Artistic director Joe Devlin wants to continue the Focus Theatre's tradition of making magic on the stage, writes Arminta Wallace.
Joe Devlin, artistic director of Dublin's Focus Theatre, is trying to find a word which might sum up, or even give a sideways nod at, his theatrical credo. He tries a few more, then grins and shrugs off the attempt. "It's going to sound either cheesy or pretentious," he concludes. "We live in a culture in which people don't want to speak in metaphysical terms. They don't want to talk about magic. It sounds odd. It's not fashionable. But I want to deliver something special in the theatre; a quality of work which is so deep that it offers something of real emotion and spirit. Otherwise, why would people leave the house and pay their money, when they could sit and watch Friends on TV for free?"
Every theatre director worth his or her salt would claim to be striving for dramatic depth rather than offering quick-fix entertainment. But the sort of depth Devlin is talking about has been a watchword of Focus Theatre since it was founded 40 years ago. It's partly a matter of selecting a certain type of play; David Auburn's Pulitzer prize-winning Proof, for example, which Devlin is currently directing. Since it opened at the Fringe Festival in the autumn the success of this production has earned it a transfer to Andrew's Lane, but Proof is by definition a classic Focus play.
"It's about a young woman who has been nursing her scientist father for the last five years," says Devlin. "The play opens a week after the father's death. The daughter is concerned that she has inherited his mental illness, because she knows she has inherited his genes, so she's afraid to explore her own creativity in case it leads to madness. It's also about her relationship with her sister, and with a young man who was her father's student. It explores feelings of loss, of love, of betrayal. It's about trust. It has beautifully drawn characters with real dilemmas."
It also, he says, packs quite an emotional punch. Which, when you get right down to it, is what lies at the heart of the Stanislavski method of acting, based on the idea of releasing the creativity of the individual actor and brought to Ireland from New York by the founder of Focus, Deirdre O'Connell. When she introduced it to Dublin in 1963, it was, says Devlin, revolutionary. Half a century later, he believes it is as valid as ever and that, at the beginning of the 21st century, it offers an exciting way forward for theatre practitioners.
"Theatre has become very intellectual," he says. "We're losing the experience of theatre as opposed to the idea of theatre. Ideas can be implicit but what has happened in recent years is that they've become explicit, so we get very headbound plays.
"We're in danger of heading into a theatrical cul-de-sac. That's what I feel, anyway, as a person working in the arts and certainly as someone working in Focus, because what we do is explore the human condition. We try to offer more than just a talking-head version of a play, where people have learned their lines and are not bumping into the furniture. It's about trying to bring the whole soul back into the work."
Devlin has a degree in theatre studies and considerable experience at running his own theatre companies in both Dublin and in his native Belfast, including Pointfields Theatre Company, which developed new works by writers such as Gary Mitchell and Owen McCafferty, and Rattlebag Theatre Company, which he describes as an umbrella organisation for the production of classic drama, new writing and international theatre.
But his love of theatre was, he says, fostered in Eastern Europe, where he studied with Romania's Bulandra company and the Moscow Arts Theatre. Now, a fistful of directors are familiar names on the international scene and Romanian theatre is considered the height of chic, although, as Devlin recalls somewhat grimly, Bucharest wasn't quite so trendy when he was there in the early 1990s. For a young director seeking to explore new theatrical languages, however, it was Heaven on Earth.
"What has Romanian theatre got to offer? Everything," he says, with a grin. "I saw a lot of wonderful, wonderful work, though Alexander Darie's was the work I found most interesting." Bringing the values of these companies back home is something of a challenge, to say the least. "The Stanislavski training takes a very long time, and it takes patience," he says. "In the climate we're in now, it's very hard. I mean, take rents in Dublin; you might as well have a mortgage as rent a place to live. But then that puts people into a situation where the work becomes secondary to paying the mortgage. The culture has changed in a way that makes it much harder for artists to survive.
"People are concentrating on movies, commercials, whatever. The idea of training over a long period of time, committing yourself to that kind of intensity, it's very hard." The Stanislavski approach demands time for the play to develop in rehearsal; time which, for hard-pressed theatre companies trying to balance budgets in the cold light of day, is sometimes an unaffordable luxury.
"At Focus I would spend six weeks on Shakespeare," says Devlin. "I spent six weeks on Proof. With Stuck, a Canadian play about an out-of-work actor who is a drug addict, I spent five weeks with Sean Power on his own in a room. That was pretty intensive! But in Eastern Europe there might be a three-month rehearsal period, sometimes even longer."
The results are, he maintains, worth waiting for. And a glance at the names which have come through Focus's training programme confirms that the Stanislavski system has contributed hugely to Irish theatrical culture in recent decades: Tom Hickey, Johnny Murphy, Gabriel Byrne, Olwen Fouéré, Joan Bergin and many other highly accomplished actors, directors and designers. This autumn, Focus celebrated its 40th anniversary with the launch of a book about its founder, a memorabilia exhibition at the National Library and a relaunch of the Stanislavski studio under its original director, Tim McDonnell. "Deirdre O'Connell's gift was her own facility as an actor," says Devlin.
"She was considered a major figure outside of Ireland - she would go and give lectures and seminars - but her integrity wouldn't allow her to sell her work for commercial ends. She genuinely wanted to develop the creativity in the individual artist and Tim McDonnell is an amazing teacher. His Stanislavski workshops are the most extraordinary training sessions I've ever seen; the kind of training he's giving is just not happening outside of Moscow and New York. I went to the forty years of Focus exhibition at the National Library on my own recently and if I'd known about all this wealth of talent which preceded me, I probably wouldn't have applied for the job at Focus. Sometimes ignorance is bliss."
That said, he is determined that Focus should not rest on its laurels. "We have an incredibly loyal audience, there are people who have been coming to Focus for as long as the theatre has been there. We need to build on that and develop younger audiences too. Stuck, for instance, got a very young audience; teenagers and people in their early 20s. Our next production, which Bairbre Ní Chaoimh will be directing, is a play called Very Heaven by the Canadian writer Ann Lambert which has some really strong roles for women.
"At the end of January, we're launching our Sunday night cabaret, a mixture of improv and comedy, which is aimed at an audience between 25 and 50, and another Focus initiative, The Songs of Mamma Cass, produced by Mind the Gap, is about to transfer to Spirit. We also want to tour more, and maybe do some site-specific work." An ambitious programme at a time when many arts organisations are struggling against a tide of cutbacks and such-like? Devlin shrugs again. A smaller budget means you have to think more creatively, he says. Last year Focus toured five full productions on a "really tiny" budget. "It sounds really cheeky, but we delivered and the Arts Council has just upped our money by 30 per cent," he says. "We want to give the Focus experience to more people." Another broad grin. "After all, we can only squeeze 70 into the wee box at a time."
Proof opens at Andrew's Lane Theatre on January 2nd.
