'A Riotous Wake For The Celtic Tiger'

dublin | arts and media | feature Sunday September 19, 2004 21:11 by ec

Spacecraft's New Farce: Bleeding the System: A Preview

‘It’s all there - conception, birth, work, coke, sex, bloody murder, earthquakes, plumbing, dollars, dead landlords, drunkenness and death’

Spacecraft’s previous production to ‘Bleeding the System’ - ‘The Hypothetical Death of an Activist’ - was a localised to Dublin re-write of Italian Playwright Dario Fo’s celebrated farce ‘The Accidental Death of an Anarchist’. It was set in a City Centre Garda Station in the immediate aftermath of the events of 6th May 2002 when a Reclaim the Streets protest had been greeted by a spectacular police riot on Dame Street. The police riot was filmed and subsequently widely broadcast on TV to a stunned Nation. The play was at the time, and still remains, the sole theatrical representation and affirmation of the existence of a growing political culture in Ireland which identifies with the radically internationalist counter-globalisation movement.

The Fo re-write by Les Shine and Felix Ford set a high bar for Spacecraft for future productions as it was that rare beast in the theatre – a knockabout farce with satirical teeth which had the audience in no uncertain terms rolling in the aisles. It was obvious to anyone who saw it that the Spacecraft gang had hit on a novel and productive update of a surreal and satirical mode in Irish Comedy rooted in the glory days of ‘Halls Pictorial Weekly’ when broad and topical mockery of the institutions of Irish Life was not only tolerated but expected. The only question at the time was how Spacecraft would manage to live up to the expectations generated by such a successful and timely re-write of an iconic piece of theatre.

Well they have managed it in spades in the form of an original farce by Fergal Leddy set this time around May 2004 as the country gears up for a referendum on citizenship and awaits its tabloid guaranteed (seconded by McDowell) destruction at the combined hands of the WOMBLES and ‘hordes’ of pregnant immigrant mothers. I had the pleasure of catching ‘Bleeding the System’ at the final night of it’s trial run at the Convergence Festival.

It opens with the recounting of an incident witnessed by the dramatist on Dame Street in Dublin in April 2003 in the course of which a Uniformed Guard without further comment snatched a bunch of roses from an immigrant street trader and drove off. Fergal wrote an account of his attemts to lodge a complaint with the Gardai about the incident for Indymedia Ireland at the time. The play, with this symptomatic incident as a starting point, takes the form of a rapid-fire fictional recounting of the onward progress of the bunch of flowers, the Flowerseller and the Garda and is set against the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger reaching towards some kind of grim societal climax of empty, property obsessed, misanthropic and insular grandiosity.

These elements orbit and eventually spectacularly collide around Bean - the unlikely anti-hero of Bleeding the System. He is a failed impotent Irish Businessman of dubious repute with Nietzschean delusions of an imminent rebirth into grandeur, omnipotence and riches. . . .

His myriad troubles at the outset of the play include a lack of readies due to the attentions of the Revenue Commissioners, an inability to provide his stinking rich Daddy in Law with an heir, the shame of his home having been turned into a B&B by his newly politicised and frustrated wife and last but not least the indignity of his not having acquired the social cachet that in his golfing circles is assured by a headline slot in the box at the tribunals running at Dublin Castle. His only friend and golfing companion happens to be the self-same Garda who robbed the flowers and who supplements his income with a spot of landlording on the side.

Bean decides in despair to flush himself and his broken dreams down the toilet but is stopped in his tracks by a phonecall promising fiscal salvation from an American Businessman in town looking for an agent in Ireland to help him carry through a massive capital investment programme. This character, with his ‘a la W’ swagger, is in Ireland supposedly looking for an outlet for his Iraq War (II) dividends and this brought to my mind the surrealler than fiction news that Halliburton, through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, is seeking contracts in Ireland to build bypasses at present. ‘Bleeding the System’ gradually but inexorably accelerates into a breathless rollercoaster of a farce when the American’s arrival chez Bean coincides with that of a radical feminist journalist (corporate malfeasance beat) who is booked into the B&B for the duration of the Mayday Protests.

A burst radiator in the phantasmagorical bathroom of the residence brings the ex-flowerselling but now plumbing Eastern European asylum-seeker into this unlikely (and unstable) mix. His subversive presence together with a couple of drinks for Bean’s nymphomaniacal while drunk wife pushes the up to then flawlessly fawltytowersesque realism of the plot into hyperspeed and right over the top towards an extended surrealistic tour de force dénouement which had even the actors on stage helplessly weeping with laughter and struggling to get their lines out.

It’s all there in the closing half hour of this riotous wake for the Celtic Tiger – conception, birth, work, coke, sex, bloody murder, earthquakes, plumbing, dollars, dead landlords, drunkenness and death. And yes – before you ask – the bent flower robbing copper does get his just deserts. This play should be running in the Abbey. It’s not but you can check it out when it runs in the SFX as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival from 21st – 26th September. Then you can go tell Ben Barnes about it. It just might be the thing to save his bacon.