CULTURE SHOCK:IF IT WERE possible to formulate the play that Ireland most needs to see right now, it would be a genetically engineered offspring of two of the big shows in the second week of Dublin Theatre Festival: Lucy Prebble's Enron, at the Gaiety, and Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman,at the Abbey.
Each play has obvious points of contact with the world of Seanie and Fingers and with the mess they've made of the country. Enronrecounts the rise and fall (in 2001) of a company whose fantasy economics foreshadowed the larger crash in global-finance capitalism. John Gabriel Borkmanunfolds in the aftermath of a banking scandal, its title character still holding on to the delusions of omnipotence that made him believe he could do what he wanted with other people's money.
It's pretty obvious why both plays are being staged here now. Theatre tends to operate retrospectively and metaphorically. Enronopened at Chichester Festival Theatre last year, eight years after the culmination of the events it narrates. Prebble's interest is clearly not so much in the Enron scandal itself as in the way, with a bit of distance, the story reveals the mad logic of deregulation, derivatives and professional collusion with fraud. Equally, Ibsen's late, somewhat awkward drama is being revived with such splendour because Borkman's craziness resonates with contemporary events.
As ways of connecting through theatre with those events, however, the two shows are mirror images of each other's strengths and weakness. Enronis strong on narrative drive and direct explication of the madness of markets. It is weak on those other things you might hope for in a work of art: poetry, meaning, humanity. John Gabriel Borkman, on the other hand, is all poetry and tortured humanity. It struggles with narrative and coherence, and the contemporary context makes it decidedly, if fascinatingly, odd.
Perhaps it is a sign of middle age, but Enronseems to me rather less innovative than the accolades and awards it has gathered might suggest. It is pretty much a high-tech version of the kind of political theatre that was being performed with a much more low-rent aesthetic by companies like 7:84 in the 1970s. There is nothing wrong with that: theatre can be didactic just as much as it can be poetic, and the technology is entirely appropriate to the subject. Prebble, moreover, does a superb job of explaining mysteries like hedge funds, mark-to-market accounting and the faith-based nature of stock markets. Interestingly, the most memorable image is also the simplest: the old-fashioned metaphor of Chinese boxes.
At times, though, Rupert Goold's ambitious and energetic production is both technically and imaginatively underpowered. If you're going to do all-singing, all-dancing drama, it helps if the music and choreography have more power than is generally the case here. And some of the visual metaphors reminded me of 1970s agitprop at its patronising worst – the "raptor" accounting vehicles Enron developed to keep its debts off the books are represented by – guess what – actors wearing dinosaur heads. Ultimately, Enronis more effective as education than as art.
John Gabriel Borkmanis a very different kind of theatrical proposition but not quite in the way you might expect. Enronis high-tech, cutting-edge and contemporary. Borkman is a late-19th-century drama by the master of naturalism that opens in a high bourgeois drawing room. The packaging makes it look like a slick star vehicle: a stellar cast with Alan Rickman as Borkman and Fiona Shaw and Lindsay Duncan as the sisters who were rivals for his love; fabulous sets by Tom Pye; and sumptuous costumes by Joan Bergin. It should be safe as houses.
And it is indeed safe as houses – in the Irish property boom. To their enormous credit, both Frank McGuinness in his version of the text and James Macdonald in his production refuse to ignore the obvious problem of doing the play now. Knowing what we know about the stupidity, vanity and incompetence of the masters of the financial universe, how can we take a corrupt banker seriously as a tragic protagonist? And how do you deal with the fact that we simply can’t do so? Macdonald’s solution is to distance us from the play, to adopt an almost Brechtian lack of sympathy for any of the characters. The tone of the production owes much less to naturalism and tragedy than to melodrama and farce. It is often very funny, always self-consciously theatrical and therefore intriguingly peculiar.
The centre of this approach is, naturally enough, Rickman’s Borkman. In a highly mannered but brilliantly modulated performance, Rickman makes the banker into a monstrous paragon of egotism, utterly incapable of seeing anything or anyone else in terms other than their effects on himself. Ibsen saw this condition as tragic; Rickman embodies it as a wild absurdity. This works wonderfully for most of the play but becomes odd towards the end, when we are supposed to care about Borkman’s fate. This extreme solipsism is shared by Shaw’s and Duncan’s characters, making the play a gallery of psychotic selfishness. All three fight for control of Borkman’s son Erhart: Macdonald, at the grotesque height of the melodrama in the third act, makes the fight literal, with Rickman wrestling the boy to the floor.
Even more bravely, the production carries through this examination to its logical conclusion: each of the main characters seems to exist in almost complete isolation from the others. The three literally act differently, Shaw all detail and nervous energy, Duncan all stillness and presence, Rickman enclosed within his own rhythms of speech and movement. A play that is notable for its technical unity (Ibsen manages to unfold the four acts in less than real time) has its surface shattered into distinct pieces.
The effect is not completely at odds with the play, which is a mix of naturalism and the earlier poetry of Peer Gynt,but it makes it far stranger than the original text suggests. It would have been easier – and commercially more comfortable – to have presented it as a star-studded classic. It is instead something more courageous and more interesting: an enactment of the grotesquery of power, greed and obsession.
