The theatre’s publicist didn’t know what was going on. “It’s kind of a secret,” she said, awkwardly. I turned up anyway. It was a night last July. The theatre was packed. The average age in the audience seemed about 25. A young woman stood up on the stage and took up a microphone. She told us all to stand up. I like a lot of different things in my theatre; participation is not one of them. The woman said she wanted to perform a luck ritual, and told us to turn around three times. With her American accent, audience manipulation and “empowerment” lingo, I felt I’d stumbled into a self-help rally. I thought about leaving.

More of that later. On a night in April, I walked into a pub in Baldoyle and was directed upstairs. A lone woman sat in the empty lounge. Gradually, as we talked, others drifted in. They stood by the bar and changed into costumes. A man stood absent-mindely in his y-fronts. A woman walked by in a Muslim chador. “No talking!” shouted the woman beside me. Somebody turned off the pub lights, and they started their play. A man playing Jesus made a speech, and his sandals squeaked. “Tony!” hissed the woman beside me. “I know, I know!” hissed back Jesus. I thought about leaving.

The American woman was Megan Riordan. She followed her luck ritual with some card dealing, and that led into a short, sharp, gutsy monologue about gambling, luck and her relationship with her father. The short monologue became a play in the Dublin Fringe Festival, ‘Luck’, which she funded in part with the $3,700 won in a weekend in Atlantic City. (Riordan is a part-time pro-gambler, who learned the trade from her father.) Her luck held: she won some rave reviews and earlier this year, her young company, Making Strange, won an Arts Council grant for its next production.

The Baldoyle woman was Moira Maguire. The play in the pub was her entry for this year’s All-Ireland Drama Festival. Moira’s group, Estuary Players, won last year’s festival with a classic, straight play, Arther Miller’s ‘The Price’; this year, she wanted to do something different. She stumbled upon a three-hour play by an American playwright about the fate of Judas Iscariot, written in a contemporary idiom, rich with a Harlem accent. By the time Maguire had finished with it, it was an hour shorter and featured a guest appearance by the Blues Brothers, amongst others. It was called ‘The Last Days of Judas Iscariot’. Even in the bare upstairs of the pub, the play radiated intelligence and integrity. The following week, it brought Maguire her second, successive All-Ireland drama award.

The winner of the All-Ireland used get a week’s run in the Peacock Theatre. No more. Though the amateur movement remains strong, the attention paid to it by both media and theatre professionals has weakened. This is a pity, because Estuary Players would have packed out the Peacock, and their extraordinary play, by Stephen Adly Guirgis, merited a wider audience.

So it is a happy coincidence that the wider audience will indeed have an opportunity to see Guirgis’s play, though not in the Estuary Players production. Megan Riordan chose it for her next production with Making Strange, and it runs for two weeks from Tuesday at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin (see www.projectartscentre.ie).

‘The Last Days of Judas Iscariot’ debuted in 2005 at the prestigious Public Theatre in New York, directed by the film actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. That production won mixed reviews, but a production at the Almeida in London last year was a hit.

Riordan, though, had seen neither when she stumbled across the script in her favourite New York bookshop, Shakespeare & Co, on Broadway. Liking the name and having heard of the writer, she bought it. “It kinda blew me away”, she says.

“There’s no way I can do this play,” she thought. And then: “I have to do this play.”

Guirgis’s play is something of a theological investigation, staged as a courtroom drama, rich in comedy, regularly skirting blasphemy with its irreverent questioning of the Catholic faith. Somewhere in contemporary Purgatory, Judas is being tried for his role in the crucifixion of Jesus; a litany of historical, religious figures are called to testify, culminating in the devil. The question that underlies it is: did Judas deserve divine mercy? Or as one of the characters, a jiving Saint Monica, puts it, “I remembered how Jesus had said that God has the biggest love for the least of his creatures – and Judas was the leastest creature I had ever seen.”

For all that Guirgis mocks some of the idiosyncracies of the Catholic faiths, and exposes tensions within its theology, his purpose is both moral and didactic.

“Religion gets a bad rap in this country (America),” he has said. “Non-maniac-type people who are religious or spiritual have a responsibility to stand up, be counted, and gently encourage others to consider matters of faith and to define for themselves what their responsiblities are and what it means to try to be ‘good’.”

It is a profound work, albeit in an unlikely package. But that’s what theatre is all about: it is the ultimate art of surprise. You never quite know what’s coming next. That cuts both ways, of course. But when a good emerging company tackles a great, urgent play, the odds are good. Megan Riordan’s luck looks likely to hold.
Published in the Irish Independent, Saturday July 4, 2009