The other theatre in Dublin

You enter The New Theatre through a bookshop with a coffee and wine bar along its back wall. As your eyes adjust to the dimmer light, you see a  theatre with a 66-seat house, great lighting, matching seats, a large booth and a stage the size of a bus stop. This has got to be one of the sweetest set-ups anywhere: browse for books, buy a coffee and take your seat for the show. This complex, if such a compact space can be called that, is in Temple Bar, the once tawdry but now too-hip-for-thou area of Dublin between the River Liffey and the Grafton Street shopping mecca. Temple Bar is a magnet for clubbers every night of the week.

            This arrangement—bookstore/coffee bar/theatre—was evidently originally funded by a businessman who had communist leanings, as improbable as that sounds. The bookshop—Connolly’s—did have a strong political section, but it also had fiction, mystery, essays, and, like every Irish bookstore I’ve ever entered, a good selection of books on Irish history. This is one of the very good aspects of Irish culture: any bookstore you walk into, no matter how modest, will have its Irish section. I don’t know whether this is a nod to tourism, but I suspect it has at least as much to do with pride of country as it does with sales to visitors.

            Una and I were at the New Theatre to see a rarely performed play by Brendan Behan. He is an Irish playwright and novelist whose reputation for drunken carousing nearly overpowered his legacy as a writer, in the tradition of so many other hard-living artists here. The play was The Quare Fellow, first produced at an equally small and experimental theatre in Dublin in 1954. One reason the play is not performed more is the size of the cast, which even Broadway would find daunting. As the director’s notes say, there are 28 speaking roles and a hanging. The director, if that’s who was responsible, has wisely cut the roles to 13, still an enormous cast, particularly for such a small stage.

            The Quare Fellow takes place in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison in the 1950s, on the eve of a hanging. The prisoner to be hanged—the quare fellow—sings to us from behind the set; we only see the light from his cell, never him. The tension of the hanging is palpable among the prisoners. The characters are unsurprising—the gruff old convict with a heart of gold, the newbie who tries to hang himself, the tender youth trying to act rough, the guard who has seen too much—but the play gets under your skin as you are drawn to the fate of this faceless man whose Irish songs reverberate across the theatre. The actors (except for the hangman) are good, all with the standard bios (theatre credits, films, BBC4); one has been acting for less than two years, but the rest have solid credentials. The singer, whose name is Jer O’Leary is the only one with any serious resumé: his deep voice and the craggy face he reveals at the curtain call have been in every Irish film ever made in his lifetime, it would appear from his bio.

            On the way home Una and I daydream about running a place like that, with branches in Ireland and California, as if combining three fast-disappearing institutions under one roof could somehow make them all viable.