He was a bit fed up, he went on, of having his views caricatured. "It's true that my understanding doesn't extend to the areas you currently inhabit," he replied, but Emin didn't register the professorial rebuke. "You people have lost me..." she said resignedly, "you've lost me now." "Do you think that's a generational thing, Tracey?" the presenter asked desperately, with a sobriety that he must have been praying would prove infectious. But by now Tracey was plucking at her clothing - "I wanna be free," she moaned as she tried to untangle her microphone, "I wanna be free." Several of those she left behind looked as if they longed to follow her example, but though everyone stayed in their seats there were other defections of a more intellectual nature. Having pocketed the cheque to help set up the programme's adversarial structure (a pro and anti debate about the status of painting) Waldemar Januszczak then cheekily washed his hands of the whole affair: "I think it's a phoney argument," he declared, insisting that he didn't think painting was dead at all. But in the end it proved impossible - as Roger Scruton tried to clarify exactly what it was he did think (as opposed to the diagrammatic opinion he had been cast to represent) he was overwhelmed by a voice slurring "you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong".
That it was a comedy of some kind - and of quite a high order - isn't in doubt, but the feelings it aroused were curiously mixed; at one moment incredulous giggles (take a bow Norman Rosenthal, blazoned on both cheeks with lipstick kisses), at the next sympathy for individuals who found themselves trapped in a purgatory of artificial controversy. At first the other guests (and the studio director) simply tried to pretend she wasn't there - much as you do when some weirdo gets on a tube train and begins ranting on about the risen Christ I still can't decide whether The Turner Prize Discussion (Channel Four) was a satire on contemporary art or a satire on arts television. Chief amongst their tormentors was the artist Tracey Emin, not quite legless (since she lurched out halfway through the programme) but certainly well beyond the reach of reason. "I think I'm nearly back to normal, but I haven't really had any energy, so I've just been writing short stories" - a volume has just been published in Ireland, America and Germany, where his work is, perhaps surprisingly, popular in translation - "but I'll be getting back to writing plays again in the New Year. I want to write one good comedy before I expire."Gosh, I counter, hopefully that won't be for a while yet."I hope so too - even more fervently than you do..."`Sive': to 17 Jan, Tricycle Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 (0171-328 1000). In that street, there was a kind of old jaded grandeur and pride, but, underneath it, there was always the pall and threat of starvation."Currently, Keane is recovering from a long bout of radiotherapy, after a relapse of the prostate cancer he suffered a couple of years ago, and so won't be in London for tonight's opening.
I remember at Christmas seeing old women in shawls and bare feet in the snow and rain, calling at doors for a few pence: they'd take a bottle of stout if they got it. And the way they'd give thanks, the promises of prayer and salvation..."We were sort of in the well-off bracket, but it was still a constant struggle, and all the neighbours had it the same way. Our house was on the way to the graveyard, and I'll never forget the sight of the white coffins going past day after day, and the people dying from diseases like scarlet fever and diphtheria - which I myself contracted. In our street, three young people died from it, it was a terrible reaper. Of course it was all due to malnutrition..."That poverty demeaned the people. When Barnes's new staging of Sive was first seen in Watford last month, it reportedly had audiences gasping in tension before the harsh core of the tragedy came hammering home.This is Barnes's fourth go at directing the play, and his honing of the script highlights the context of brutalising poverty that motivates the cruelty of the characters.Keane sparks on that subject: "The most grinding period I remember was from the mid-1930s up to the beginning of the war. They look dated now, but they have still provided Groundwork with a succession of popular hits, including The Year of the Hiker, The Man from Clare and Moll, a daft comedy about a priest's housekeeper that prefigures Father Ted.But Sive penetrates far deeper, with its raw tale of a young schoolgirl sold into an arranged marriage to a wealthy old farmer through the connivings of a snivelling matchmaker and the girl's hardened aunt and foolish uncle.The lush poetry and humour of the language - there's a lot of talk in a Keane play - disguise the astonishing narrative undertow of the storytelling.
Barnes, whose hallmark is an exhaustive attention to text, has since enjoyed an on-going relationship with Keane's work, paring and editing the three big plays down to what are now the standard editions.During the 1990s, Barnes's Groundwork company at the Gaiety has mined many of Keane's skittish, and sometimes anguished, comedies. Critics used to apologise for melodrama as if it were a sort of freakish aspect of the theatre, whereas it's the very foundation, the very soul of it."Given that, of his other two big plays, The Field is now on the Irish secondary school curriculum, it's astonishing that the Abbey wasn't to touch his work until 1982, when Ben Barnes was invited in to direct Sive. But, I tell you, it was the spoken language of the people in this part of the world - and still is in isolated areas. It's a cross between Elizabethan English and Bardic Irish, a thing called an bhairdne, the official, court Irish used by the poets.