Reviewed: The System, Parts I & II

The System, Parts I & II Project Arts Centre

Twenty years ago, the great opposites of modern European theatre were Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht. Beckett's isolated individuals in existential despair seemed poles apart from Brecht's cool, dynamic social critiques. The contrast was rather too neat: there is a political edge to Beckett, and Brecht's Mother Courage is also an anatomy of the absurd. But it did make some sense. In the world of Beckett's characters, change is impossible; in that of Brecht's it is inevitable. There's a hell of a difference.

Now, though, we are all post-modernists, and those opposing poles of modernist theatre have all but merged. The great interest of The System, an ongoing series of plays by the young German writer and director Falk Richter, is the clarity with which it illustrates this merger. Richter's position is a knowingly self-contradictory one - that of a political playwright in a world where change seems impossible. He is a Beckettian with Brechtian desires.

The universe of The System, the first two parts of which are given a lucidly impressive Irish premiere by Rachel West, is Beckett's entropic cosmos, in which identity dissolves into amnesia, language loses its meaning and becomes a mere cry to fill up the silence, and humanity itself seems like a dying anomaly on an indifferent planet. But Richter sees these conditions not as an existential imperative, but as a political product, the consequences of a media-saturated, high-tech, market-driven globalisation.

None of the elements of The System are original. The stream-of-consciousness monologues come from Beckett, the dislocated protagonists from Kafka, the self-disgust from TS Eliot, the alienation effects and political satire from Brecht. Much even of the language is deliberately borrowed - from trendy media-speak in the first play, Electronic City, and from hysterical management-speak in the second, Under Ice.

Richter's distinctive contribution is in the peculiar combinations and confrontations of familiar elements, and the ingenious mixture of forms, from monologue to video (superbly realised here by Martin Rottenkolber), from stand-up comedy to absurdist ballet, and from direct satire to a strange, fragmentary poetry.

The problem with dislocation, amnesia and alienation, of course, is that they are essentially static states, and, once stated, they allow little elaboration. There are times when Richter takes half an hour to say what Talking Heads said in three minutes in Once in a Lifetime. Times, too, when, James Simmons's magisterial reply to Eliot's The Hollow Men comes to mind: "That man's not hollow, he's a mate of mine." Electronic City, in which a TV production team directs the lives of a man and a woman trapped in the no-man's land of international airports and identikit hotels, largely escapes these strictures.

But Under Ice, a satire on the management consultants who want to reduce the world to their own dead formulae, does tend to labour its point, reproducing the very conditions it criticises.

Tedium is, however, kept at bay by two factors. One is Richter's bone-dry wit, beautifully captured in translations by Marlene J Norst and David Tushingham that are so articulate that they don't sound like translations at all. Richter is best when he is funniest and there are times when his humour, both satiric (the arrogant media language of the TV team in Electronic City) and absurdist (the childhood memories of the ageing businessman in Under Ice) is scintillating.

The other factor is the quality of West's production, which is designed with acute precision by Andrew Clancy and Suzanne Cave, and performed with terrific skill by an outstanding cast. In Electronic City, Emma McIvor's astonishing fluency as the dominant member of the TV team and Orla Fitzgerald's wonderful command of different registers as she acts out her assigned role are utterly compelling.

Adam Fergus's rendition of the glib consultant in Under Ice is also memorable for the way it gradually pushes realism into preposterousness. And West's deft control of the plays' constant shifts of style and mood maintains a focus that is as sharp as it is unblinking.

Until Jan 14

Fintan O'Toole