Paul Mercier’s Homeland, the first play commissioned by new Abbey Theatre director Fiach MacConghail, opened recently in Dublin.
It is a busy time for MacConghail. He is also co-producer of the movie adaptation of Mercier’s Studs, which will receive a world premiere at the forthcoming Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
But it is Homeland which is attracting the greater attention at the moment. For MacConghail there is something ironic about this. Twenty years ago, in his first hotpress interview, he insisted he wouldn’t touch the national theatre “with a 20 foot pole!”
Today, he can laugh at his previous obstinacy. “Yeah, I remember saying that. But the Abbey is not a building, the Abbey is a state of mind,” says MacConghail.
“The Abbey in 2006 is not the same Abbey it was in 1986,” he says. “It was a different world, then. There was a different relationship between the national theatre and the independent fringe theatre.”
Of course, this isn’t to say that, somewhere out there, there isn’t an angry young theatre director who would refuse to have anything to do with the Abbey, he says.
Foremost among MacConghail’s ambitions is the fostering of closer links between the Abbey and independent theatre.
For his part, Mercier believes that Homeland, which updates the legend to Tir Na Nog to Celtic Tiger Ireland and deals with issues such as immigration and rezoning, will strike a contentious note.
With its barbed criticism of contemporary Ireland, MacConghail acknowledges the play isn’t breaking new ground. That doesn’t mean the message isn’t worth repeating however.
“The discussion about social inequality is ongoing and no doubt that discussion is going to move up a gear in the next couple of years before the next general election,” he says.
“Yet there already is a sense that there is social inequality and people are particularly aware of that in the context of the Celtic Tiger. They also are acutely aware of the corruption in society and the two-tiered system.”
Mercier adds: “All I’m trying to do is express and explore such themes in my own kind of theatrical form. In a way that is deeply personal to me and I hope just might strike a new chord. But that only happens when you put things on stage in a certain way.”
He is commandeering the legend of Oisin returning from the land of the young to Ireland to tell a familiar story in a new way, he says. “I’m using that myth totally because I think it is very potent and because I feel it can carry the theme of what I’ve written about in Homeland. I certainly think society needs that mythical dimension to the tale. ”
The playwright says it is not his intention to preach. “But there is a moral tale in [Homeland] and that is something I hope people do take in when they go see the play.”