THE ARTS:Ireland and the UK could learn a thing or two from the European theatre model, says Pan Pan's Gavin Quinn, as the company prepares for something of a homecoming tour, writes Sara Keating
"HELLO. MY NAME is Oedipus, and I think I've been unhappy for a very long time." That long time is more than 2,000 years, when he first turns up in Homer's Odyssey, killing his father, marrying his mother and spawning a cultural fascination with unconscious desire that still resonates today. And in Oedipus Loves You, Pan Pan Theatre's postmodern parody of psychoanalytic culture, the miserable legacy lives on.
First performed in October 2006, Oedipus Loves Youis a brilliantly ironic reworking of the Oedipus myth, fleshing the mythic story out with the Freudian paradigms of modern therapy culture. The ancient family becomes an experimental punk-rock band who, in the words of the blind seer Tiresias, the band's lead singer and therapist, "reconstruct the Greeks with a contemporary edge". Gordon is a Mime's pulsing score provides the characters with opportunities for confession - Antigone is "antigonised" in Miss Dun Leary; Creon reveals underlying sexual anxieties in Play Pool; a castrato laments his androgyny in CrackerAss- while the ancient gods controlling their destinies become director Gavin Quinn, who manipulates a miniature of this stage-world from the side-lines.
Since the premiere of Pan Pan's highly conceptualised production two years ago in Smock Alley's studio space, Oedipus Loves Youhas toured to more than 20 cities, including Berlin, Beijing, Helsinki, London, Quebec, New York and Shanghai. Now taking residency at the Project for 10 performances, if Pan Pan were a band - and in Oedipus Loves You, they might as well be - you could call it a homecoming tour.
Director Gavin Quinn is delighted to have the chance to show the work in Ireland again, as the last 18 months on tour with Oedipus Loves Youhas "allowed the work to continue to develop so that it now has an intensity that helps the actors and the audience to get as much out of it as they can. It will be great to see how the Dublin audience reacts to it again too, because watching the different reactions that the show has got over the last 18 months has made us understand what we're doing in different ways, and that feeds back into the work as well, and into the work that we will do in the future too."
Touring has always been a key part of Pan Pan's artistic remit, from its first show in 1991. "We brought the show to Lyon," Quinn explains, "and it did really well and that made us realise very quickly that there was another audience for our work apart from the local audience, that there were many potential audiences all over the world, and that our work should speak to them as much as to those who were interested in our work at home." However, it is only in the last few years that Pan Pan has been able to develop its international agenda with any consistency, and Quinn is quick to praise the mechanisms that have developed in Ireland over the last few years that have enabled Pan Pan to work abroad.
"Being on an island can be prohibitive for touring," he says. "If you're in mainland Europe you can just hop in a car, but it is logistically and financially difficult to organise, not to mention fund, touring work from here. It is almost entirely up to Culture Ireland that it has become possible for us, because they provide a funding mechanism for resources that is accessible. Although obviously you still have to develop the interest in [and] the appetite for the work first."
AS THE EXTENSIVEtouring and critical reception for Oedipus Loves Youconfirms, there is no shortage of interest in Pan Pan's work. Its latest production, The Crumb Trail, written by Gina Moxley, opened at the FFT Theatre in Düsseldorf on November 22nd, proving the benefits of touring for a company such as Pan Pan, whose work is deeply engaged with the European aesthetics of experimental theatre.
"The FFT is actually one of the first places where we did Oedipus Loves You," Quinn says. "And it was actually the Oedipustour that directly facilitated our next show, because the FFT asked after seeing it what we were doing next. When we told them about the idea for The Crumb Trail, they said they'd like to co-produce it and gave us some funding, so they got the premiere. We developed the work with the resources of another theatre in Berlin and we'll bring the show there later on, and we are also going off to New York with it in January. We also showcased part of The Crumb Trailat the Dublin Theatre Festival this year, and 25 international producers from the Irish Theatre Institute conference came to see the work, and out of that we got an invitation to take the work to Portland in September.
"That sort of proactive production is quite a normal European model," Quinn continues, "with festivals and venues getting involved in funding and developing the work very early on. They feel that they're not just buying a show but they're part of the process, they're supporting the artist. It's not as commercial as in Britain and Ireland - they are interested in the ideas, not just the entertainment - and it's a broader value of art I think. The problem in Ireland is that there isn't really that interest at the early stage."
Quinn says that the European model for producing theatre also reflects how the work is received, even how the interest in context and aesthetic is reflected in the theatre buildings themselves, "where the theatre is primarily a social hub. People stay around after shows in the cafe or bar, and the audience will come and interact with you and ask you questions.
"There is a dialogue going on - not like in the formal setting of an after-show talk - but a human contact and sense of exchange that seems very real, as the audience talk to you, and question you and tell you what they got from the show."
The formal complexity and provocative subject matter of much of Pan Pan's work encourages such dialogue, and despite language barriers the highly theatrical nature of productions such as Oedipus Loves Youmakes them accessible on a wide range of levels. "The text is only one part of the stage language that we use, but the visual impact, the use of sound, music and multimedia, means that there are many different aspects that they can engage with," says Quinn. Even so, 18 months of touring have thrown up some brilliant anecdotes about misunderstandings, like the one in China that transformed Pan Pan momentarily from avant-garde theatre-makers to cult artists.
"China was one of the most interesting places that we visited," Quinn says. "The audience didn't really know the whole Oedipus myth, but there is a similar story in Chinese myth about somebody gouging their eyes out, so they identified with that, and with the idea of killing your father, which is a major taboo in China. We did all the sub-titles in Chinese obviously, but at the point in the show where I write down parts of the script and they are projected live to the audience, I decided to write with Chinese letters. My writing was terrible of course, but this became a really funny element of the show, becomes sometimes I'd get the Chinese characters wrong. At one stage I wrote 'everybody needs to pee' instead of 'everyone needs love'. Afterwards people started coming up to me, asking me to autograph my awful Chinese scripts like they were artworks."
Oedipus Loves Youyields another potential collector's item: the CD recording of the soundtrack that provides the pulse for much of the action, precipitating the characters' confessions, and providing them with moments of emotional release. "Remember a happy moment from your life," Tiresias urges again as the show draws to a close, and as the final evocative ballad plays out, you can't help but think that just for a moment, for Oedipus, this is it.
•Oedipus Loves You runs at Project Arts Centre until December 6th.The Crumb Trail plays at Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, New York as part of the Under The Radar festival from January 7th-17th
