IT takes guts - and, one might add, severed legs, lopped off arms, parched bones and disconnected heads - to take on Edward Bond's stark and strange play Early Morning, which makes up the third and final part of Bedrock's excellent Theatre of Cruelty season at the Project. But all of these body parts are, literally props - they support a passionate and humane argument about the place of violence in our world. Though famous for being banned by the Lord Chamberlain in Britain in 1968, the play is in fact far too abstract, too intellectually rigorous, to be obscene or revolting. What it demands is not so much a strong stomach as a strong mind - a willingness, not to wallow in violence, but to think about it.
In this, it makes a fitting culmination of a season that has been marked by a great deal of theatrical and intellectual courage. In the first two instalments, Bedrock presented plays by Samuel Beckett, Heiaer Muller and Mark O'Rowe, as well as Gavin Kostick's Forked, an always lively, often intriguing, and sometimes brilliant variation on the myth of Tiresias.
What united these pieces, apart from the search for a theatre of the body and an intrepid exploration of the new space at The Mint, was a concern to place violence in a political frame. The Beckett plays chosen for the season - Catastrophe and What Where - are his most overtly political works. The Muller plays make connections between apparently private acts of violence - a woman's suicide, Medea's murder of her children - and a vividly evoked context of war and fascism.
Edward Bond, too, is concerned to show that violence is not some kind of biological original sin, but a result of social and political distortions. "A dog," he writes in his essay On Violence that accompanies the published version of Early Morning, "has a capacity to swim she first time it goes into water, but it has no need to swim because it has no need to go into water. Human beings are violent animals only in the way that dogs are swimming animals. We need to eat; but only when we're starving does there have to be the possibility that we will use our capacity for violence tub satisfy our need for food."
Early Morning is essentially a playing out of this notion. If you can imagine a creature that is one third Shakespeare, one third Shaw and one third Swift, this play is it. It gives us a Hamlet like royal family at war with itself, complete with poisonings, swords and skulls. It sets its story up in Shaviaa terms as the illustration of an argument. And then it uses grotesque exaggeration with an energy and confidence that has not been seen since Swift. It has that strange tone that you find in Gullivers Travels, where by being extremely literal people really eat each other on stage - you create wildly improbable metaphors.
The royal family in this case is a phantasmagoric version of Victoria and Albert, the archetypal image of political power supposedly united to domestic bliss. But like all families, this one has a few little tensions. Albert is planning to stage a coup with the prime minister Disraeli. Victoria is thinking of poisoning her husband. A royal wedding is being planned for Prince George, but this presents some minor difficulties, both because he and his brother Arthur are siamese twins and because the bride to be Florence Nightingale is having a lesbian affair with the Queen. And though the world outside is already full of random and extreme violence, it soon descends into complete brutality.
In spite of having such a predictable plot, the play presents some difficulties and it is not surprising that Jimmy Fay's fluid and admirably proficient production doesn't cope with all of them. What is most difficult in working through the play is to keep your nerve, not for the horror, which has a dreamlike, surreal quality, but for the comedy. Laughter, in a play like, this, is a sign, not of escape, but of recognition.
As an epic play in the Brechtian sense, Early Morning demands an attitude of cool distance on the part of the audience. If we start trying to identify with or feel for the characters, the whole thing breaks down into mere absurdity. Only by laughing at them can we keep open the space that can be occupied by thought. Here, there is not quite enough polish, not enough command, to keep the comedy going all the way through. Nor is there quite enough stagecraft to carry through the effects that Bond intends, some of which call for the skills of an illusionist.
BUT there is still an extraordinary degree of skill and commitment. One of the revelations of the season as a whole has been Bedrock's ability to bring together a terrific group of young actors and to give them a clear sense of common theatrical purpose. In this regard, Fay's direction of Early Morning is a superb accomplishment, featuring as it does not just a disciplined and intelligent ensemble but some very fine individual performances from Andrew Bennett, Tony Flynn, Mary O'Driscoll, Patrick Leech and Liz Kuti.
In the scale, intelligence and ambition of this season - bringing difficult foreign plays to the Dublin, stage, putting two new Irish plays into the mix, exploring serious cultural and political questions - Bedrock has established itself as a real force in Irish theatre. It has also, incidentally, established The Mint as an exciting space that must be retained for the theatre even after the Project moves back to Temple Bar. To do less than acknowledge such an achievement, would be cruelly ungrateful.
