A fabulous beast on stage

Michael Keegan Dolan's The Bull is funny, horrifying, frustrating and entirely necessary for Irish theatre, says Colin Murphy

Michael Keegan Dolan's new play, The Story of the Bull, is great theatre. Dolan is doing something new, something different. Not earth-shaking, not even particularly radical; as with all innovations, in retrospect it seems so simple. But there is nobody else doing work like this – or, at least, nobody doing it with success – and Irish theatre needs it.

After a Dublin Fringe Festival beleagured with "dance theatre" – shows which largely seemed to follow the maxim, "why use one word when five minutes of movement will do?" – Dolan gives us a piece of clear, crisp storytelling that happens to have some dance in it. Blink and you'd miss it; the moments of anything approximating "contemporary dance" are sparse and brief. But his performers are steeped in dance – which is just another way of saying they can move – and whatever they do, they do with precision, and often beauty, so that the twists and turns of this story manifest themselves not just in the language, but also in the tension in their bodies. There are many fights and much violence in it, as well as a lot of sex, and each such coupling is an opportunity for Dolan's performers to confront each other with visceral physicality.

This is the story of the Táin Bó Cuailnge (the Cattle Raid of Cooley), which tells of how Medb of Connaught led an army into Ulster to claim a great bull, only to be met by the young Cuchulain, defending Ulster single-handedly as the province's men were afflicted by a debilitating curse.

In Michael Keegan Dolan's rendition, nouveau-riche Maeve Fogarty (played with panache by Olwen Fouere) ventures into the midlands in pursuit of a bull owned by the Cullen family. Her initial attempts to coax and bribe it from them are stonewalled, and her enterprise turns violent. One by one, the Cullens and Maeve's assistants are killed off, until Maeve is left facing the youngest, Conor Cullen.

In the way of the old Irish sagas, The Bull wanders and ruminates, it explores subplots and minor characters, it delves into detail apparently unnecessary to the plot. The sagas were not created for the stage, but for a night's storytelling, and are closer to today's soap operas than to plays. Though this is the source of its inventiveness, it is also the source of its chief weakness. Condensed into two hours, despite the energy, imagination and commitment with which it is staged, The Bull appears inchoate, uneven, indulgent.

Many of its scenes could be sketches from a comic revue – a Beyond the Fringe lampooning rural Ireland. Time flows unevenly. An apparently insignificant detail or scene is elaborately, lovingly crafted, while great swathes of time, and character development, are skipped over at the apparent whim of the narrator. Motifs and minor characters are introduced, milked for their whimsical, comic potential and discarded. Aristotle wouldn't like it.

For two hours, without an interval, it occasionally gets to be hard going. At moments, you long to grab Dolan by the scruff of the neck and tell him to get on with his job – making great theatre – and stop messing around. To stop following the saga down its storytelling cul de sacs and instead craft a coherent stage play from it. To reign in his company's physical creativity and his visual imagination just enough to service the play more closely and tautly. At moments. Mostly, though, you just sit back and marvel, and laugh, and relish the vim, the imagination, the dynamism of what's on stage.

Dolan knows what he's doing; this isn't Hamlet, and he's not seeking our pity for his tragic heroes. They are doomed, but rather than be moved by watching them rail against their fate, we get to smirk as they plunge headlong towards it. As Maeve and Conor Cullen sink further and further into the violent cycle that entraps them, there is nothing for us to feel sympathy or empathy for, nothing to hook us emotionally. Instead, we marvel at the horrors they bestow upon each other, driven by pride, lust, land, loyalty and simple fury.

It is delightful, and horrifying; voyeuristically thrilling, and vulgar; funny, and offensive. Dolan has found a seam of base humanity, and he mines it for all it's worth. This is all we are, he's saying: isolated, maddened people for whom sex and violence are simple functions, not moral constructs.

With Dolan's mischevious eye for gory detail, the beauty and simple invention of the staging, a wittily written script perfectly delivered by narrator Conor Lovett and the compulsive watchability of his characters as they transgress and tansgress and transgress, this makes for great theatre: entertaining, provocative, energising.

Yet, absent of any real emotional content, of any moral dimension, of any attempt by his characters to rail against their fate, instead of simply blindly charging towards it, The Bull remains, ironcially, an aloof work. It is a celebration of base humanity without suggesting that there is something more. Suffused in the raw passions that animate us – anger, lust, pride – it remains aloof from those emotions that drive great drama: love, fear, loss, joy.

Is it fair to call this a weakness? Or is that to cleave too narrowly to an Aristotelian notion of tragedy? Either way, and despite its indulgence, this is a great production – but the suspicion remains, that if Michael Keegan Dolan were to do this with a text that was moving, that was tragic, rather than epic, he could make something greater.