The Rough Magic Seeds programme is yielding a rich crop of plays. But only after a long, hard graft, writes Peter Crawley
Struggling playwrights take note. "The primary purpose of good dramatic dialogue is to state clearly the facts which advance the action of the play. Its basic form is to be found in the Latin Mass or catechism: a simple statement and response, or a question-and-answer technique." Amen. Those pearls of pedagogy fall from the wilting pages of How Plays Are Made, which, frighteningly, is a contemporary guidebook for aspiring writers. Who knows how many theatrical careers, hurled between choppy illustrations from Shakespeare and Ibsen, have foundered on the unforgiving rocks of such instructions.
A less restrictive and infinitely more creative dialogue has informed two new plays from two new voices, performed in repertory by Rough Magic Theatre Company at Project arts centre in Dublin from this Friday. The first, Gerald Murphy's Take Me Away, is rife with the pathos and humour of a family of men trapped in dead-end jobs and believably staggered syntax. The second, Ioanna Anderson's Words Of Advice For Young People, involves articulate, witty characters reunited to bury the remains of a father who disappeared long ago but looms over them still.
They are both plays by young writers in which characters seem stifled, if not suffocated, by the previous generation. They are also plays that have been made possible by the initiative of a theatre company that this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. Two of the six new works nurtured through the Seeds programme established by Rough Magic and Dublin Fringe Festival, Rough Magic's artistic director, Lynne Parker, considers them contrapuntal plays.
"They're radically different as pieces of theatre," says Parker, who directs Take Me Away. Staging two productions in repertory, she says, creates a sense of festival for the alternating performances, generating "an increased opportunity for conversation, for dialogue, given that they were two different plays dealing with a related theme. Gerald writes brilliantly for people who are inarticulate, which is an extraordinary thing, whereas in Ioanna's play people have an extreme ability to express themselves."
For young playwrights, however, the challenge of self-expression has rarely seemed greater. Murphy and Anderson happily admit to having benefited from the crucible of collaboration and mentorship initiated by Parker and Loughlin Deegan, Rough Magic's literary manager and now producer. Both were already award-winning writers, but without Seeds and the platform a Rough Magic production can afford, Murphy asks rhetorically: "What were the other options for me?" For Anderson, whose first two plays were staged by her own company, the now "possibly permanently defunct" Greenlight Productions, the appeal of Seeds was to work with an established director and company. Although the Edinburgh-born writer speaks with fluent self-deprecation, it is still somewhat dispiriting that she can announce: "It's never a good time to be a writer in Ireland. It's never a good time to be a writer full stop. It's just not a good job." Consider, too, the title of her play.
Last year barely 30 new Irish plays were staged by professional theatre companies - about half the number produced in 2000. This year a chilly conservatism dominates the main stage of the Abbey, where not a single new play will be staged in its centenary programme. Although the smaller Peacock will stage six new plays, a feeling persists that the development and staging of new writing is considered a commercial liability. Is there a willingness among audiences to take a chance on new plays? "I think you have to massage it into being," says Parker. "You have to work harder to promote it and put it in front of an audience, because by definition it has no reputation to go with it."
Curiously, there is an evident hunger for new Irish writing abroad, particularly in Britain, where Rough Magic has had successful runs at the Bush Theatre in London and at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, places where Parker says there is a "specific interest in new work". Last year Stella Feehily's first play, Duck, toured the UK in a co-production between Out of Joint and the Royal Court, taking in the Peacock during Dublin Theatre Festival. Meanwhile, the work of the young Co Clare writer Ursula Rani Sarma has been translated into several other languages for international performances.
"It is Ireland's sacred duty," wrote the critic Kenneth Tynan in 1956, "to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness." When new voices from Ireland are embraced so strongly abroad, why should it seem like such a struggle to be heard at home? It is a point not lost on Philip Howard, artistic director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, which is dedicated to new writing. "For a theatre culture that is very literary and has this fantastically important literary history which the Brits just look up to with such cringe-worthy awe, the fact is that the actual development of new writers is surprisingly out of step here."
As mentor to Anderson during the Seeds project, and now director of the play it nurtured, Howard understands the importance of forging a constructive relationship with the writer, aided by experience with such esteemed Scottish playwrights as David Harrower and David Greig. Anderson considers their professional relationship to have lasted "longer than most marriages", and likewise its success is built on open communication. It is also set to continue: Anderson is under commission to write a new play for the Traverse.
"I'm very uncomfortable with the notion of the pedagogue," says Howard in liquid tones. In the Rough Magic offices after a day's rehearsals he arches his eyebrows at Anderson. "It is as much about the relationship you form and the dialogue you have \ about how the drama works. It's not about having tutorials on your play."
Gerald Murphy would agree. Mentored by Mike Bradwell of the Bush Theatre, Murphy considers script development to have a lot to do with personal relationships: whether you can trust the person you're working with and whether you feel that they understand where you're coming from. "I found Mike Bradwell's approach very direct and quite practical. It's the Socratic approach; asking questions. Why do you think this character is making this decision? Whose story is it? All those big questions."
Having produced eight drafts of her play, Anderson derives confidence from such a considered developmental process, but she doesn't feel that such a lengthy gestation ought to be the rule for writing plays. Similarly, Howard is careful not to portray the mentorship process as foolproof. "I think if it were as simple that every dramaturgical intervention produced quantifiable results, then you wouldn't have so much trouble getting funders to radically shift the way that they approach new writing. For every successful process, I've seen plays get worse because they've been wrongly dramaturged . . . . Part of the trick is knowing when to leave well enough alone."
Contrary to the frequent criticism that new plays are rushed onto the stage before they are ready to bear performance, Howard believes that Words Of Advice For Young People has benefited not just from the investment of time and money but also from Rough Magic's continued belief in Seeds.
In three years Seeds 2 is due to mark the company's continued support for emerging talent, but this time it is set to cultivate directorial skills as well. "We won't concentrate solely on young writers," says Parker, "because there is a huge paucity of opportunity for training young directors."
Although Rough Magic was one of the first independent theatre companies in the economic dilapidation of the 1980s, Parker finds the current economic climate even less generous. "It's very hard for people to get the wherewithal together to do their own work. We were ableto do the amount and type of shows that we could because it was possible then to live on nothing. Nowadays it just isn't."
Climbing the staircase of Rough Magic's offices in Dublin, you ascend into an archive of diversity. Upon the walls of a vertiginous stairwell hang posters that chart the varied production history of an independent company that has stayed its course since 1984. From early Irish premières of international works to tentative adaptations to fully-fledged new plays by the company's founding members, the posters bear the hallmarks of innocence and experience. Parker is aghast, however, that after 20 years in business anyone might now consider Rough Magic part of the Establishment.
"I would be quite shocked if people were to start considering an independent theatre company as an institution," she says. "I actually don't believe that any theatre should become an institution, and it does so at its peril. We have to work just as hard as we ever did, and that's a good thing." Especially when they are so committed to staging new writing.
With his wealth of experience, Philip Howard has no illusions. "There's no doubt about it; new writing is still risky." When so many others reel from the terror of the new, we should be grateful that there are still companies willing to take that risk. "I think that we have to be unexpected," says Parker of the demands made of Rough Magic ahead of the launch of its full anniversary programme next month. "If we have a particular skill, I think it's in identifying and bringing on new talent and making sure that talent will out."
Take Me Away opens at Project, Dublin, on Friday. Words Of Advice For Young People opens on February 20th. They will be performed in repertory over five weeks, presented as a double bill on Saturdays
