Do you remember the shock of Harold Pinter's early plays? They were difficult to understand, but we could see that the picture they dramatized was not exactly nice. And 40 years later, he's the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature.

	Author/director Michel Keegan-Dolan as the narrator of "The Bull." Click photo for larger image. Related article In Dublin, troupes from all over the world tussle with passion and betrayal

Look, now, at my accompanying image of a peat-encrusted figure clutching an ancient book. Michael Keegan-Dolan is the creative engine of Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, a company that creates epic theater that's not "nice," either. Today I have a review of the Dublin Theatre Festival, including his latest, "The Bull," which joyously mixes ancient and contemporary, comedy and tragedy, brutality and satire.

In this image, author-director Keegan-Dolan is posing as the narrator of "The Bull," who rises at the start of the play, like an insistent gnome, out of a coffin buried in peat -- the very stuff that covers most of Ireland, an ancient vegetative matter that preserves and nurtures. That narrator has a deeply Irish story he insists must be told ... as does Keegan-Dolan.

It's a serious story but also funny -- see the glint in his eye? It's the same story and glint that you find in the greatest Irish playwrights, John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey -- the story of facing up to who the Irish really are. For Synge, the story was the robust rescue of the rural Irish from sentimentality and condescension. For O'Casey, it was a ribald debunking of nationalist pieties. In Keegan-Dolan's case, it's about a multicultural Ireland relieved of its three ancient oppressors -- England, prudery and poverty -- and free to express all its robust passions, however frightening they may be.

This obvious generality was crystallized for me following "The Bull" when Keegan-Dolan agreed to spend a few minutes talking to my two tour groups, members of a Post-Gazette Critics Choice theater trip and students in my Irish Drama course in the Pitt Honors College. I'd talked him into this a few days before, but on the evening in question, he said, "I don't want to do it if it's going to be all negative."

"How could it be negative?" I replied, still buoyant with the adrenaline rush of "The Bull's" percussive, exultant conclusion, which brought the excited audience to its feet in stomping approval.

But I blanched when we invited questions, and the first, from one of my older trippers, was an insulted protest over seeing the sainted Ireland of her forebears presented with violence and scatology. "I'm Irish," she said, "and none of my ancestors ever talked like that!"

"You don't sound Irish," Keegan-Dolan replied, going on to tell her just how the Irish really talk today. But he knows how firmly Irish-Americans cling to a glamorized image of the past and how willingly the Irish cater to that with tourism and tchotchkes. As she went on, insisting on the ugliness (though I don't think that was exactly her word) of his work, he countered with the ugliness of Irish history (oppression, famine, revolution, terrorism) and then said that what he finds really ugly is the vapid, sanitized, smiling image of "Riverdance."

Complete with the comic picture of me, the flustered critic/teacher trying to smooth ruffled feathers, it was a resonant moment. Suddenly the Abbey Theatre riots that greeted Synge's "Playboy of the Western World" and O'Casey's "Plough and the Stars" came back to my students. No one was throwing things at the actors, but the emotion in that talk-back was real -- and the woman who spoke wasn't alone.

I think what intensified her discomfort was that "The Bull" is so funny. How can you make comic epic out of such pain?

Well, how can you not?

But defining a people is serious business. Artists create powerful images that can shock us with uncomfortable views of ourselves. They bring news even more distressing than the formal news media, because the artist's insight and imagination can get under our guard. Think of the shock to American self-image of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity" or "Oleanna," or of Tony Kushner or Adam Rapp or Neil LaBute.

But today's shocker can turn out to be prophesy; today's shock, tomorrow's classic. And now Harold Pinter has won the Nobel Prize!

I've just had an e-mail from Keegan-Dolan, who tells me "The Bull" is sold out for the rest of the run and that Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre has expressed serious interest in importing it straight after its run at London's Barbican Theatre in early 2007. Of course, his "Giselle" almost made it over to America, too, but the Guthrie and Brooklyn Academy didn't follow through on their early interest. So let's hope. And perhaps Paul Organisak at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust can get on the bandwagon early?

Also from Dublin I bring good wishes from Anne and Dennis Kennedy -- he's the former Pitt theater professor, now the Samuel Beckett Professor of drama at Trinity College -- and from Fergus and Rosaleen Lenehan. Fergus is the former arts editor of the Irish Times, and Rosaleen starred last year in "James Joyce's The Dead" for Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre and will be back next summer if PICT has its way.

I returned from Dublin the day after what I hear was a deeply moving, beautifully arranged and executed service for August Wilson. Would that he had lived long enough to win the Nobel, too.