In a triple bill of one-act plays for the Abbey's centenary celebrations, George Fitzmaurice's The Dandy Dolls is the gate-crasher. Revisiting the early years of the National Theatre with plays by two of its seminal figures, Yeats (Purgatory) and Synge (Riders to the Sea), director Conall Morrison has avoided an overly respectful homage to the Irish Revival by opening with Fitzmaurice's surreal work, and infusing it with crazed energy.
The nightmarish fable of a doll-maker and his bitter wife, a venal priest and greedy neighbours was too much for Yeats, who rejected the play. Written in 1913, it didn't receive its first Abbey production until 1969. With exhilarating choreographed sequences, superb lighting, fairytale costumes and riveting performances from Derbhle Crotty, Ned Dennehy and Eamon Morrissey, this production illuminates a neglected but influential work, whose language echoes Synge's lyricism but gives it a much darker tinge.
Synge's language is refracted again in Chun Na Farraige Síos, Tomás Ó Flaithearta's Irish translation of Riders to the Sea. Hearing the lines in Irish is an unsettling experience: it's a return to the language on which Synge's lilting cadences are based, but to a text that didn't previously exist; Morrison and Ó Flaithearta's linguistic archaeology is creative rather than philological.
The play is distilled to its simplest elements, deepening its mythic resonance. Beautifully visualised, with black-clad figures waiting to mourn the fishermen who are "gone to the sea", it has an unforgettable starkness. While the formality of Yeats's verse drama Purgatory gets lost somewhere, this triple bill is a reminder of the importance not just of the Abbey's past, but of its present and future.
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