Schoolrooms have often been used as dramatic metaphors. But Pat McCabe's play, based on his 1995 novel and seen at last year's Dublin theatre festival, owes nothing to Alan Bennett. Its chief source is Tadeuz Kantor's Polish experimental piece, The Dead Class, in which the characters lug their desks around like lifelong burdens. In this rich, if confusing work, McCabe suggests Irish classrooms have similar symbolic weight.
McCabe's method is to contrast two teachers of different generations in a Dublin academy. The senior man, Raphael Bell, is a product of the Cork working class and represents discipline, order, Catholicism and classicism. His younger colleague, Malachy Dudgeon, stands for the emerging Ireland of sexual liberty, secularism and personal freedom. The difference between them is neatly embodied in their musical tastes. Where Raphael loves John McCormack, Malachy leans towards Van Morrison. But, whatever the generational divide, both men are driven towards madness.
You need to be Irish to understand all the resonances of McCabe's hectic, kaleidoscopic play. But what comes across clearly is that the schoolroom is a symbol of the decay of the twin Irish gods of nationalism and religion and of the new rampant individualism. While the play has a strong elegiac quality, it is also mordantly funny. There's a wonderful moment when Raphael plucks up courage to propose to his girlfriend by shyly asking her: "How would you like to be buried with my people?" And Malachy's dad abruptly announces his suicide by telling his son: "I'll be off to the lake to go and toss myself in." In McCabe's blackly comic vision of modern Ireland, death is a constant factor.
Even if the play sometimes resembles an overstuffed suitcase, it is given a vividly surreal production by Padraic McIntyre for the Livin' Dred Theatre Company. In Marie Kearns's decrepit schoolroom set, door panels suddenly open up to reveal intruding hands and faces and a window flies apart to disclose a choric beggarman.
Amid the frenzied action, Sean Campion is a magnetic centre of attention as Raphael, slowly disintegrating along with his world of inherited Irish tradition. Malachy's downfall is less compelling, but Nick Lee still lends the younger man a similar sense of inexorable decline. Carrie Crowley, Gemma Reeves and Peter Daly revolve around the two teachers like orbiting satellites and dazzle with their quick-changing panache. It is an evening that leaves one alternately bewitched and bewildered, but it is a stunning piece of staging and owes infinitely more to Polish experimentalism than native Irish realism.
