Irish theatre at the Fringe: Exploring the wilder shores of what theatre can achieve

Published on Sunday 27 July 2008 23:25

AS EVERY dog in the street knows, Ireland has one of the most vibrant national theatre traditions on the planet; the only problem is that sometimes, the very strength of that tradition – from WB Yeats to Sean O'Casey – creates nostalgic expectations of a theatre drenched either in Celtic mysticism, or in a fierce, high-energy form of gritty social realism.

Now, though, a whole new generation of Irish playwrights are challenging those expectations with some of the most wild, creative and beautiful theatre being produced anywhere in Europe – work that's not "experimental" in any old-fashioned 20th-century sense, but absolutely committed to exploring the wilder shores of what theatre can achieve in terms of imaginative journeys, and the special role of language in making those journeys possible; and some prime examples of that work are about to open on this year's Edinburgh Fringe.

At the Traverse theatre, for example, that 21st-century genius of reinvented theatrical language, Enda Walsh, rolls out The New Electric Ballroom, right, his follow-up to last year's left-field Fringe hit The Walworth Farce. Best known for the global smash-hit Disco Pigs – a lurid exploration of the low-life adventures and frightening passions of a pair of disturbed Cork teenagers – Walsh wowed Edinburgh audiences in 2007 with a show that seemed like a well-organised collision between the energy of a Dario Fo farce, the themes of a Tom Murphy Irish-expat drama, and the aesthetics of an episode of Little Britain. This year's show should be at least as interesting, as it explores the confused sexual histories of three ageing sisters in a small Irish village.

At the Assembly Rooms, meanwhile, Bill Burdett-Coutts's team offers space to the work of two acclaimed young Irish women playwrights, Ursula Rani Sarma and Shona McCarthy. Rani Sarma's leatest play, the Magic Tree – just premiered at the Cork Midsummer Festival – follows a man and a woman through the dark landscape of a dying civilisation. McCarthy's Married To The Sea, a haunted tale of the breakdown of a traditional Irish family created for her own young company, Dragonfly, was hailed on last year's New York Fringe as signalling the arrival of the most exciting new Irish theatre group for a decade.

And, back at the Traverse, the Abbey Theatre presents the UK premiere of Mark O'Rowe's Terminus, the latest piece of thrilling and chilling poetic drama from the man who shot to fame, nine years ago, with his fabulous Bush Theatre hit Howie The Rookie, one of the most brilliant double monologue plays ever written. Like Howie The Rookie, Terminus begins on the streets of contemporary Dublin, and takes its audience on a strange and mythical journey, using a rhythmic prose-poetry full of fierce internal rhymes. This play entwines three mono-logues rather than two; its surreal and magical dimension is much bolder than in any earlier play, as the landscape is stalked by mighty winged demons who can save human lives, but only at a savage price.

"I think one of the key things about the monologue form is that it represents a way of squeezing a lot of plot into a show of palatable length, and doing it organically," says O'Rowe, who spent his teenage years in Dublin overdosing not on theatre, but on classic crime movies and powerful American fiction. "This way, you can create stories in the theatre that are incredibly big and fantastical, and do it within an hour or two – by comparison, novels are far too long, and films are much more expensive and cumbersome. I love the theatre for that reason.

"As for the sense of violence and darkness in my plays, and in a lot of contemporary Irish theatre – well, I'm interested in something Nick Cave once said, about how the most violent stuff in art and music often comes out of periods of great peace, whereas people write beautiful love-songs and ballads in times of war. In the end, if we're honest, we usually want to write about what scares us. We are scared of violence, and there's a shame in that. I think it's partly in order to exorcise that shame that I write in the way I do. And then it's the language, and the fantastic sense of possibility within it, that keeps me moving from one line to the next. I love that. That's what drives me on."

&#149 Terminus and The New Electric Ballroom at the Traverse, Edinburgh, 3-24 August, with previews from 30 July. The Magic Tree and Married To The Sea are at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 1-25 August.