It is right and fitting that he should be invited to direct Wilde at the Abbey, and An Ideal Husband is an intriguing choice. It’s not Wilde’s best work, but nevertheless it still makes for an entertaining evening.

The first act, a party set at the home of the Chilterns, was a delight – we entered a superbly staged world of a decadent society, the women resplendent in high fashion, the players displaying almost a Commedia dell’Arte physicality, jousting in a heightened Berkoff-esque wordplay that seemed faultless.

However, the darker themes of the play soon become apparent: blackmail, insider dealing, political hypocrisy, honour and character, love and betrayal, redemption and forgiveness. They are too personal for lightweight comedy; or, perhaps, Wilde’s unhappy end reminds us that they are, in truth, no laughing matter. As a result, the flippancy and sparkling irreverence of the play’s opening act is hard to follow.

The set-up is for Sir Robert Chiltern, a rising star of the political firmament, to fall, brought down by the scheming Mrs Cheveley, who can prove his entire career and wealth was based on selling a government secret.

Derbhle Crotty is outstanding as the blackmailer, seductive, sinister and passionately self-serving. Lord Goring, an old lover of hers and a friend of the Chilterns, is, on the surface, a determined, frivolous dandy. He proves to be a man of real substance and character when tested, and becomes a formidable match for Mrs Cheveley, and a reliable friend in need, the catalyst to enable the Chilterns to forgive each other their human weaknesses, and move on.

Lord Goring: All I know, Gertrude, is that it takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love.

Mark O’Halloran is as perfect a Lord Goring as one could imagine. He brings a sense of being a “wise old soul” to the part, as well as impeccable comic timing, and at times he reminded me of one of my favourite English actors, Leonard Rossiter.

The costumes were sumptuous, and the lighting in particular was excellent (by Chris Davey). I was confused by one aspect of the production, however: the set. Although set and costumes were both the work of the same person, Bartlett’s long-time collaborator Rae Smith, they did not feel like they were in the same production at all. There was no expense spared in the costumes; they were stunning in every detail. The set, however, looked like it would be serviceable enough in a fit-up company in the fifties, on a regional tour; painted plywood boards everywhere, a sort of designer shabbiness, with a post-modern self-consciousness; we see behind the sets to the bare walls and doors, we see the braces and stage-weights, the chandelier has an ugly electric plug showing half way up the chain. The red velvet curtain that falls between acts is bedraggled and torn, but only covers half the wide Abbey stage. I could easily imagine this production working very well in a severe black box, with no pretence at period detail; on the other hand, a decent attempt at a subdued but quality set that allowed the actors to shine would have done no harm at all. But this was neither fish nor fowl, and was distracting to me. Perhaps I expect more from the National Theatre; yet I am usually more than happy to support a production that confounds a certain bourgeois expectation that classic period plays should have gorgeous sets. The sets should never be the point in Wilde; perhaps I am just old-school enough to believe they shouldn’t attract my attention at all.

However, this production is well worth a visit; well-paced, witty, snappy, and passionate. I’ve rarely heard such uniformly crisp, crystalline English accents on an Irish stage, and even though I saw the show in preview, the ensemble acting was as tight as a drum. The dialogue between Sir Robert and his wife, when they are torn apart by the prospect of ruin, is as relevant now as it was then; the corrosive effects of idealization in a marriage, indeed any relationship, and what happens when someone falls off the pedestal on which their partner has placed them. But I was curiously unmoved, as their love was tested; perhaps it’s because in the cynical 21st Century, it’s hard to accept undiluted moral outrage that a politician has a guilty secret. Neither of the Chilterns is easy to warm to, but I don’t believe that is the fault of the actors. Perhaps, in their exchanges, Wilde was safely playing out the many conversations, imagined and real, he had with his loyal wife, Constance, over his own secret life, which would have been incendiary and heartrending. Had the real issues of Wilde’s marriage been addressed in this play, it would have been electrifying. But of course that would have been impossible at the time, so in a sense we are reading between the lines.

Wilde was being blackmailed himself, at the time he wrote this play. The storm clouds were gathering, and he was arrested for gross indecency during its first run. By sailing so close to the wind in his emotional subject matter, but distancing himself from the real matter in hand, perhaps he lost perspective. It is purportedly a comedy, in that it plays around with appearances, illusions and reality, but, at its heart, it is a neutered tragedy. Perhaps a sense of superstition prevented him from cataloguing his hero’s downfall. Maybe he was refusing to tempt fate by presaging his own destruction. Life imitates art; perhaps he believed, or hoped against hope, that by creating a story with a happy ending he could avert the inevitable, and keep the circling wolves from his door. As Wilde would have been very well aware, wishful thinking, as played out in the eventual happy resolution of An Ideal Husband, is antithetical to great art. That Chiltern doesn’t fall, that his corruption does not get exposed, is a happy ending of sorts; but his last words are insecure, self-doubting. It is neither a comic nor tragic story. It is human, but not as dramatic as real life.

The tense exchanges between former lovers Lord Goring and Mrs Cheveley are richly satisfying; and there are elements of pure farce in the final scenes which are timed to perfection. Goring, happily, finds his playmate in the end, in the chirpy Mabel Chiltern, (played delightfully by Aoibheann O’Hara), and they all, seemingly, live happily ever after; a bittersweet backdrop to the real tragedy that befell Wilde, which he must have known was coming. I would give anything to have been in the audience watching this play in 1895, the night the news had been broken that the playwright had been arrested.

All in all, an interesting play played with relish by an excellent cast; like a beautifully accomplished portrait of an imperfect subject, showing its best qualities. Pity about the cheap frame.

Aristotle

In Oscar Wilde’s case, his downfall came about when, at the peak of his career, he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel. Defence council Edward Carson discovered a long line of rent boys willing to testify, and so the case collapsed, and criminal charges quickly followed. Wilde knew the dangerous power those mostly working class youths posed to him; he described being with them as “feasting with panthers”. When Wilde heard that it was Carson, an old Trinity rival, who was to oppose him, he remarked “No doubt he will pursue his case with all the added bitterness of an old friend”.

Twenty one years later, Roger Casement was hanged for treason. His own diaries were found and circulated by British officials in order to discredit him; scribblings salaciously listing his many sexual exploits with men, especially youths he met out cruising at night in Europe and abroad. Appeals by his many supporters for clemency were, as a result, ignored.

A hero’s tragic flaw is one which is self-inflicted. The poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh, with the same taste for post-pubescent youths as Casement and Wilde, (which makes them pederasts, not paedophiles) welcomes a film crew into his life in Nepal, and the resulting damning documentary, Fairytale of Kathmandu, has become defamatory evidence that, at the time of writing, may or may not be used in a court of law against him.

You will have to wait till March 11th to see the documentary itself, when RTÉ broadcasts it. It’s a honey trap of a film; it starts off lyrical and soft, elegiac for the most part, a lilting portrayal of a popular charismatic figure and the obvious heartfelt love that surrounds him in Kathmandu. In the months that she is there with him, however, the director, his friend and neighbour Neasa Ní Chianán, also records the frequent visits to his hotel by young men, who often stay the night, and become his friend for a few days or a few weeks, and sometimes longer. We hear some boys talking and joking about the many, many young friends he has, laughing about the numbers. Unaccountably, the director doesn’t ask Ó Searcaigh about them at the time, nor talk directly to the youths herself. It wasn’t until the cynical, jaded hotel manager talked about Western exploitation that her “eyes were opened”. (One has to remember that this same hotelier had been happy to have Ó Searcaigh as a regular guest for years.) Then, and only after Ó Searcaigh had left Kathmandu, she puts the word out, decides to interview some of the youths (all 16 or over) with a counsellor. They tell tales of confusion, hurt feelings, shame about feeling that they had been “bought”, and anger. Which is, after all, exactly what she was looking for – the Nepalese are obliging to Westerners, whom they see as gods. Most of all, what comes across from them are stories of lost innocence.

Innocence is the theme of the film, a collective Fall from Eden. Although Ní Chianán portrays herself as having been innocent, only realising, with shame, that the subject of her biography had been busy having a sex life throughout her stay in Nepal, right in front of her eyes, it is not mentioned that she had already spent a winter filming him for a previous documentary, The Poet, The Shopkeeper and the Babu (2006). If I am to believe that her statements in the film are authentic, and not disingenuous, then she is guilty of letting her own freely-admitted hero-worship of Ó Searcaigh get in the way of what this documentary should have been: a piercing and fearless exploration of the man’s voracious sexual appetites, and how he squares it with his exquisitely sensitive nature. However, perhaps because she was nursing her second child during the shoot, and feeling very maternal and protective, which she freely admits, she avoided grasping the thorny issue of his sexual exploits until he had left the country. So, crucially, he is not present to hear his accusers, to respond, to account for himself.

This is not to say that it is right that he should leave so many ex-lovers unhappy, nor that he apparently bedded some of them under false pretences; but I am not convinced that an adolescent’s loss of innocence (over the age of consent) is necessarily the sin that Ní Chianán makes it out to be. It is a mother’s desire that children are protected for as long as possible from hurt and pain – it is only natural. But it is also important to recognise that, at some stage, that one’s children will make mistakes, will have sex, which is often disturbing and confusing. They will grow up. Boys become men. To interpret the experience of a teenager having sex with an older man for the first time as de facto abuse, and to see him only as a victim, is potentially disempowering, shaming, and even castrating. Seeing herself as a rescuer, setting up a trust fund for Ó Searcaigh’s“victims” so they can receive psychosexual counselling is, in my professional opinion, as a working psychotherapist, inappropriate and potentially unhelpful. The hurt that Ní Chianán discovered in the boys she interviewed was relational, in that they didn’t like their experiences with Ó Searcaigh. Their complaints should have been brought directly to the man himself, then and there, so we, the audience, could understand for ourselves the interpersonal dynamics, could judge for ourselves what had happened between them. There is no evidence to suggest that he would have refused this exploration; indeed, perhaps, unconsciously, it is what he was inviting, for we men can insulate ourselves from women’s perspectives on sexuality and relationships, often to our detriment. Instead, his erstwhile friend returns to Ireland and ambushes him with her accusations, and his shocked, defensive, blustering response is what ends the film. This lack of natural justice is why I am so angry with the film makers.

It took them two winters in Nepal to finally address the elephant in the room: the man who put cruising into the Irish language (ag crúsáil) was cruising, all the time. It’s there in the documentary, you can see him strutting through the streets of Kathmandu, late at night, his boys following behind him, cock of the walk. Some of the youths in his life are timid and shy – although it is impossible to know whether the pained awkwardness we see in one youth in particular, being treated to ice cream, is the result of being with Ó Searcaigh or having a Western film crew focussed on his every facial expression. Lest anyone think that we Westerners are bringing our evil ways to the innocent East, there are cruising areas in Kathmandu, and one, a small cruising park in the centre of the city, has between 100-200 guys visiting every night. There are trained outreach workers to spread the safe sex message, and a drop-in centre for gay people – with a staff of 23. There is even an annual gay pride march.

Desire makes fools of us all, and when it expresses itself outside of a relationship of equal status and common interests, which is what many people like to think sex should be about, especially women, then it brings its own contradictions, pleasures and pains. Ní Chianán really doesn’t understand this kind of sex, but, most unprofessionally, didn’t seem to want to understand. The first lad in the documentary who spends the night with Ó Searcaigh, a seventeen-year-old called Ram, seems at ease with him the next day and Ní Chianán’s voice-over seems mystified as to why this might be: “they were worlds apart”. Her curiosity should have been expressed to the poet, then and there. But then, we’d have had a very different kind of film, adult, intelligent and non-exploitative, instead of a pained but nevertheless vindictive response to her own disappointment, that her hero has feet of clay. In Fairytale of Kathmandu, we have a man innocent enough to believe that his friend would not become his nemesis, threaten him with criminal proceedings using the film as evidence, and refuse to supply him with a copy of the film so he could defend himself properly once it had begun being shown and marketed, when his very openness about matters sexual would have meant that he could have explained himself to his accusers on film, long before it had got to that stage. Ó Searcaigh’s hamartia, or tragic flaw, is that he was too trusting.

Apparently, Ní Chianán had an unfilmed conversation with the poet after she had completed the film, and she asked him to consider therapy, to reform himself. According to her, they parted on good terms, with a hug. His subsequent refusal to reform was interpreted by her as evidence that he was an unapologetic recidivist child abuser, to judge by the way she writes and speaks about him now. The answer may be far more complex and uncomfortable: this man, like many men and indeed some women, has a form of sexuality that is transgressive, and seeks to push the limits of desire as far as he can. At its root may indeed be a broken heart, as Ní Chianán alludes to in the film, and a desire to avoid the painful feelings of being dependent, of being possessive and obsessive. But it may also be driven by delight in pleasure, a love of beauty and gentleness, and a lack of shame about sex. He certainly needs to address the issues raised in the film about exploitation, and come to terms with the implications of being a rich Westerner in a poor country, and how that is a perilous path. He most definitely needs to face his accusers. But it occurred to me, as I was watching a few of the lads later on in the film, who were laughing genially and expressively at his every word, but not really getting his literary references, that they were humouring the old codger. Exploitation can be a two-way street, especially when it comes to sex.

“It is the Hera archetype that makes us see Priapus as distorted as we do” says the writer James Hillman. What he’s saying is that the more we look at relationships and sex from a matronly, family-orientated perspective, the more grotesque, threatening and repellent the male sex drive seems. This film is so biassed. Indeed, it is worse, it is prejudicial and punitive. Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s side of the story, in all its uncomfortable complexity, has yet to be told.

This article was originally published in Hot Press. See also the young men’s own story here. I discussed the documentary on The Kiosk with Nadine O’Regan on Phantom FM on Saturday 15th March. An edited version of this article was reproduced in Village magazine, April 2008.

Romeo and Juliet pitched at the bebo generation is a risky proposition. Ever since Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film for the e generation, theatrical productions which aim to give this teen tragedy a contemporary feel, and reach new, younger audiences, have a hard act to follow. But, given the power of this play, it should survive most attempts to give it a make-over, if the text is respected, and the actors aren’t daunted by the language. Too often in Irish theatre, Shakespeare productions suffer because of a clumsiness or self-consciousness with the verse, that interferes with the fluidity of the story-telling.

Happily, in this production by Jason Byrne, (the first time the Abbey has ever staged this play), the actors are, in the main, in effortless command of the narrative. In particular, the stellar Gemma Reeves brought a moving simplicity and heartache to the role of Juliet, in a way that caught me by the throat. Her mother, Anita Reeves, playing the nurse, was also powerfully affecting, funny and human. As for Romeo, Aaron Monaghan helped make the famous balcony scene with Juliet one of the most gripping I’ve ever seen – risky, funny, and full of the adrenaline-rush of adolescent infatuation. I’m not sure, however, that his leggy laddy physicality was quite right for Romeo. But then, that part is one of the most difficult parts to play in Shakespeare (I know, I’ve played it) because there’s a spinelessness, a haplessness to his personality, as evidenced when he changes his mooning affections from Rosaline to Juliet in a conscienceless flash. In his scenes with the Friar Laurence, his immaturity and sheer gormlessness become apparent, almost to an irritating degree. Frank McCusker, as the friar, gave the most satisfying performance of all for me, in a way, because it was so surprisingly menacing, worldly and dark.

The dance sequence, in which Romeo catches first sight of Juliet, was just a bit too rich and self-consciously contemporary for me stylistically, with Amy Winehouse providing the backing track. But I loved the overall look of the piece – the design ideas that influenced designer Jon Bausor are available to look at on the show’s bebo page – and the stunningly stormy set piece at the end of Act I, with superb lighting by Paul Keogan, was filmic and exciting.

The naturalness of the speaking style in this production extended to allowing actors to use their own accents, which worked largely successfully, but contributed to a disjointed loss of place at times. And I felt a little bit uneasy at a couple of the scenes where there is a collective weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over yet another death; sometimes, grief restrained is more affecting.

However, it’s Juliet who carries the play, and Gemma Reeves’ truly harrowing distress at the end left me wet-faced and shaken, as if I’d never seen this timeless tragedy before. And that, for me, is the mark a truly contemporary production; Amy Winehouse, and all that jazz, is but icing on the cake.

It was with high hopes that I went to see Woman and Scarecrow at the Peacock, especially given the mouth-watering cast that included Olwen Fouéré, Barbara Brennan and Bríd Ní Neachtain. Knowing the play was addressing death, I was confident that given Marina’s rich knowledge of myth and loss, I would find myself challenged and disturbed.

Right from the start, one has to cope with the accent, the wogious midlands drone, flat, unrelenting, as dreary as bogland. It alienates, deliberately – and I don’t mean that this Jackeen doesn’t understand or can’t relate to it, I mean that each character is tied by phonetics into a specific geographical area, the bogs east of the Shannon, and by colloquiallisms into a specific time, an Ireland that is long gone. But, because the style is not natural realism, we know this isn’t a story about quirky Tullamore folk from the fifties. Audiences relax when they see and hear the familiar, but the tension created by the contrived nature of Carr’s world can serve to heighten awareness and catch one by surprise with powerful emotions, offering a rich wry perspective on life. When I saw By the Bog of Cats in the West End, with Holly Hunter, I found myself shaken to the core, blasted by a fierce grief, despite having been constantly irritated by Hunter’s inability to master the accent, and, in retrospect, the directorial insistence that it was that specific Offaly brogue or bust. I attributed the power of the piece to the script, and also to Hunter’s emotional commitment to the piece. And it was also wonderfully funny.

Visually, this production is stunning; the set design is by Conor Murphy. It opens with a home movie of the young Woman, a girl in a red coat playing on the seashore, projected onto a scrim; then, as it grinds open, sounding like the gates of Hell, she dances across the stage, one of the most beautiful openings of any show I’ve seen in a long time. There is a wonky bed set high on an indoor snowdrift, and lying langorously in it, there’s the Woman, Olwen Fouéré, dying of spite, bickering with her alter-ego/guardian angel/dream lover/Scarecrow, Barbara Brennan. Death is waiting in the wardrobe, growling, “making a bracelet out of infant ankle bones”. And immediately, we’re right in it. This is quintessential Carr, clever, unapologetic, caustic, pugilistic, absurd, bitter, merciless. We have to figure it all out for ourselves. We must banish all memories of Tom Murphy’s Bailegangáire – an impossible task, really, for Siobhán McKenna’s swansong as the dying bedridden Mommo is still etched in my heart after over twenty years.

Woman and Scarecrow is inhabited by unashamedly one-note characters, as if tightly bound into corsets of wrought iron, squeezing out all sentimentality, maturity, and hope. The message is that life is brutalizing, rancorous and toxic. Compassion is absent. Happiness is baffling, self-awareness brings no relief from twisted complexes. Self-examination is forensic, pathological, in the detached sense of an autopsy report; in Woman and Scarecrow, there is no enthusiasm or life force or joie-de-vivre waiting to be undammed, no redemptive cathartic release is possible, to go pulsing through the heart after the knotted tourniquet of hate is untied. In the Woman’s arteries, after a life spent using up everything she had giving everyone else what they wanted, there is only venom. These characters are already dead, ghosts of themselves. But even the word ghost is grossly inappropriate – ghost comes from the word for spirit, life, breath. Looking for life? Move along. There’s nothing to see here.

Woman asks at one stage “When did it all turn to tragedy, Scarecrow? When did I stop lampooning the world, and why?” In some ways this is Carr speaking – she has given up the ghost in this play, and, casting her cold eye on life, it’s as if she has immersed it in liquid nitrogen with her gaze, and shattered the resulting brittle shapes with an icepick. Woman and Scarecrow is cadaverous. Beckett, in comparison, had a deep rich humour that enabled us to mine existential depths with his characters. Carr’s humour, however, is in her sophisticated wordplay, a barrage of pithy ironic complaints, that gives us no room to catch our breath. By the time death comes in the end, (for of course death comes in the end) and Woman and her Scarecrow/Ghost Mother arrange themselves for us in a posed and dismaying still life portrait, my heart was as cold as marble.

This is an analysis of a failed marriage, a self-sacrificial suffocated woman and a philandering husband, a marriage that was a façade for procreation. A study of the gangrenous effects of a girl losing a mother, herself self-loathing and bitter, too early in life. A portrait of a stifling repressed community. It is a reflection on lives unlived. It is played with bravery and total commitment by all the cast, but the absence of subtext in each character poses severe challenges for even the most talented of actors. In particular, I was struck by Barbara Brennan’s compelling physicality, agile and angular, and Olwen Fouéré’s astonishing capacity to bare all, emotionally as well as physically, always impresses.

The one moment of aching loss that I felt in the evening is not in the script – director Selina Cartmell had Barbara Brennan move hauntingly across the stage, as the Woman is describing to the redoubtable Auntie Ah (Bríd Ní Neachtain) her last memory of her long-dead mother, and in that moment something shifted for me. But it was fleeting, over in an instant, a hint of what might have been.

I left the theatre as bitterly disappointed as the Woman herself, with the confusing relief of leaving a morgue, albeit a strangely beautiful one. Not wanting to say goodbye, because I still hoped in some way that, if I could stay long enough, I would see a flicker of life in the corpse, some flash of recognition, some insight about life that would enrich or comfort me. Like the Woman herself, I had no such luck.

I reviewed this production with Pavel Barter of the Sunday Times on Nadine O’Regan’s show The Kiosk on Phantom FM.

Played winningly by Andrew Macklin, whom I last saw shine in The Irish Curse, the central character Seán starts his journey in McDonalds in Dublin airport, with his much-loathed parents and brother. He is caustic, restless, and bitter: about them, about Ireland, about life itself, the bitterness of adolescent idealism. “Disappointment makes strangers of the ones you love” he says, ruefully. But, he’s starting a new life for himself; he’s young enough to believe the answers lie outside in the world.

Delivered in a fluid, natural, and energetic style, Seán addresses us directly, and takes us along with him on his journey with plenty of humour, a fine eye for the quirky detail, and a cutting charm. To his initial dismay, the very first guy he meets in Bangkok is Irish, a charismatic Dalkey character, Karl “with a K”, (“Finglas? Never heard of it”) who shows him the nightlife of “Bangers”. At the end of the first night, a very drunken Seán makes a clumsy play for him, which is rebutted, and the messy confusion of Seán’s unrequited love/lust for Karl serves to be the key relational dynamic of the piece.

Throughout the play, scornful references to the hokey trash parochialism of the Irish abound. Calling home, using Eircom Reverse Charges, he at first bristles at the operator’s (typically Irish) intrusive comments about how he should keep in touch with his Mammy; but when his Mammy turns out to be a woman not really interested in her son’s life, but more interested in the salacious fantasies that Psychics Online are selling her about him, it becomes apparent what fuels the massive chip on his shoulder. As a sweet counterpoint, the Eircom operator, Anne, to whom Seán keeps on getting through when making his calls, becomes one of his few confidantes, and he finds himself getting more comfort from her dotty encouraging chats than he does from his parents.

Broke, Seán finds himself staying with Karl in Sydney, and ends up working for him as an escort. When his first trick is blowing him, Seán weeps, looking out the window at a small boat on Sydney harbour; when he’s paid, the punter adds as an afterthought: “Oh, the vulnerability thing was a big turn-on”. He soon gets into it, in the experimental way that a lot of young lads do, enchanted at the prospect of making such “easy” money, and soon he’s heavily involved with the Sydney gay scene, drinking and drugging. His contempt for the other Irish lads there is telling, most memorably for the richly comic and (immediately familiar) barman Darren, a queen from Tallaght, and, most cruelly, when he pours scorn on a young Irish kid with glasses, straight off the plane, who gauchely approaches him saying that he recognised him from the George. Seán is on the run from who he used to be, heading for a fall. He becomes harder and colder, and more and more alone.

Karl’s Unique Selling Point as a pimp is that he has Irish escorts, as popular in Sydney for sex as Irish workmen were in London early last century; even the trannie Tallulah calls herself Siobhán to punters who ask for an Irish “girl”. She may be Brazilian, but as Karl says, if they believe that she’s a woman, “believing she’s Irish isn’t that much of a stretch”. In the end, his unrequited love for Karl becomes too much to bear when Karl shags the vile Darren, and Seán breaks away from Karl’s orbit, who takes revenge in a most unpleasant way. But this isn’t a clichéd “prostitutes always come to a bad end” story-line, there was something about the way it was written that avoided an overt moralism in favour of a subtler, more believable truth.

This is a play that makes no claims to being particularly deep, and yet is written with an authenticity that feels richly autobiographical; in particular the fecklessness and cruelty of youth are portrayed starkly and with humour. Is it a mere “gay play”? No, it’s a modern Irish play, full of a bristling suspicion about all things Irish. Coming out is not an issue, being gay is not the issue. This is a young man’s search for cultural and personal identity, relationship, and values; it’s a play about being a young Irish man.

Update: I reviewed the show with Peter Crawley of the Irish Times on The Kiosk with Nadine O’Regan on Phantom FM on 15th September.

Renaissance humanism saw no distinction between science and the arts, and Leonardo da Vinci epitomises that confluence of approaches. Nowadays the scientific method seems to be anything but creative, although of course individual scientists can be exceptions to that rule; then, the natural world was to be experienced and reflected upon with both wonder and a sense of artistry. It was observational rather than theoretical, emphasizing the capacity (and, in Leonardo’s case, genius) of the human mind to observe, to pay attention, to notice. It prioritized human reason over blind faith, which, of course, was a challenge to the power of established religion, which held a monopoly of learning until then. But it wasn’t until Galileo Galilei, a hundred years later, with his assertion that the Sun was the centre of the solar system, that the split crystallised, and such a philosophy was deemed to be heretical. But unlike Leonardo’s contemporary, the philosopher and astrologer Marcilio Ficino, who saw the world around him imbued with soul, Leonardo’s approach was more scientific in the sense that we now understand the word. Although he was not interested in metaphysics, he nevertheless saw the planet as a living entity. His work was not burdened by any moral or philosophical theory, but came from an extraordinary devotion to looking at the world around him with fresh eyes, and wondering anew, a belief in his own “simple and pure experience.” This emphasis on scientific, meditative, empirical observation informed Leonardo’s work – his detailed, beautiful sketches of skulls for example, were masterpieces of anatomical precision, which enabled him to paint the human face with breathtaking accuracy. Art was applied to science, as flesh was added to bones.

Leonardo and Michelangelo were contemporaries, rivals, and had little time for each other. Michelangelo, 23 years his junior, was a tortured, melancholic man, obsessed with male beauty, with which he struggled all his life. One only has to see the statue of David to know what possessed him; a commission that Leonardo was first offered, but which Michelangelo fought hard for, and of course eventually won. But in his private life he was inelegant, abstemious, a misanthrope; he was arrogant and impossible to be around, and lived in squalid conditions. He was profoundly dissatisfied with himself. Unlike Leonardo, who revelled in the wonders of nature, Michelangelo’s moral, philosophical and emotional struggle was about overcoming what he perceived to be the limitations of flesh, of desire, of nature itself, seeking beauty anywhere else but in himself, in the real, in the ordinary. He managed to find love, seemingly in spite of himself, at the age of 57, when a young man, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, became his companion, until the artist’s death. This relationship prompted the first modern series of love poems from one man to another, and although at the time it was well known where his interests lay, Michelangelo’s nephew, when he published them after his death, changed the sex of the beloved to female.

Leonardo, on the contrary, was an elegant, graceful, lovable man, who seemed far more comfortable in his own skin. He was an inspiration for his teacher, Verrochio, who sculpted a bronze statue of David, widely thought to be of the young, beautiful Leonardo. He was tall and strong, generous and witty, commanding everyone’s affection. A sparkling conversationalist, he overcame the stigma of his illegitimate birth through the immediately apparent genius he displayed, despite not having a formal education. (One might speculate that this could have been key to his capacity to think in such an original way.) One endearing description of him says that as an old man he wore brightly coloured clothes, and his hair and beard long, against the style of the day, which immediately suggests a wise old hippy to me. He is on record saying that he found the notion of procreation “disgusting”, which seems a bit of a giveaway as to his sexual tastes. When he was 24, he was investigated by the Florentine “Officers of the Night”, a sinister court dedicated to eradicate sodomy and pederasty, that operated on a system of anonymous tip-offs. A seventeen-year-old model and rent-boy was accused of having performed favours to dozens of men, but only four were named, including Leonardo. After two months, charges were dropped, due to lack of evidence, and he remained under official scrutiny for many years afterwards. But this seems not to have dented Leonardo’s confidence or standing, although he was a private man when it came to his emotional life. In his late thirties, a boy nicknamed “Il Salaino” or “little devil”, entered his service as a servant and pupil. He was the model for the painting John the Baptist, and Leonardo drew many erotic paintings and sketches of him. In his fifties, Leonardo met the teenage Francesco Melzi, a young man of noble birth, and he became his lifelong companion, and favourite pupil. Melzi was with Leonardo when he died, in France. Melzi was Leonardo’s main heir, but Salaino, who did not accompany Leonardo to France for the final years of his life, was not forgotten; he was bequeathed the Mona Lisa, among other works.

Leonardo chastised Michelangelo for his exaggeration, one might say fetishization of the muscular male form; he advised him “You should not make all your muscles of the body too conspicuous…otherwise you will produce a sack of walnuts rather than a human figure.” One only has to look at images of six-pack masculinity in the twenty first century to see how prescient Michelangelo was, and yet I’m also drawn to speculate that their different approaches to life and love are as relevant now in understanding homosexuality as they ever were. Leonardo’s appreciation of beauty seems far more gentle, reverential, and imbued with a sense of joy in the ordinary, which can only have come from a deep inner sense of self-worth, an appreciation of the beauty within, which seems essentially humanist to me. The Mona Lisa seems to epitomise this. But Leonardo’s long litany of incompleted works seem to suggest a lack of confidence in his capacity to match the ideal in his mind, and so, perhaps, his nerve failed. The incapacity to complete things is often a mark of the narcissistically wounded, those who cannot bear to accept the ordinariness of producing work, to dare to achieve their enormous ambition and risk the inevitable disappointment when it proves not to be perfect. But he seems to have been very content with his life, and simply got on relentlessly with other projects, distracted constantly by the infinite wonders in the world. He journalled away privately, in notebooks such as the Codex Leicester, which is littered with shopping lists and little scribblings, in between profound meditations on the nature of the world. But he never published his work, eschewed the modern technology of printing, and wrote them in his famously mirror-image scrawl. Perhaps he was ashamed of his lack of formal learning, and didn’t think they were worthy of publication, or perhaps they are indeed proof of a pathological incapacity to complete things, ambition so large and unattainable it was crippling. But, however much he struggled internally, he kept it to himself, and got on with life as fully as he could. Michelangelo, on the other hand, dared to go beyond the natural and bring the ideal, the supernatural into form; but his sense of mismatch between the real and the ideal was tortuous for him to bear in real life, and his life was far less full of joy as a result.

Go see the Codex Leicester. Written between 1508 and 1510, it’s all about water – the workings of it, the mechanics of it, the symbolism of it, the wetness of it, the wonder of it. It’s the work of a hydraulic engineer and a philosopher. An artist and a scientist. There’s nothing else like it in the world. In it, he wondered afresh what caused the tides; was it the Earth breathing? Why did the moon reflected so brightly, was it covered in water? Where did rivers come from? He wondered if the world was hollow, threaded with courses of water, like veins, and that streams originated in mountains when these veins surfaced. In later life, he acknowledged that evaporation was the more likely cause, and he seemed unencumbered by any sense of ego or dogma to allow that change of belief. It was reason and experience, and his deep commitment to honouring that experience, that led him to that conclusion.

Ends August 12th – arrive at 10am and I’m sure you’ll still get in.

I reviewed this exhibition on Nadine O’Regan’s arts and entertainment show The Kiosk on Phantom FM.

The beginning met my sombre expectations, and I braced myself for a long, worthy night – although the superb new shape of the auditorium happily banished many dreary memories of feeling disconnected from the Abbey stage. A candle flickered into life in the dark, and we were faced with a grey abstract monolithic box, walls like slabs, and a huge overhanging girder, giving the space an oddly anachronistic industrial-era resonance. I doubt one could create a grimmer, more alienating set. The darkness receded under a horizontal shaft of cold white light, to reveal a body laid out in front of us like a corpse. Men and women, dressed in monochrome, brought a pale semblance of life to the stage, as they fretted about the inexplicably comatose girl, Betty Parris, and what she and her friends had been doing in the woods together the previous night, to leave her in such a state.

The bleakness had a strong effect on me – I found myself starved for colour, for warmth, for signs of vitality, for some relief. The girl’s father, Peter Hanly’s Reverend Parris, a neurotic ferret of a man overwhelmed by a terror of witchcraft rumours spreading, set the uneasy tone of the times for us: tense, volatile, unhappy. A queasy helplessness dominated, a lack of ability to be rational, grounded, sensible. We heard the story of Ann Putnam, a simple woman failing to make sense of the pain of having had so many of her babies die in her arms, and how she had arrived at her deeply flawed conclusions, that set in train the events that were to destroy so many people’s lives. Intense grief can warp our rationality, and once I had connected with that, through Marion O’Dwyer’s goosebump-raising performance, it began to be clear how magical thinking could flourish in that community, like a pale and sickly growth mushrooming overnight on rotting wood, and I knew that I was in for a gripping night of theatre.

The frenzied hysteria gathered momentum, and took on a frightening life of its own, and accusations of witchcraft flew around, ensnaring dozens in a cruel double-bind: confess to witchcraft and name others who have walked with the devil, or face a guilty charge, and death. The story became a simple but moving one: how each person struggled to retain their integrity in the face of irrational hate and fear. The Reverend John Hale (Peter Gowen), a witchcraft expert, called in to investigate the girls’ disturbing behaviour, led by the manipulative Abigail Williams (Ruth Negga), began by impressing with his calm rationality but he, too, got swept up in the storm, as the cases snowballed and went to trial. A farmer, John Proctor (Declan Conlon) and his wife Elizabeth (Cathy Belton), whose marriage was already frosty due to his having had an affair with Abigail, found that their private troubles became the business of the courts, as they too found themselves accused, and betrayed. Another farmer, the eccentric and wily Giles Corey (played to comic perfection by Tom Hickey), moved heaven and earth to obtain justice for his accused wife.

The simplicity and fluidity of this production by Patrick Mason (even though I saw it at first preview) was deeply impressive, because at every twist and turn the emotions of the characters were available to us and instantly understandable. The audience tittered with nerves when the young girls’ collective hysteria was at its most disturbing and creepily infectious. When we heard what unhappy fate befell Giles Corey in the last act, so much had he endeared himself to us, the effect was devastating. The strain in the Proctors’ marriage was achingly familiar, and the thaw in their relationship, when it finally came, brought tears to my eyes. John Proctor’s character, so flawed and passionate and heroic, is proof alone of Arthur Miller’s genius as a playwright, but Conlon and Belton’s superb performances brought immediacy and heart to his words.

This was ensemble acting at its best – clear as a bell, accessible, taut, generous, not a weak link in the chain, not a false note struck in the entire evening. It seemed utterly right that the accents were Irish, unforced, natural. By the end of the night, I found myself still hating the mechanical oppressiveness of the set, the accusing, interrogative, blinding light of each scene change, a hint to force us, perhaps, to question our own capacity to be swept away by hysteria. But I liked the fact that there was no reference to the 1950s and the McCarthy era; the psychological truth of The Crucible is timeless. However much as I disliked the greyness of the environment, the humanity of each character seemed even more palpable as a result. This production worked for me because it didn’t have an angle, the director had no high-concept axe to grind, his sole interest and achievement was to allow his gifted actors to tell a great story well. Sometimes we need the plainest of settings to enable us to see gems at their sparkling best.

Listen:

Update: I reviewed the show with Dave O’Mahoney of Film Ireland on The Kiosk with Nadine O’Regan on Phantom FM on 9th June, and we both gave this production 5 stars.

I’m looking forward to being in Dublin in May for the first time since the annual International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival started in 2004. There are some plays in the programme I have high hopes for.

Of particular interest to me will be Jack, The Lad, a rent boy’s journey of self-discovery, Dream Man which is set in the world of telephone sex lines, apollo /dionysus which promises to be an uninhibited fleshing out of ancient myths, The Irish Curse, which explores masculinity, The Boy Who Fell from the Roof from South Africa, and The Gaydar Diaries, a piece about the infamous dating site. (The co-founder of which, incidentally, Gary Frisch, somersaulted off his balcony and plunged to his death in February after taking too much ketamine; he’d been depressed and over-indulging in drugs since the death of his mother. His last reported word was “Wahey!”)

I reviewed the festival with Peter Crawley of The Irish Times, for Nadine O’Regan’s arts and entertainment show The Kiosk on Phantom FM.