CultureShock:Does RTÉ's new series, Prosperity, signal that the station is finally getting the hang of making urban drama?
For those of us of a certain age, the second episode of RTÉ's new drama series, Prosperity, which will air on Monday night, carries some resonances of the past. It follows a lonely young kid, Gavin, as he mitches school with his younger sidekick and wanders around Ballymun and Dublin city centre. Visually, it is very much of the moment, its contemporary setting marked by the demolition of the Ballymun tower blocks, the Luas, the Jervis shopping centre and so on. But the basic shape, a marginalised youth with nowhere to go, is that of what was meant to be a breakthrough social-realist drama, first screened by RTÉ in 1971. Brian MacLochlainn's A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton followed a Dublin kid released from an industrial school and finding that he belongs nowhere in an indifferent city. The two films even share the same political subtext, drawing attention to those left behind by a long economic boom and to the State's carelessness of those who need it most.
In that context, Prosperity ought to strike us as something of a re-thread. It belongs to a genre that was pioneered in the 1960s by Ken Loach and Tony Garnett for the BBC. Some of the images from the first two episodes seem almost to reference Loach's early work. Siobhan Shanahan's Stacey pushing her pram around the streets in the first episode brings to mind the pioneering 1965 drama Cathy Come Home. Shane Thorton's Gavin in the second episode focuses his need for love on an animal (in this case, a rabbit) just as David Bradley's Billy in Loach's 1969 film Kes lavishes all his care and hope on a kestrel.
Given such obvious antecedents, one of the interesting questions about Prosperity is why, instead of being hackneyed, it is both utterly compelling and genuinely shocking.
Part of the answer lies, of course, in artistry. The writer, Mark O'Halloran, and the director, Lenny Abrahamson, know what they're doing. The series is rooted in one of the best Irish films ever made, Adam and Paul. It has the same writer and director, the same crew, some of the same actors, the same basic premise of following characters who are usually almost invisible around the city for a day. In Gary Egan's Georgie (around whom the third episode is built) it even has one of the same characters.
Prosperity even looks filmic. Abrahamson and the cameraman, James Mathers, have the technical ability to shoot entirely on location, giving the work a mobility and spontaneity that marks the narrative style of both Prosperity and Adam and Paul.
Yet this artistry could, if anything, have added to the problem of familiarity, making Prosperity a rehash, not just of 1960s British social realism, but of Adam and Paul itself. That doesn't happen, though, for a rather paradoxical reason. The traditions in which O'Halloran and Abrahamson are working are, in the Irish context, barely traditions at all. The development of Irish television drama has been so discontinuous, so fragmentary, that there is no real sense of one achievement building on another. Brilliant things have been done by RTÉ in the field of urban drama, but they have tended to be one-offs and dead-ends. Efforts to create a follow-up to Martin Cluxton in the 1970s went nowhere. The brilliant Michael Winterbottom mini-series of Roddy Doyle's Family in 1994 had an Irish writer and Irish actors at its core, but it was essentially a BBC production.
The talent and energy have always been there, but they have never been shaped into a consistent and coherent set of conventions for contemporary TV drama.
The upside of this failure is that so much remains to be done. Eugene O'Brien's Pure Mule in 2005 could practically invent the Midlands - and the young provincial middle class - in television terms. Prosperity has a whole urban landscape to show us for the first time: Ballymun's haunting mix of old shells awaiting demolition and spanking new buildings, Luas stations, shopping centres, the weirdly blank spaces of Wolfe Tone Square. But it also, remarkably, has a fictional past to build on.
It may seem ridiculous to suggest that no one in Irish culture has really built on Joyce's Ulysses, but in the simplest terms this is obviously true. Joyce invented a form of urban narrative based on the idea of a group of characters moving around Dublin over the course of a single day. No one really bothered to take hold of this idea, but O'Halloran and Abrahamson are doing so. The way stories are told in Adam and Paul and in Prosperity - a journey through an urban landscape, marked by both casual encounters and random sightings - is pure Joyce. But because no one else has done it since 1922, it also has the energy of novelty.
At another level, of course, Prosperity is a million miles away from the Irish literary and theatrical traditions. It demolishes the comforting stereotype of the natural linguistic gifts of the Irish poor: Stacey in the first episode is usually either silent or monosyllabic; Gavin in the second stammers badly and says little. It is also deliberately undramatic: in terms of conventional plot, nothing at all happens to Stacey and Gavin's story acquires drama only its final minutes. Prosperity is, in other words, completely televisual. Some 45 years after RTÉ screened its first drama, it may be finally coming to terms with the form.
