Published: 4 March 2010
by JOSH LOEB

SOMEWHERE, once upon a time, someone coined the term “bog gothic” to give a flavour of the bizarre imagination of Pat McCabe.

The term stuck, but the writer is no fan. “It’s a hateful term coined by a journalist,” he told this paper. “It’s been hanging around like a bad smell.”

McCabe, who is most famous for his novel The Butcher Boy and the film it spawned, objects not to the “gothic” but the “bog” bit. Yet the marshy, soupy atmosphere pervading this play means that, if you take “bog” in its literal sense (ie not as meaning “toilet”), it isn’t far off as a description.

Punctuated by cartoonish absurdity, this work is reminiscent of Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum and the “magical realist” style it pioneered. 

The Dead School was adapted from McCabe’s novel of the same name and is one of those plays that you can’t help thinking probably worked better in the medium which many feel leaves more room for manoeuvre.

Sean Campion and Nick Lee play teachers Raphael Bell and Malachy Dudgeon, whose values come into conflict in a school in Dublin. 

One is socially conservative, the other more of a free spirit. 

The result? A descent into madness.

The personal issues between the two men mirror wider events in Ireland in the 1970s – a decade when the country was being torn apart by adherents of old and new ways.

Amid the complexity and murk, there are moments of humour. Raphael proposes to his girlfriend with the words: “How would you like to be buried with my people?”

The most unusual aspect of the piece is its gallery of grotesques, including a phantom called The Little Beggarman, who wears a creepy mask and makes impromptu appearances, menacingly singing ditties. 

He might be a reference to ghosts of the past, but ultimately he seems like nothing more than a weird distraction.

The biggest flaw in this play is that it seems like a child squeezed into a school uniform a few sizes too small; the roomier environment of a book was surely more appropriate. 

By way of an aside, McCabe himself once worked as a teacher – just around the corner from the Tricycle in fact, in the early 1990s.

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