Festival preview: Shaun Davey, composer

Jonathan Swift looks down on St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, the church of which he was dean for more than 30 years. On this summer day, the building is buzzing with tourists. Swift’s solemn features seem to gaze on the swarm of foreign teenagers circling the gift shop with a kind of benign disapproval.

“What do you imagine is going on in that man’s mug?” says composer Shaun Davey, as we stand together looking at the marble bust. Davey has written the music for a new production based on Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels by the leading Romanian director Silviu Purcarete which will open at the Edinburgh International Festival tonight. “I think it’s a very mobile face. There could be warmth there.”

In literary history, Jonathan Swift is something of an enigma: a politician, a churchman, a satirist – perhaps one of the best that ever lived. Gulliver’s Travels, often bowdlerised as a children’s story – witness last year’s big screen comedy with Jack Black – is, in fact, a serious piece of socio-political satire, anger radiating from its pages.

Davey, who is one of Ireland’s leading composers, draws my attention to the cathedral’s sumptuous mosaic floor. It caught the eye of designer Dragos Buhadjar, and is carefully replicated on the stage. It’s the kind of detail one might expect given the visual pyrotechnics of Purcarete’s Faust, performed at EIF in 2009 in a hangar-like space at Ingliston with a cast of 80. Gulliver’s Travels is a little smaller (it fits in the King’s Theatre), but does promise to be visually striking, and the cast includes a horse.

Davey says he was able to watch the production come together on stage at Teatrul Radu Stanca in Sibiu, Romania. While the actors improvised and devised with Purcarete, Buhadjar added and revised elements of the design. “Each day things took a step forward, Dragos would bring in a new element of the design, the lighting would become more sophisticated. I’m so impressed with the company, how all the technical people worked together.

“Because the show is image-driven, it opens up the possibility of very extraordinary and sometimes very beautiful things on stage. It veers between very hard, sometimes quite vicious images, and things which are quite naïve and charming.”

He says that Purcarete’s aim from the outset was to create a series of tableaux which respond to the works of Swift, not only Gulliver’s Travels. The production will reference several other pieces, including A Modest Proposal, the infamous essay in which Swift drew attention to the plight of the Irish poor by proposing that they eat their own children.

Davey says: “Swift wasn’t really a storyteller, he was a radical moralist, and he had very strong social motivations in his writing. I think Purcarete was interested in the radicalness of Swift’s writing. He was also impressed by the bravery of his spirit, his uncompromising attitude. When he speaks of Swift, Purcarete reminds us that in other areas of Europe he could have been put to death for the things he said. Like Swift, I think Purcarete enjoys being controversial, he’s very content with dissent and controversy.”

He says that although Purcarete and Buhadjar found the show “difficult and challenging” to make, they realised Swift had things to say about the world today: “There are contemporary references. At one point a line of bankers appear and they march around the stage in step. In the end, they disgrace themselves. I think the symbolism is that no matter how fine your clothes, the savage still lurks beneath.”

Davey and I walk to the spot where Swift was born in 1667, a stone’s throw away from the cathedral. The house no longer stands, but the old pend still had its name: Hoey’s Court. Swift’s father, a lawyer, died before he was born, and his education was supported by an uncle. Swift’s life was spent between political appointments in England, first with the Whigs then with the Tories, and ecclesiastical appointments in Ireland, following his ordination in the Anglican church in 1694. He was made Dean of St Patrick’s in 1713, and wrote his best-known works while in the post.

“His work was very much fuelled by anger,” says Davey. “Presumably he had seen so much of court life, and the political life of Britain, that he was exasperated at the inability of governments to govern for the benefit of all the people. In Gulliver’s Travels, he said what he had to say in an extreme way, I guess in an attempt to shock everybody into some form of realisation.

“It’s often overlooked that the majority of Gulliver’s Travels is quite bleak and despairing. Purcarete was very struck by the pessimism of Swift’s view as expressed in Gulliver’s Travels, that our behaviour as humans is irredeemable, we are incapable of being anything other than savages. And at the same time, there is a lot of humour in this collaboration, which is, of course, the other tool that was employed by Swift.”

The best-known section of Gulliver’s Travels, the voyage to Lilliput, where he is a giant among a race of people six inches high, is only one part of a much larger – and darker – text. Though funny and ribald in places, there is a seriousness at its heart. Other lands Gulliver visits include Brobdingnag, a land of giants, the flying kingdom of Laputa (which inspired Hayao Miyazaki’s anime) and the land of the Houyhnhnms, where intelligent horses are in charge and humans are savages (“yahoos”). In a (tongue-in-cheek) parting shot, Swift writes that he hopes the book “will wonderfully mend the world”.

Davey said he had been interested in working with Purcarete ever since he saw the Romanian’s production of Les Danaides in Dublin in the 1990s, which was so large it was performed on a baseball court. “It was an example of a type of theatre I had never seen before; very ceremonial, but an extraordinarily powerful blend of text, narrative and visual organisation. I certainly wanted the chance to work with him and experience working in that kind of theatre.”

Davey is best known for works such as The Brendan Voyage and Granuaile, which draw together elements of orchestral and traditional Irish music. His suite for the 2003 Dublin Special Olympics was performed for an audience of 80,000. He has also worked widely in theatre, for directors including Sam Mendes, Adrian Noble and Trevor Nunn, and in film and television, including Ballykissangel, Waking Ned and David Copperfield.

In 2009, he worked with Irish and Romanian musicians and a male voice choir from Bucharest to create Voices from the Merry Cemetery, 13 songs inspired by the epitaphs from a Romanian graveyard, for the International Theatre Festival in Sibiu. It was after a performance of that work in St Patrick’s Cathedral that he was introduced to Purcarete and Buhadjar.

He says: “Purcarete says I am the ‘first creator’ [on Gulliver’s Travels], in the sense that, at his request, I made a number of musical studies before the company began to rehearse. I cast my net into waters where I hoped I would find something of use in the context of what he and the company were going to do. Eventually, he told me to stop writing music because I had already written more music than there would be theatre!

His score is a mixture of choral work, which will be sung by the cast, accompanied by an organ on stage, and more “experimental” instrumental pieces. “I found it quite liberating not to be directed into a particular genre or a particular area. I enjoyed the experience of being set free by Purcarete, hoping to be somehow in the zone, and then finding that it did suit, that it did fit the narrative.”

Who can say what the face on the bust would have made of all this, though the chances are he would at least appreciate its seriousness of purpose. His epitaph hangs there like a challenge: “Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, doctor of divinity, dean of this cathedral, where fierce indignation can no longer rend the heart. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can, this earnest and dedicated champion of liberty.”

• Gulliver’s Travels, King’s Theatre, tonight until 20 August, 8pm (also 19 August, 2:30pm). www.eif.co.uk/gulliver