Look inside: 'That Was Us'

‘THAT WAS US’ Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance Edited By Fintan Walsh

Contents 1. The Power of the Powerless: Theatre in Turbulent Times Fintan Walsh

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ONE: Theatres of Testimony 2. ANU Productions and Site-Specific Performance: The Politics of Space and Place Brian Singleton 3.

Witnessing the (Broken) Nation: Theatre of the Real and Social Fragmentation in Brokentalkers’ Silver Stars, The Blue Boy, and Have I No Mouth Charlotte McIvor

4. You Had to be There Louise Lowe

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TWO: Auto/Biographical Performance 5.

Making Space: Female-Authored Queer Performance in Irish Theatre Oonagh Murphy

6. The Writing Life Helen Meany 7.

Metaphysicians of Unnatural Chaos: Memories of Genesi

by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Dylan Tighe

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THREE: Bodies Out of Bounds 8. Insider and Outsider: Michael Keegan-Dolan in the Irish Dance Landscape Michael Seaver 9. And the Adults Came Too! Dublin Theatre Festival and the Development of Irish Children’s Theatre Eimear Beardmore 10. Living Inspiration John Scott

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FOUR: Placing Performance 11.

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Representations of Working-Class Dublin at the Dublin Theatre Festival James Hickson

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‘Getting Known’: Beckett, Ireland, and the Creative Industries Trish McTighe

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13. The Art of Perspective Michael West

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FIVE: Touring Performances 14. Druid Cycles: The Rewards of Marathon Productions Tanya Dean 15. Staging the National in an International Context: Druid at the Dublin Theatre Festival Sara Keating 16.

Viewed from Afar: Contemporary Irish Theatre on the World’s Stages Peter Crawley

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17. A Dance You Associate With Your Family Gary Keegan

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Contributors

Acknowledgements

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Index

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Figures 2.1: Sorcha Kenny in Laundry. Photo by Patrick Redmond.

Courtesy of Louise Lowe.

2.2:

Caitriona Ennis as Marie and Lloyd Cooney as Dennis in The Boys of Foley Street.

Photo by Patrick Redmond. Courtesy of Louise Lowe.

3.1: The ensemble listens to the story of Michael Byrne in Silver Stars before joining in through song.

Photo by Jill O’Malley. Courtesy of Brokentalkers.

3.2:

An empty school dormitory with crosses laid on each child’s bed forms the backdrop while a performer works on masks in the foreground.

Photo by Daniel Keane. Courtesy of Brokentalkers.

3.3:

Balloons drop on the audience in Have I No Mouth.

Photo by Daniel Keane. Courtesy of Brokentalkers.

5.1:

Veronica Dyas in In My Bed. Photo by Niamh Burke-Kennedy.

Courtesy of Veronica Dyas.

6.1: David Heap as Cardinal Newman (standing) and Will O’Connell as Gerard Manley Hopkins (projected) in No Worst There is None.

Photo by Hugh O’Connor. Courtesy of Dylan Tighe.

8.1: Dancers and musicians in Rian. Photo by Elliot Franks.

Courtesy of Michael Keegan-Dolan.

9.1: Louis Lovett in The Girl Who Forgot To Sing Badly.

Photo by Patrick Redmond. Courtesy of Theatre Lovett.

9.2: Louis Lovett in The House That Jack Filled.

Photo by Patrick Redmond. Courtesy of Theatre Lovett.

11.1: Nick Lee as Farrington in Dubliners.

Courtesy of photographer Fiona Morgan.

11.2: Older Man (Philip Judge) embraces Young Man (Ciarán McCabe) in Trade. Courtesy of photographer Fiona Morgan.

12.1: Barry McGovern in Watt. Photo by Jeff Clarke.

Courtesy of the Gate Theatre.

Essay

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The Power of the Powerless: Theatre in Turbulent Times Fintan Walsh

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Performing Us

eft hanging on a street corner, looking around, waiting for something to happen: ANU Productions’ site-specific The Boys of Foley Street (Dublin Theatre Festival/DTF 2012) begins by slyly turning all of its spectator-participants into the children on whom it’s based. Via a headset, we listen to clips of Pat Kenny’s 1975 radio documentary for RTÉ, which first captured the experiences of children living in Foley Street, one of the most deprived areas of north innercity Dublin.1 We also hear recordings from later documentaries that attempted to follow those same children into adulthood. Speaking in 1988, one of the original interviewees recalls the first documentary with a succinct ‘that was us’ – the tone of his voice somewhere between surprise and dismay. It’s a line that collapses a straightforward sense of time, space, and affiliation; eerily connecting us to five decades of Irish social, political, and economic history – mostly the darker layers the Celtic Tiger would have had us forget.2 In this moment, and the production that follows, life is not so much represented to us, as it is lived by us. We are implicated as co-conspirators in everything that happens.

I borrow this line as the book’s title, not just because the encounter was so powerful, but because it serves to remind us of the ongoing role theatre and performance have to play in exploring questions of identity, responsibility, and civic participation. These are also among the concerns addressed by the critical essays and artist reflections contained in this collection, which profile and analyse some of the richest and most important developments to take place in contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Focusing mainly on work produced between 2007 and 2013 by Irish artists and companies connected to the Dublin Theatre Festival, essays by critics and academics examine some of the

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most significant innovations and interventions to take place in Ireland’s cultural landscape.3 Additionally, shorter reflections by theatre- and performance-makers describe formative encounters with international artists, many of whom have appeared at the Dublin Theatre Festival at various points in its history. By bringing a variety of voices into concert like this, I hope that discussions of practice, cultural politics, influence, and inspiration chime in nuanced and illuminating ways.

The contributions account for theatre and performance responsive to, or resonant with, a period of profound turbulence in Irish culture.

As well as highlighting some of the topical social and political issues addressed by this wave of work, the volume foregrounds the diversity of aesthetic and dramaturgical experimentation that took place during this time. It does so by discussing a range of forms and practices, many of which newly came to the fore, including: site-specific and site-responsive theatre; testimonial, documentary, and biographical performance; dance theatre; theatre for children, young people, and families; new writing; and fresh takes on canonical writing staged at home or toured internationally. The book is divided into five main sections, which can be taken to indicate these varied forms and practices, while also signalling approaches to interpreting the work: Theatres of Testimony; Auto/Biographical Performance; Bodies Out of Bounds; Placing Performance; and Touring Performances.

Abundance and Austerity

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The turbulence referenced in the title of this introductory essay draws attention to the volume’s focus on theatre and performance in a time of crisis. Times, you could argue, are always in a kind of crisis. But over the past six years in particular, this has been especially true for Ireland, as it plummeted from the heady heights of neoliberal abundance and excess into political, economic, social, and cultural turmoil. Following over a decade of unprecedented prosperity, the country fell into financial difficulty in 2007, declaring a recession in 2008 – the first country in the Eurozone to do so in what would become a global phenomenon.

Unemployment rates rose sharply, reaching 11.4% in April 2009, and 15% in February 2012.4 Mass emigration ensued, and by 2013 a National Youth Council of Ireland survey reported that 308,000 people had emigrated from Ireland during the previous four years.5

In September 2008, the Fianna Fáil government hastily committed to save the country’s corrupt and inept banking system, with a guarantee of up to €440 billion, which placed a crippling burden on current and indeed future generations of Irish people.6 A key contributor to economic expansion throughout the previous decade, the property bubble spectacularly burst in 2007, leading the government to establish the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) in 2009, aimed at acquiring property development loans from Irish banks in exchange for government bonds. A year later, in 2010, the government requested an EU-ECB-IMF bailout, which not only radically undermined the country’s political and economic sovereignty, but shackled the Irish people to an enduring programme of austerity.

The social fallout of this political and economic upheaval has perhaps been most vividly manifest in mass unemployment, poverty, and emigration (including many of those people who had moved to Ireland during the boom years), but also reports of poor mental health, and perhaps most troubling, rising suicide rates.7 While many of these problems can be directly connected to patterns of poor governance during the previous decade, others have deeper roots. Published in 2009, the Murphy and Ryan reports document the complicit brutality of the state and religious-run institutions in the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children throughout much of the twentieth century, while in 2013 the McAleese Report detailed the state’s involvement in the incarceration of women and girls in Magdalene laundries between 1922 and 1996.8 The Irish arts sector felt the brunt of this braided political, economic, and social upheaval in the severance of subsidy, which impacted theatre most by reducing annual recurring funding in favour of project support.9 This shift has gravely impacted upon the economic lives of artists – a fact that shouldn’t be forgotten about in a book that centralises practice and representation; that is, work that actually manages to get made and produced – but it has also altered the way work is made, and the kind of work that’s made. For many independent theatre- and performance-makers, this has meant not only the unviability of the traditional company model, but also the need to reduce the number of people working on projects. This might be one way of understanding the rise of the solo show or small cast, for example. The flip side of this is that more established, heavily funded companies are charged with

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the onerous task of creating work which can tour internationally, not simply to generate capital in the short term, but to remind the world that although Ireland may be in grave political, economic, and social difficulty, its artistic integrity remains intact.10 Despite the precarious conditions of artistic labour and artists’ lives, some of the most active and significant theatre and performance companies working today, many of which are discussed in this book, have been established in the past decade.11 These include, but of course are not limited to: THISISPOPBABY (2007), THEATREclub (2008), ANU Productions (2009), HotForTheatre (2010), and Theatre Lovett (2010). Alongside arts cuts, there has been some major investment in training and education, most notable with the opening of The Lir: National Academy of Dramatic Art at Trinity College Dublin in 2011. In a similar vein, an important initiative of the Dublin Theatre Festival has been the establishment of The Next Stage strand of the programme in 2007 (presented in conjunction with Theatre Forum Ireland), created to promote artist development and participation during the run of the festival. In 2008 the ReViewed strand was created (in partnership with Culture Ireland and Irish Theatre Institute) with the aim of showcasing a selection of Irish productions that had played during the previous year, but which may have fallen under the radar, to international producers as well as general audiences.12 As some of the production histories outlined in this book make clear, the Dublin Fringe Festival plays an extremely important role in supporting emerging artists and cultivating new work. A dogged commitment to sustaining the arts has also been demonstrated by the advocacy group the National Campaign for the Arts, which was established in 2009 in response to a proposed government cut to the public expenditure report (McCarthy Report), which would devastate arts infrastructure and funding if it were implemented.13 Established in 2005, the state agency Culture Ireland has been instrumental in putting Irish theatre and performance on the global stage, even as national platforms creaked under financial pressure...

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excerpt

13. The Art of Perspective Michael West

A wall of darkness. The faint whistle of a train. In the distance the tiny illuminated carriage windows clatter past – a string of fairy lights drawn across the stage. The lights are clearly drawn by human hands – we are at a puppet show.

The train passes by in the other direction. Louder, a string of bigger lights. The audience titters: this is perspective for babies. The rhythmic sound of clacking steel builds to a crescendo. The train is closing in.

Unseen, it slows and screeches to a halt with a squeal of brakes and gush of steam. White clouds billow out before a wall of light. We are on the platform of a station.

A man in a fedora and belted trenchcoat steps out, a battered suitcase in his hand. He puts down the case and opens it – to reveal a miniature version of himself, complete with hat and tiny suitcase, a rope tied round his waist.

The reason for the rope becomes clear the moment he takes out the homunculus: the puppet shoots up into the air like a helium balloon.

The man reels the puppet in and tries to pack him back inside the case. It takes a couple of attempts. Finally he gets the struggling homunculus back where he belongs and sits on the closed case…

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tterly charming in itself, the opening sequence of Dérives by the Philippe Genty Company (Gaiety Theatre, DTF 1991) was then followed by one of the greatest theatrical coups I’d ever seen. The moment the man succeeded in closing the case with a satisfying click, he himself shot up into the air – and a full-size real 173

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human, in trenchcoat, hat and carrying a suitcase stepped through the veil of light, his other hand holding a rope…

We’d been watching a puppet manipulating a puppet all this time but, in spite of the scaling game of the lights, had willingly attributed agency to the larger figure merely because we’d ‘seen’ a puppet.

This was the most visceral and witty lesson in perception and audience complicity, as well as being a masterclass in low-tech theatre magic. Dérives (and the two other Genty shows I saw in the following years, including Ne m’oublie pas and Désirs parade) were devoted not only to the presentation of exquisite dreamlike images, but to demonstrating that the act of puppetry itself was dreamlike and subject to the same possibilities of transformation and delight as the scene being ostensibly represented.

In many of the sequences the puppeteers became characters who fell in love with or fought with the puppet – or among themselves for the attentions of the manipulated figure who now seemed to be controlling them. And then the puppeteers would disappear in full view of the audience by redirecting our attention back to the puppet.

In all of these shows the performers could silently and effortlessly walk back and forth through a veil of light, slipping between visibility and invisibility with a flick of a wrist or a sudden stillness. I think of that opening image often because it catches something essential about the dual nature of acting – how the performer is both the person representing a character and the character represented; how this duality is continually and delicately in flux and is renegotiated at every step of the way with the audience’s engagement; how the actor can both be there and not be there at the same time.

Some time later, Annie Ryan (Artistic Director of The Corn Exchange) and I took a workshop with Nicolas Gousseff, one of Genty’s collaborators and a puppeteer with his company for several years. A lovely teacher, he took us gently through some of the classic exercises in the dance studio at the top of the Beckett Theatre: fixed point work, corps vide, animating ordinary household objects. I remember one of the days involved a lot of string. Nicolas told me how they developed much of their material: Genty would come in and recount his wife’s dreams and the company would try to stage them. Maybe they were his own dreams and he passed them off as hers; maybe they belonged to the performers – there are a lot of intervening steps between a dream

and its recounting by many hands – but if you’ve seen any of the shows then whoever was doing the sleeping had some very strange nights.

Nicolas also told me that he had been very keen to come to Ireland ever since he had visited as a child with his family. He confided that his artistic quest was to recreate a memory of eating a digestive biscuit given to him by his father in a cave by the sea on a wet summer’s day somewhere near Wexford. This has always struck me as a rather beautiful answer to the question ‘Why do you do what you do?’

The question was answered forcefully for me a few years later at The Street of Crocodiles by Théâtre de Complicité (DTF 1994). The opening of a production teaches you how to watch it and to watch people clambering out of impossibly small trashcans or walking down walls was a profoundly simple but powerful evocation of theatre’s great trick: to make you see.

‘That Was US’ contemporary irish theatre and performance £16.99 | PB | 256PP. ISBN: 9781783190355 WWW.OBERONBOOKS.COM/THAT-WAS-US 175

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