Industry anger becomes art at Dublin Fringe
There’s a new confidence by emergent artists. How best to leave a mark that lasts?
At this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival, there was a moment during a play when someone decided they were done with theatre. In the stunningly clever It Was Paradise, Unfortunately, playwright Raphaël Amahl Khouri, despite having a celebrated success, realised the precarious life of making plays was a harmful addiction and not a career. “Fuck Shakespeare,” he says, as his scene partner unbuttons their shirt, revealing a t-shirt saying: “… and fuck Aristotle.”
Khouri wasn’t alone in his derision; throughout this year’s festival, there was plenty of irreverence shown towards long-time institutions. At least two different shows aimed jokes at the Abbey Theatre. Shane Daniel Byrne began his stand-up comedy Trouble Denim in that venue’s smaller Peacock auditorium by zinging about the bigger room upstairs: “Did you think it was going to be the real Abbey? So did I.” In Illness as Metaphor, Dead Centre’s far-out adaptation of Susan Sontag’s essay, there was a scene when six individuals living with long-term illness pulled off a metaphysical escape from their bodies, and even, via Kilian Waters’s extraordinary video design, teleported to the large stage of the Abbey. “They wouldn’t want us sickos there!” one of them insists.
Elsewhere, Boss Rob – a play for young audiences by Darren Yorke, Duffy Mooney Sheppard and Liam McCarthy – presented a pompous artist (a version of Bob Ross, as inverted as the play’s title) as someone to encourage disapproval of, for an audience of young critics to disregard his attached prestige.
Punching-up is nothing new but there was a sharper anger unseen before, aimed at barely-veiled targets. From the comedy world, A Good Room saw comics Cian Jordan and Allie O’Rourke trace a map of Dublin comedy clubs where they witnessed bigotry, whether behind the scenes or onstage. The production was tinged with the sad state of things. Faced with injustice (there’s mention of a perpetrator who has returned to gigging “after a few years writing pantos”), the decision to stage the show inside a terrace house converted into a comedy club (Jordan’s home), partially had to do with O’Rourke’s experience of transphobic attacks in those industry spaces. This is fringe site-specific performance as retreat from a toxic establishment.
In theatre, the most driven critique was Joy Nesbitt’s Julius Caesar Variety Show, a dark comedy depicting an audition where a diverse group of actors perform for a bullying director. Nesbitt’s points felt new and insightful: watch how a Black actor (a cool-headed Loré Adewusi) has to deal with an insecure white actor jealous of new fascination with non-white stories (an excellent burlesque by Daniel Mahon), or a director insisting that not going along with exploitative expectations of Blackness is actually being artistically conservative (a compellingly snide Ultan Pringle). How depressingly elaborate these schemes are.
But Nesbitt’s play also drew on a very clear strain of historical abuse in Irish theatre. At one point, Pringle’s director – tall and long-haired, and once considered innovative by critics but now dismissed – makes a note to himself: “Think about The Crucible at the Gate.”
There seems to be a new confidence, mostly by emergent artists, to try depict people with access to power, and leave a mark that lasts. When the industry reopened after the pandemic, there were attempts by established companies to try reconcile theatre’s past crimes, but these always shunted away to a reality far from ours – to a theatre brawl elsewhere in Europe during The Last Return, to the culture wars of 1990s Greenwich Village in Masterclass, and into a rewrite of an ambivalent slave-era melodrama in An Octoroon. Then, at last year’s Fringe a shot fired close to home.
In Dog Shit, Bellaray Bertrand-Webb’s soaring comedy about twentysomethings working for a superficial theatre company in Dublin, there was a scene when a woman, accused by her peers of being a sell-out because she quit playwriting for a job in tech, reminded them she didn’t have the same safety net to work in a precarious industry, and made a dig at “middle-aged women” occupying cushiony jobs. Take your pick who you think that was aimed at; much of the industry is run by people in that demographic. (Intriguingly, Bertrand-Webb’s play later found a London production, populated by a cast of actors who decided to leave Ireland – which in itself seems a comment on the industry at home).
If artists are going to make an art of protest, aimed against the hand that feeds them, how should they go about it? Around a decade ago, the then-prolific director Peter Reid staged a production of Dario Fo’s satire Accidental Death of an Anarchist, relocated to Ireland to tackle corruption at home. In between shots taken against the Corrib Gas controversy and the government’s austerity cuts, a criminal, trying on impersonations of authority figures, decided to approach the touchy subject of Arts Council funding. “It’s all about who you know,” he wisecracks, as if the disappointment of somebody whose funding application was rejected had found its way into the playscript.
Sometimes art is the only means to speak out. During the Waking the Feminists outcry, Marina Carr – a female pioneer in the male-led world of Irish playwriting, forced to bear the weight of a trailblazer, and ultimately left to stand alone by an establishment uninterested in diversity – voiced her agreement with the movement, but only in taking issue with a wider patriarchal society, without making explicit criticism of the same managements that produced her plays. Seemingly stuck in a tight spot, Carr wrote a scene in her next play Anna Karenina when one of its St Petersburg socialites, during a dinner conversation, mentioned the suffrage movement, using 19th century parlance: “What about the ‘women’s question’?”. The careful selection of words made it sound like a stand-in for Waking the Feminists, and Carr, disinterested in becoming the face of a campaign, had found an inspired joke about women being a thorn in the side of the establishment, no matter what century.
After cuts to arts funding in Northern Ireland, playwright Rosemary Jenkinson went so far as to create a caricature of a culture minister. Premiered during the 1916 centenary, Here Comes the Night saw a politician rock up to the house of two new homeowners in Belfast, wanting to install a plaque onsite to commemorate a nationalist writer. The couple would prefer not to have the attention. “Is this some kind of joke to you? The whole point is to interrogate the past, give voice to the forgotten, give these streets a new identity,” says the minister. Here is a politician responsible for the arts, on the scent of good publicity. Who can quote the hunger strikers, but doesn’t know who Sophocles was.
Recent anger, however, seems to be aimed at people who have a say in what gets put on. In one sense, a predecessor to Dog Shit was It Was Easy (In the End) – the final play by TheatreClub, previous representatives of a younger generation’s ire. Its director Grace Dyas had spoken publicly about being dismissed in the industry for being working class, and, with this production on the Abbey stage, seized the opportunity to depict the despair of the housing crisis. A version of Hamlet, the play started with a visualisation exercise: a sentry is asked are they capable of picturing the Abbey stage populated by homeless characters. “No,” he replies, as if expecting nothing more from the national theatre’s programming. Part of the play’s theory, it felt, was that mainstream theatre won’t be able to address this national crisis until it opens doors to working class artists.
The question is: how do you leave a mark that lasts? Somewhat cynically, Julius Caesar Variety Show, A Good Room, and Dog Shit left its characters defeated by dire conditions, ultimately turning against each other, as if people will tear each other apart unless things meaningfully change. It Was Paradise, Unfortunately made a significant discovery, presenting the Dionysia festival of ancient Greece as a possible source of inspiration from past to present – of theatre becoming joyful and diverse again.
Another revelation this Fringe came in Eva O’Connor and Hildegard Ryan’s off-the-wall comedy Chicken, which showed the American film business chewing up and spitting out its stars (with obvious references to Irish men in Hollywood in particular). It was hardly driven to tear that industry down; with an animal actor as its protagonist, the play became a sly, questioning meditation on meat-eating, and whether you have to go as far as Hollywood to sell your soul.
That’s also a relevant aphorism to walk away with from this year’s Fringe, as audiences of an overbearingly white industry where harmful workplace experiences are the norm: you are what you consume.
Friends,
In case you missed it, my stories below were recently published in the Irish Times.
My review of Trouble Denim. (“Trouble Denim: An anarchic comedian adjusts to chaotic life on the road”).
My review of The House. (“The House: Druid’s bold Tom Murphy revival dives into an obsessed mind”).
My review of First Trimester. (“First Trimester: On-stage sperm-donor interviews elicit touching discussions about parenting”).
- Chris