Since I'm off to New York for the next year, this column will not be published again until some time in late 1998. And as it has been appearing, with some breaks, for nearly a decade, I thought it might be worth reflecting on the changes in Irish theatre over that period before signing off for the moment. Looking back can be, for critics, a rather humbling experience, and the most obvious thing about the last decade is how much it has confounded expectations. In the late 1980s, two things seemed to me obvious about the future of Irish theatre. One was that it would gradually move away from text-based plays to a much more physical, visual and direct style of performance. The other was that, if this didn't happen, theatre would lose its central place in Irish culture, becoming increasingly marginal as television and film fulfilled a changing society's need for drama.
Neither of these predictions was entirely foolish, but both have proved, in essence, wrong. There is no doubt that Irish theatre now pays much more attention to what can be seen, rather than just heard, by its audience. Audiences are seldom asked now to sit through what are in essence animated radio plays.
Younger actors are, in general, more visually literate, more at ease with physical display. Directors are no longer people who stop the actors from bumping into each other, and the primary job of designers is no longer to make the stage look as much like a sitting room as possible. The days when an Irish play was five people sitting around a table may not be entirely gone, but they are clearly numbered.
Yet Irish theatre is, for all that, still overwhelmingly literary, in the simple sense that its great driving force is the production of new plays written, for the most part, by single authors sitting at home rather than theatrical collectives. Not merely has the death of the author in the Irish theatre been greatly exaggerated, but there is a new one born every month. A decade ago, the number of established professional Irish playwrights was tiny - Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, John B. Keane, Bernard Farrell, Tom MacIntyre, Frank McGuinness. Now, at least twice as many have a really substantial body of work.
Arguably, indeed, no decade in Irish theatre history has seen the emergence of as many really accomplished playwrights as the last one. If the work of Sebastian Barry, Marina Carr, Billy Roche, Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson alone is considered, it is clear that this has been an amazing period for Irish theatre writing. But there are, besides, at least another dozen new writers who have produced significant plays and seem likely to go on doing so.
This is not to say that the kind of plays being written is the same. On the contrary, the epic social drama of the 1960s onwards is no longer being written and the newer work is more odd, more angular, and more oblique. But it is also, if anything, more literary. Texts have become, in general, denser, more poetic, more highly wrought. As naturalism has waned, there has been a return to highly charged, self-consciously stylised language.
Strangely, Irish theatre now has more in common with the early years of the 20th century than with, say, the 1970s. If this has made it in one sense formally conservative, it has also given it an extraordinary sense of life.
And this upsurge of new writing relates to the second area in which my expectations of a decade ago have been confounded: theatre has not been shoved aside by television and film. This may be in part a negative phenomenon - the fact is, Irish films are still rather rare and one-off television plays are even rarer. But there is a more positive sense in which the attraction of theatre for a new generation has proved much more resilient than I had expected. Theatre audiences may be predominantly middle-aged, but that is hardly news to anyone. And the striking thing is that theatre is still a form that interests many outstanding young artists. The belated development of professional theatre schools has resulted not, as some feared, in a production-line for careerist clones, but in the emergence of an amazingly self-confident new generation of performers, at least some of who are good enough to rise to whatever challenges innovative directors are willing to give them. And what's important is that the new generation is not using theatre to hide from the problems of late 20th-century culture. In the work that, for instance, John Crowley has done with the Bickerstaffe company in Kilkenny, there is an obvious search for forms that will make sense of the broken narratives and discordant voices of an increasingly globalised world. Theatre is being used not as a playground for nostalgia but as a way of testing contemporary experience. So long as that is happening, it will hold its place in Irish culture.
So, I'm not sorry to have been wrong in some of the basic assumptions I made a decade ago. If you know what the experience is going to be like, theatre isn't worth going to. Without surprise, without strangeness, without, even, a degree of perversity, it's just show business. If it's not overturning expectations, theatre is just a bad habit. Here, for all its problems, it remains unpredictably alive.
