Behind the scenes of Irish theatre simmer concerns about funding - and whether Shakespeare should be banned, writes Peter Crawley
As far as governing themes go, "Tearing up the Script" is just asking for trouble. But enshrining the topics of the fourth Theatre Forum Ireland conference under that title, Willie White of Project Arts Centre, and curator of this year's conference events, discussions and interviews, intended to be provocative. "As we meet again for another year," he asked, "how do we avoid our groove becoming a rut?" This was not only a very good question, it ran right to the heart of Theatre Forum. A resource organisation and muscular lobby group that essentially forged its identity in the heat of 2003, following a period of threatening cuts to arts funding, Theatre Forum has never been defined by complacency.
If conflict is the soul of drama, White arranged a programme intent on stimulating and provoking the delegates - from a keynote address by actor Fiona Shaw to an interview with Michael Colgan of the Gate; from a free-range brainstorming session entitled Open Space to panel discussions on dramatic texts called You Make Me Feel Brand New and I Want To Break Free, titles that made one question both the orthodoxy of writer-centred theatre in Ireland, and their organisers' taste in pop music.
Yet anyone expecting an exhortation to iconoclasm from Shaw's invigorating keynote address would have been in for a shock - determined, as she was, to avoid any shocks. Introduced by the artist Dorothy Cross in evolutionary terms - "there are certain species that evolve quicker than others," said Cross, "her rate is much more advanced" - Shaw's first response was physical, approaching the podium with a low, swinging gait and rising, as if by Darwinian progression, to her full height. From there she could do no wrong. "I really don't think I can tell you anything," Shaw began, "except a bit about what I've learned on my travels."
HER BRIEF HISTORY of the theatre, from Euripides to Robert LePage, was rooted in a fluent understanding of language. The script, far from being something to shred, was what Shaw most exalted. "If an actor wants to be worthy of it," she said, her gestures so strong that her words seemed to attain physical properties, "they have to sort of swell their souls, swell all their experience to inhabit something that is worthy of an audience."
Although she would talk of Ibsen, Yeats, Brecht and Beckett, Shakespeare was the core of Shaw's address. Dotting her analysis of Shakespearean verse and metre with several recitations and entertainingly donnish asides, she illustrated, only partly facetiously, English, Irish and French deliveries, concluding: "What you discover is that rhythm is the key to the unconscious."
SHAW'S CAREER MAY not strike you as a model of textual reverence. She famously performed the role of Richard II, acted in Deborah Warner's controversial production of Footfalls which was shut down by the Beckett Estate in 1994, and says she originally rehearsed her bold portrayal of Medea for the Abbey while wearing a Darth Vadar mask. "I don't think the theatre's job is to be very reverent about anything," she said shortly after the address. "It's nice to go against received notions of things. And you discover that through play." However, she added: "You can only test the play if it's willing to be tested." In a short, polite and extremely tense interview, Shaw was less willing to discuss her own script, the details and rhythms that inform her performances, whether they be her artistic processes or, more contentiously, the place of her nationality in her work. "You don't want to reduce her to anything," Shaw said of Medea at one point, but she could as easily have been referring to herself.
How Shaw might have responded to Pol Heyvaert's suggestion, during a later panel discussion, that we ban Shakespearean performances for 20 years is similarly hard to deduce. "Repertoire theatre leads to a limitation culture," said the member of Belgium's unorthodox Victoria theatre company, a point that proved satisfyingly controversial and might have made for a less flexible interpretation of the general theme. ("Tearing up the Script" lent itself metaphorically to any number of quite distinct industry concerns: the venue and marketing managers who called for more entertaining product; the artist advocates who called for "freedom to fail"; the audience advocates who called for less "freedom to fail"; and those who correctly pointed out that such cross-currents of interest had steered the conversation into something.)
On one point, however, everyone came together: the announcement, in a lecture theatre in the University of Limerickfull of arts practitioners, that Seamus Brennan had just been appointed Minister for Arts, something that prompted an immediate, collective gasp.
This was nothing compared to the riveting, productive and free-form nature of Open Space, an event of the delegates, by the delegates and for the delegates, in which people were free to join and depart any topic of conversation that interested them. These subjects ranged from the industry-specific (VAT on artists' royalties) to the timely (the infrastructure necessary for musical theatre) to the broadly philosophical (What is Irish theatre?).
The most delicately worded topic was also the most devastating: "How do we approach the issue of encouraging the Arts Council to cut companies who are past it to enable new talent to breathe?" This last one, initiated by Annie Ryan of The Corn Exchange, was very well attended and far too absorbing to stray from.
Within a circle of participants, three profoundly revealing points emerged: that everyone felt the Irish theatre had reached a critical mass where new talent was suffocated by eternally-funded panjandrums; that everyone could think of companies that ought to have their funding removed (none was named); and that nobody could truly fathom the decisions of the Arts Council. Whether or not any conclusions could be reached by any of these discussions - no matter how vigorous they became - the Open Space event will doubtless be repeated beyond the confines of the Theatre Forum, having proved deeply contentious and enormously successful.
Which brings us neatly to Michael Colgan. The director of the Gate Theatre has never been short of success or slow to voice a contrary opinion and these go down very well at a theatre conference. Colgan, moreover, is incapable of giving a less than enjoyably forthright interview, even when questioned by so firm a friend as Dr Maureen Gaffney. "He's hugely successful," Dr Gaffney began. "He's a man about town. He's an impresario. He's an enfant terrible. He's a very big personality. He's very warm. He's very engaging. He's very charming. Some people think he's arrogant." This, clearly, was not going to be a grilling. But Colgan was prepared to discuss his character, his outlook and his perceptions. "To survive," he said, "you have to be persuasive." To illustrate this point he described a scenario of himself as the man who cannot fix his car, but who can force a mechanic from his bed at 3am, have him change the tyre in the rain and then, when the mechanic raises the subject of money, Colgan will reply: "Oh, don't worry. We're fine."
Colgan had many things to say, most of them provocative - that he will not go to the theatre "unless someone tells me it's great", that he finds directors are generally not ruthless enough, that an unfettered ego and personal taste are essential to his business, that the theatre is not working hard enough "to keep up with [ an audience's] imagination"; and that Irish theatre criticism is uninformed and dreadfully inadequate.
CONSIDERING WHEN HE might leave the Gate - Colgan has served as the theatre's artistic director for 25 years - he had this to say: "I think it's when I think I'm bigger than the job."
Aideen Howard's thought-provoking discussion with Marius von Mayenburg, dramaturg with Berlin's Schaubühne, about taking new approaches to the theatrical repertoire may have seemed to subscribe more neatly to the overall theme, tearing up and repositioning the script in order to keep pace with an audience's imagination. But Michael Colgan's personal mix of the deliberately antagonistic and persuasively charismatic fits that model too.
There is something compelling about the authoring and shredding of every text, be they part of the repertoire, new dramas, or our own scripts.
