is softly melancholic, with a streak of bleakness and despair, and a countervailing seam of hope and humanity. It is a gentle entertainment, in which the meandering earlier scenes, which are dominated by a sometimes-awkward burlesque comedy, lead to the payoff of a closing sequence of simple, stark beauty and emotional clarity.

The action, such as it is, takes place across a long day’s drinking