Losing the plot

The Sanctuary Lamp
Arcola, until 3 April

Eigengrau
Bush, until 10 April

Furore fever still obsesses Irish playwrights. In Edwardian times there was nothing like a good old riot at the Abbey Theatre to get a new work established as a classic. Luvvie lore is replete with tales of mass walkouts and punch-ups at Dublin premières where the fisticuffs invariably end with the house being stormed by Sinn Fein while W.B. Yeats leaps on to the stage to appeal for calm and the Polish ambassador gets stabbed with a hat pin. Tom Murphy’s 1975 drama, The Sanctuary Lamp, seeks the rowdy affirmation of this tradition.

Murphy has read deeply and widely but he writes narrowly and superficially, and although he’s keen to revive some aspects of Attic dramaturgy — the static stage and the extended essay in poetic oratory — he forgets to include a plot or any kind of immediate action. His play is set in a church inhabited by a set of amazingly garrulous misfits who lounge among the pews indulging in diary-room monologues. Interesting characters are involved but they don’t appear on stage. Fascinating action features, too, but it all happened before the play started. We see nothing but a remembered tale of orgiastic prostitution told by an articulate drunkard declaiming from the pulpit while swigging altar wine and twirling a crucifix around his head. The sacrilegious effects are too calculated, too headline-hungry, to be convincing.

Under the author’s direction, the show is distinguished by a powerful display of rhetorical fireworks from Declan Conlon, playing the maverick fornicator, Francisco. And Ben Ormerod’s lighting offers a beautiful range of painterly effects. But the overall effect is bum-numbingly flat. The show recalls a forgotten era when a playwright could rely on reactionary theatre-goers to sit through two hours of provocation and emerge, bang on cue, to spit their fury into the notebook of a waiting reporter.