The timing of playwright and journalist Colin Murphy’s piece of ‘pop up’ political theatre, produced by Fishamble, is impeccable. Guaranteed!, Murphy’s well-blended mix of documentary and dramatisation exploring the events leading up the Irish bank guarantee in 2008, is touring the Dublin suburbs just as the ‘Anglo tapes’ have surfaced, recordings of telephone conversations that reveal the executives of Anglo Irish Bank to be no better than a bunch of privileged, arrogant American frat boys. Like the Anglo tapes, Murphy’s deeply researched drama confirms our worst fears – and then some: that the people at the wheel of Ireland’s crashing economy were either willfully ignorant of the damage they were inflicting or just didn’t give a flying fig.
The production behaves like the theatrical version of some sort of covert counter-propaganda operation. It’s lean, mean and seemingly ready to be parachuted into wherever it’s needed at a moment’s notice. The setting (no designer is credited) is sparse, made up of a few chairs and a desk, with projections guiding us through the ever-quickening episodes counting down to the fateful night of the bank guarantee. The simplicity of the piece is also due to the fact that it appears to still be in the process of being honed. However, the workshop nature of the play doesn’t at all detract from its impact.
The cracking cast of five, made up of Peter Daly, Peter Hanly, Darragh Kelly, Mark Lambert and Caitríona Ní Mhurchú, each hold scripts in hand, and you’d think this would serve as a distraction to both actors and audience. Not so. The up-front presence of scripts as documents of record are a useful reminder that what we are hearing and seeing is either culled from or inspired by the public record. The raw, unpolished theatricality of the piece actually invites the audience in, assuring them that what they are partaking in is as much a conversation as a presentation. This impulse is carried through as well, as Murphy and Fishamble have made it a point to engage with the audience and a set of invited speakers in post-show discussions at each venue attended.
The highly skilled cast leaps in out of playing the infamous public figures who defined the period of boom and bust in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It’s a cavalcade of benighted personalities from Irish business and politics: Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen, Brian Lenihan, Sean Fitzpatrick and David Drumm make appearances, and at times garner responses from the audience that might resemble subdued reactions to panto characters. It’s to the credit of the cast and Murphy that these figures are treated, for the most part, as three-dimensional human beings rather than satiric caricatures. This comes through particularly well in the latter half of the play, where Conall Morrison’s sharp direction makes the desperate back and forth between the government and the banking sector on the night of the bank guarantee riveting to watch. It’s also a testament to Murphy’s abilities as a journalist and dramatist to turn the technocratic mumbo-jumbo of policymakers into accessible, red-blooded theatrical language.
As the play continues to develop (and it seems this stripped down production is just the start of much more polished project), there are issues the makers may want to address in terms of deepening the performative potential of the production. The brief period of development and rehearsal seems to have left the actors as carriers of text rather than active participants in the debate Murphy’s play conducts. This lack of a sense of ownership over the material on the actors’ part creates the danger that they might appear merely as mouthpieces for Murphy’s argument, rather than as citizens who, like the audience they play to, have been directly affected by the political decisions they portray. Additionally, Caitríona Ní Mhurchú’s presence as the lone female performer in an ensemble that plays a host of male roles cries out to be commented on in some way. A blind eye should not be turned to the role gender plays in expressions of political and economic power in Ireland, and Ní Mhurchú’s gendered casting offers up the opportunity to address this issue in provocative ways.
Still, even in its stripped down form, Guaranteed! poses unsettling questions about how Ireland ended up where it did, and whether or not its citizens are once again willing to turn a blind eye to collusions between the State and the banks.
Jesse Weaver