A great, but tragic, Irish leader struggles with his fate. He is the foremost Irishman of his day, though he divides the country. He is confronted by treachery, and distracted by beautiful women. And as chaos threatens to consume his world, he replies… with a song.

Plays dealing with Irish politicians are rare, and Irish musicals are rarer still. So it’s a striking coincidence that not one, but two leading Irish historical figures are currently to be found on the Dublin stage, singing.

Tom Mac Intyre’s ‘Only an Apple’ (at the Peacock Theatre) tells a twisted tale of political excess, centred on a pale imitation of Charles Haughey. It is not actually a musical (though it is difficult to say what precisely it is), but at its theatrical heart is an outré and quite bizarre showtune.

Bryan Flynn’s ‘Michael Collins’, on the other hand (at the Olympia), is most decidedly a musical: it is an audacious attempt to tell one of the defining stories of modern Ireland in two hours of choral excess.

The coincidence is superficial, for these two plays are as different as can be. But they have in common one striking characteristic, too often lacking on the Irish stage: ambition.

We are too quick to treat ambition as hubris; to lament it as excess and to applaud its downfall. The ambition shown by Mac Intyre (and his director, Selina Cartmell) and by Flynn is badly needed. And yet, both productions do show signs of hubris.

Mac Intyre’s play is an extraordinary melting pot of theatrical styles and tropes. Its initial moments suggest an Irish version of ‘Yes Minister’, with a growling Taoiseach telling his press secretary that a conspiring backbencher “has to be shafted”. And then Grace O’Malley and Elizabeth I arrive into the Taoiseach’s Palladian drawing room. Figments of his imagination? Ghosts? Or some kind of nefarious set-up?

Whatever their nature, these two libidinous historical luminaries proceed to provoke both confusion and rampant coitus in the Taoiseach’s household. By the end of the first act, the order of the household, and the form of the play, has disintegrated so much that it is almost unsurprising when the entire cast bursts into a showtune called ‘Pussy drives the train’.

Having flirted with satire, fantasy and burlesque, Mac Intyre now rolls out the farce. With two rapidly opening and closing doors on either side of the stage, and an atmosphere that is both coy and carnal, ‘Only an Apple’ gives way to ‘Carry on Charlie’. But, apart from the fine comic touch of Steve Blount as the rural deputy, McPhrunty, the effect is more bemusing than funny.

By this stage, it seems clear that the play is about Enoch Powell’s adage, that all political lives end in failure. The Taoiseach’s two visitors from the past are both sirens and Fates; they are symbolic both of his delusions of grandeur and of his fears of failure and mortality. For the finale, Mac Intyre strips away the excesses of earlier, and leaves Don Wycherley’s Taoiseach to deliver a rambling – but riveting – apologia of sorts.

‘Only an Apple’ boasts moments of Selina Cartmell’s trademark extravagant stagecraft, and suggests at times that Tom Mac Intyre has sharp things to say about politics, power and the theatre itself. But the overwhelming impression is of a play where nobody thought to say stop. Director of the Abbey Fiach Mac Conghail has spoken often about his desire to use the Abbey’s stages to hold a mirror up to the nation; but Mac Intyre’s is a fairground mirror, and it’s impossible to discern what its distorted reflection says.

The image captured in Bryan Flynn’s mirror, on the other hand, has a technicolour tint. ‘Michael Collins’ offers such an uncomplicated, unquestioning view of the struggle for Irish freedom that this, a new musical, feels like it must be fifty years old. Curiously, that is testament both to its weakness and its success. Flynn has done something that has not successfully (or at all) been done before: he has set the story of independence to music. That music is badly garbled in the Olympia and, to my taste, rather bland, but the resounding ovation that greets the final chorus, “Fly the flag of freedom high”, suggests that there is a hunger for it – a hunger for an uncomplicated, sentimental story of heroic self-sacrifice at the foundation of the State.

Flynn’s hubris lies not in writing ‘Michael Collins’, but in opting to direct it too. Deciding to sing the story of Michael Collins is a bold move, but it is not enough for him; he needs a framing device, and appropriates WB Yeats’s nationalist play, ‘Cathleen Ní Houlihan’, as a backdrop to his own story; and then he takes the figure of Cathleen and has her ghost through his own play as well. It is a trope too far; less would have been more, as with Mac Intyre.

Neither ‘Only An Apple’ nor ‘Michael Collins’ is great theatre. But they are bold experiments, and provocative in their way. Mac Intyre provoked me to think of the constraints that convention too often imposes on theatrical vision; Flynn provoked me to think anew of the men that fought for, and over, Irish independence. Both plays could have been better shepherded to the stage; that they got there, though, is a success of sorts.

Written for my weekly column in the Irish Independent’s Saturday ‘Review’, May 2009