Fresh

Colin Murphy on The Empress of India and The Exonerated

There are electric moments on stage during The Empress of India, Stuart Carolan's new play for Druid. Sean McGinley striding around his bedroom in the psychiatric hospital, throwing open doors, shouting, "God! Are you in there?" Aaron Monaghan and Sarah-Jane Drummey having sex on the hard floor of the Abbey stage – unusually for stage actors, sex without their clothes on. Monaghan in a church, threatening a statue of the Virgin – above him, a huge mirror protrudes from the rear wall of the stage, turning it into a vast, vaulted space.

The Empress of India is a play of great moments and big ideas, awkwardly knit together in a form that feels unfinished. Carolan's first play, Defender of the Faith, shared with this his grasp of credible dialogue, laced with liberal cursing. That play was a tightly-plotted, tautly-executed story: The Empress, by contrast, is sprawling and inchoate. It takes us from an Irish psychiatric hospital, to a church, to a New York apartment, to the London underground. The imagery is intense, the ideas provocative: the collapse of faith, the exploration of sexual identity, self-harm and suicide.

This is unashamedly a young man's play, a play of these times. Carolan captures the anger, confusion and desperation of his characters as they confront these ideas, but his strident and raw ambition overwhelms the drama of the piece. Yet it is exciting even still to see that ambition on the Abbey stage. And Carolan's ambition is matched by Sean McGinley's masterful performance as the raving yet beautifully coherent father.

Ambition is blatantly absent in The Exonerated, an off-Broadway hit that comes to the festival garlanded with awards and rapturous reviews. The authors, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, had a big idea: to travel the US interviewing former inmates on deathrow who had been exonerated. The production is made up of transcripts of interviews with six of these (culled from 40), leavened with excerpts from affidavits and transcripts from their court cases. Ten actors sit on stools across the front of the stage in front of stands carrying their scripts and read/recite, playing "the exonerated" and various ancillary characters. There is some soporific guitar music and occasional sound effects of gun shots. The stories of police and judicial corruption are presented with little art and have been edited to the extent that they contain little insight – apart from the glaring insight already signalled by the title of the piece – that mistakes are made in the administration of the death penalty. The Exonerated has travelled the world on the back of celebrity endorsement and demands little of its cast and nothing of its audience, other than that they agree with its politics.

This is sufficient to bring the audience, at the end, mostly to its feet. Moments later, the standing ovation is complete, as the audience is told that one of the performers has been performing her own story: Sonya Jacobs, who now lives in Ireland. An extraordinary feat for Sonya Jacobs, who has told a story of incredible resilience and courage. The fact of Sonya Jacobs' participation defies cynicism, but the manner in which this is 'revealed' invites it, and smacks of emotional manipulation by the producers.

There is a polemic at the heart of The Exonerated that is worthy, well researched and well crafted. Perhaps it is more reflective of our culture than of the worth of the play that this production has travelled so far largely on the strength of its combination of celebrity and 'real life' participation.

Neither of these have anything to do with drama. But, in this age, perhaps they have to do with good polemics.