Theatre: To educate or entertain?

Two new plays offer contrasting answers to what theatre is all about, says Colin Murphy

Mother Teresa is Dead. Project Arts Centre www.project.ie until 26 August

Hedy Lamaar and the Easter rising, Bewley's Cafe Theatre, www.bewleyscafetheatre.com, until 9 September

In the Project Arts Centre's studio space, Mother Teresa is Dead, two hours of passionate arguments on global injustice and gender politics, is ambitious, issue-driven, overlong and overwritten.

While at Bewley's Café Theatre, Hedy Lamarr and the Easter Rising is a lunchtime's worth of gentle entertainment.

Mother Teresa is Dead is a recent English play by Helen Edmundson. It follows a strong run of issue-driven drama over the last year or so, which has seen slavery, racism, terrorism, genocide, political repression and asylum all dealt with on the Irish stage.

These are plays that have dual objectives: to make drama, and to make an argument. And they are often more persuasive at the latter. This doesn't take away from the value of staging them, but it does make them rather harder work to sit through.

A decent editor would cut Mother Teresa is Dead by a third and the result would be more credible and less hard work. Yet, for what it is, it is quite successful.

The play gives us a quartet of earnest and struggling characters: a young Irish mum who has abandoned her family in Dublin to find herself in India; the husband who comes after her; the young Indian charity worker who befriends her; and the older Irish expatriate who takes her in when it all goes wrong.

The Indian charity worker wants the Irish mum to stay and work in his children's shelter. The husband thinks the Indian just wants to get into his wife's knickers. The mum has fled to India to escape the vicious cycle of materialism she feels caught in. The older expat, a woman, has earlier sought a spiritual retreat in India, but has herself become enraptured with the young Indian.

It's all a bit of a mess, and in sorting it out they get to have lengthy arguments about the roles of gender, charity, rights, spirituality and capitalism. The play's weakness lies in an intellectual ambition that its simple narrative can't sustain. But its strength lies in the playwright's refusal to make the issues simplistic or predictable – all of the characters are ultimately manipulative and reckless in their own ways, and the more believable for that. And the performances are first rate.

Michael James Ford's short one-man play, Hedy Lamarr and the Easter Rising, on the other hand, is simply content to make drama – something short, witty, and which will go agreeably with your Bewley's soup. Ford has excavated the remains of a forgotten and idiosyncratic figure from Irish history, John Loder – the man who, as a British soldier in Dublin in 1916, took the surrender from Patrick Pearse, subsequently became a Hollywood actor, and married the screen idol Hedy Lamarr.

It was an extraordinary life, though one blighted by a sense of failure. Ford writes, and plays, John Loder as a decent chap wandering through a life unintentionally unconventional. His stiff upper lip means that this is not a play of overt passion; the peripatetic nature of Loder's life means it is not a play of overt politics. But Ford has a light and affectionate touch with his character, and the result is a lunchtime in gently compelling company.