A century ago, at the Abbey, a young writer mentioned women’s underwear in a new play, and the audience rioted.

Fifty years ago, in the Dublin Theatre Festival, a young director staged a play that involved a condom being thrown on stage, and the director was arrested.

Then, last year, in the Dublin Fringe Festival, a young theatre maker wrote a play about casual sex and hard drinking. She won a new writing award, and has been busy visiting schools to talk about it.

Grace Dyas is a college drop-out, a youth theatre veteran, a theatre company founder, a producer, a director, an actor and a playwright. She’s 20. She talks too fast to take notes and, to judge by her script, has no idea how to use an apostrophe. But she can write like a fallen angel.

Dyas’s play, Rough, gets a welcome revival at the Axis in Ballymun next Thursday and Friday (tickets from (01) 883 2100 and www.axis-ballymun.ie). It’s a gutsy piece of street poetry, a litany of confessional insights into what people older than Dyas (like me) would call “youth culture”, and what Dyas and co would likely call “life”.
“This is a story about sweet f*** all,” announces one of the two young female characters, early on. The echo of Beckett may be unconscious, but it’s apt. “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” says Estragon in Waiting for Godot. As in Rough, the line works both as a wry description of the play itself and, more tellingly, as a depiction of the characters’ plight: marooned in a meaningless world.

“We live in an instantaneous culture,” says Dyas. “If I want to listen to a song, I can listen to it instantly. Everything I want, I can get instantly. So we think happiness and being fulfilled should be equally instant.”

This doomed search for instant happiness projects Dyas’s characters out into late-night Dublin, fuelled by nagins of vodka, seeking alcoholic transcendence and the ephemeral epiphanies of chance sexual encounters. They are a generation formally empowered by feminism but emotionally stunted by consumerism.

“You read in a magazine about ways to make men fall in love with you, but you don’t want to be the type of

girl who reads those magazines,” says one. “You buy a new dress on your laser card. You go for a drink in a fancy hotel. You answer your phone while you hail a taxi and imagine that this is New York.”

“The abrasiveness of that culture burns your soul a little bit,” says Dyas. “But how do you break out of it? It is the culture. It’s all around us. It’s the way we’ve evolved. To claw yourself out of it is really hard.”
In capturing that culture she casts Dublin in a noir-ish light, and echoes the rhythms of the beats. “The 4am feeling descends upon the filthy town/ a bottle of something you never drank before./ A siren and talking to a police man/ Not knowing what your saying/ And losing control of your body/ And feeling sick and dirty.”

If Dyas has lived this life herself, then she has clearly managed to claw her way out, repeatedly. From the Liberties, she joined Dublin Youth Theatre while at school, and then went to UCD to study Arts. Bored, she dropped out – but instead of (or as well as) seeking distraction on the late-night streets, she returned to DYT and teamed up with a couple of friends, Doireann Coady and Shane Byrne.

They called themselves THEATREclub and started putting on short plays, staging work at the Project Brand New nights, doing shows in the Dublin Fringe, and then, last December, running a week-long festival at the Project Arts Centre.

So how did they get such institutional support so quickly, and so young?

“We done it just by being really cheeky. Just by asking for what we wanted, and delivering when we got it.

“I’m not saying that we don’t trade on being young – we do – but then we deliver. Not to be bigging us up, or anything, but we’re good. We sold out the Project three times a night for five nights.”

But something was missing, even amidst that success. “We make work about the things around us. But the people the shows are about aren’t seeing it.” That brings them to Ballymun, where they’ve been running workshops in local schools to drum up interest in the play, and have set tickets prices at just €5.

“We want to tour all over,” she says. “Ballymun is a prototype. Can we do it? Will people in the suburbs come to see the work?

“I’m not saying it’s a f***ing revolution, but it’s a bit different. We want the audience to own the work, and be a part of it.”

Dyas has talent, and her company has enviable energy; but the lasting significance of their work may lie in their success or otherwise next week. If they can get a new, young audience into the theatre in Ballymun, they can do it anywhere. In 2010, that would be more genuinely radical than talking about casual sex on stage.

(The two references at the start are to the 1907 premiere of The Playboy of the Western World, and to the 1957 Irish premiere of The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams, staged by Alan Simpson at the Pike Theatre. See www.colinmurphy.info for more.)

Written for my Saturday column in the Irish Independent Review, February 20