Powerfully in contention for the silliest comments made about art in the last year are Ian McEwan’s on opera. The thrust of his argument is that operas are not enough like Ian McEwan novels: “I don’t like fairies and dwarfs cavorting around the stage… and I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the lack of psychological realism in opera”. Thus McEwan does away with Mozart’s Magic Flute, perhaps in favour of a McEwan-style Realist Flute. But the questions for McEwan are: who said anybody was supposed to really believe it in the first place? And even more: is it nevertheless not actually truer than your “heritage London” reasonableness?
One hour off from such reasonableness is at the Peacock in Wayne Jordan’s production of Pierre Marivaux’s La Dispute, nicely translated by Neil Bartlett. The play does in the end happily throw away the crutches of authority (the only form of authority that art ever has) on the question that it purports to settle: is it men or women who are first to be unfaithful in love? But even if it hadn’t I wouldn’t have believed it, and wouldn’t have minded either. The play spends most of its time confirming prejudices, tickling them, and adding a few we didn’t know about. The most outrageous of these, which is frankly weird to see on liberal Dublin stages, is the proposition, crucial to the working of the play, that black people are unattractive. The two black characters, Mesrou (played by Nicholas Beveney) and Cerise (Aïcha Kossoko) have raised the four young lovers who are going to settle the question, each separately, to the age of sixteen without any suggestion of desire coming into their minds.
But now they are to be released into an artificial Eden, to meet another young one of the opposite sex, and the same race. The two couples encounter each other, with ample opportunities for unfaithfulness in place of a snake. The rampant and very tactile fancying that takes place is great to see. The couple we see first, Eglé (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) and Azor (Barry Ward) instantly electrify each other with their touch. Throughout, there are limber dances of desire, and poses for the young poses. It puts one in mind of the definition of art of Marivaux’s fellow Frenchman Stendhal: “une promesse de bonheur” (a promise of happiness).
All this exciting unreasonableness makes up for conceptual silliness of the play. It is the girls, of course, who are jealous and vain, and the guys who just want to be friends, with the girls getting in the way. The play shaves another few threads off the dividing cord between laddishness and homoeroticism. The best line in this vein is when Azor, having met Mersin (Simon Boyle), explains to Eglé, “We just want to go off together… to talk about you”. This probably owes more to translation and sitcom than to Marivaux’s 18th century world. But it fits into that sophisticated world that liked shallowly (in the best sense) to laugh at innocents, especially jealous and vain innocents.
And the Eden is presided over by The Prince (Bosco Hogan), whose father planned the experiment, and is for the most of the play watching what’s going on like the audience. His wife Hermiane (Karen Ardiff) doesn’t like what she sees, and calls a halt to the whole thing. The Prince simply says to Mesrou and Cerise, “Follow the instructions I have made for them”. This is the one worrying element in an otherwise knockabout play. Granted, the experiment is no longer amusing, but what happens to the unwitting actors of this play?