No Drama at the Abbey

The Abbey revives an Irish 'classic' by Lennox Robinson for the Christmas season. Colin Murphy wonders why

It is ironic that Drama at Inish was playing at the Abbey the week that the final bail-out of the theatre was announced by Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue.

Still awaiting a decision on its relocation, and apparently housed in a fatally sick building, he granted the theatre €500,000 for refurbishment and €3.4 million to bring the theatre back into the black, granting the new director, his former advisor Fiach MacConghail, a financial clean slate.

Ironic, because this is precisely the kind of production that undermines the argument for a state-funded national theatre.

Drama at Inish is a 70-year old wellish-made play by Lennox Robinson, a staple of the 20th century Abbey but a playwright who is now, on this evidence, justifiably neglected. Not every Irish play once produced in the Abbey is canonical, just as much of today's work will not survive a decade. Drama at Inish's dramatic value is chiefly as a historical curiosity, and a main-stage production for the Christmas season appears an extravagent way to re-examine it.

Though "re-examine" is not the appropriate term: there is little evidence of this being re-examined at all. Jim Nolan appears to have taken the script directly from the archives and, unquestioning, played it straight for the contemporary audience. Satire that could have been raw for even today's audience comes off as quaint, and much of the humour is simply lost.

The plot, though, is wonderful. A repertory theatre company arrives on the island of Inish for the summer season. The island is a typically quiet place, a bit boring. The company plays modern European classics – Ibsen, Chekov, Strindberg. They pack out the small theatre, with the islanders returning nightly to see the full repertory. But the plays force them to re-examine their lives – to ask the question, why are we here? – and, as they do, chaos breaks out. There is an epidemic of attempted murders and suicides, as the island descends en masse into a Chekovian melancholy.

At the time, this must have given the Abbey a marvellous opportunity for pastiche of the work that the competition at the newly opened Gate theatre was concentrating on bringing to Dublin. Robert O'Mahoney and Kate O'Toole, as the actor couple who lead the repertory, play this perfectly, hitting the right pitch between comic exaggeration and almost-credible actorly sentiment. The idea is very funny, and there are laugh-out-loud moments in the script – two of the best of these belong to Judith Roddy and Michael FitzGerald, who each have scenes (deliberately) upstaging the "actors" themselves.

There is satire in this, too. The chaos that the theatre company provokes proves that there were "lots of scandals going on in the town that nobody knew about except the parties themselves"; a town that once thought itself boring is revealed to itself as home to seething tensions and anguished emotions. The play is prescient in its depiction of the "underside" of Irish society and of the distress that is caused when this is revealed; the glibness with which the town returns to its bland tranquility once the theatre company leave could be bitingly satirical.

So there are ideas, and potential, there. But linking them all together is a script as pedestrian as the blandest soap opera. It stretches on and on, through innumberable banal exchanges and jokes lost to history, puntuated by the occasional good one-liner or, failing that, by a noisy entrance or exit. The dash of satire there is too dilute to have any bite, and the play is left to succeed or fail entirely on the quality of its comedy. It is not that it is unfunny so much as it is resolutely inconsequential.

Director Jim Nolan appears to have played it straight, possibly thinking that aiming for the comedy in the play was the only way to make it sufficiently entertaining. That doesn't, however, explain the final scene. I can't quite describe it. The last loose ends were being tied up, in the manner of romantic comedies. I had been lulled to a state of near equanimity by the gentle conclusion to the proceedings, and was anticipating one last, telling quip before the lights would fade or the curtain fall.

That last quip never came, or not that I noticed. Instead, the entire cast suddenly, and jarringly, danced back on stage, cheering and grinning, for a quick musical number. The back rows of the theatre were jerked awake, and a confused clap-along started, as if by parents who'd guiltily caught themselves napping at the panto. The cast, faces encased in smiles, danced with abandon for a couple of minutes, then ran off. The lights dimmed, the hesitant clap-along became a brief applause, the cast returned for a very efficient curtain call, and I ran.

?More Drama at Inish continues at the Abbery Theatre until 31 December. Booking on 01 878 7222. www.abbeytheatre.ie