Pan Pan's ambitious new project is designed to awaken the senses of both actors and audience, director Gavin Quinn tells Peter Crawley.
At the age of five or six, as a group of people stood laughing at him, Tom Hickey realised that he would become an actor. For his part, Scott Fredericks simply remembers that he had always wanted to be somebody else. Alan Stanford chose his profession "in order to survive my own shyness". And, perhaps most strikingly, as Billie Traynor lay on the ground, having been stabbed by a mugger, she decided that she couldn't leave her daughter, nor allow herself to die without having acted.
There are 100 different answers in response to just one question - "Why do you think you became an actor?" - at the heart of One: Healing With Theatre, a monumental multimedia project devised by Pan Pan theatre company. Beginning life as an unedited 14-hour film, shot over a year and a half (which began screenings, in two-hour instalments, last week in the Temple Bar Diversions Festival), it has yielded a hefty but beautifully designed book and now culminates in a gargantuan-scale live performance in which 100 actors perform for 100 audience members in 100 specially constructed rooms.
Its immensity alone would give a director sleepless nights.
Yet, in the offices of Pan Pan last week, amid a kinetic swirl of activity - making last-minute edits to another video project, finalising the rehearsal schedule with performers and unpacking boxes loaded with tomes - director Gavin Quinn resembled the eerily calm centre of a perfect storm. He watched a video monitor carefully as Alan Stanford flickered on screen long enough to say, "Your job is to disappear into the character and let the character do the work."
Whether Quinn, for 14 years a co-artistic director with Aedín Cosgrove of Dublin's leading theatrical iconoclasts, agreed with the statement was impossible to tell.
Later, in the cavernous warehouse of the Digital Hub, Quinn walked around an enormous structure with surreal proportions. Still under construction, the set curved around him like a magnet, or a horseshoe, its myriad doors becoming as disorientating as an optical illusion.
"It feels more like five hundred rooms," he noted, drinking in the immensity of sculptor Andrew Clancy's design for the first time.
"For the audience, even finding the room is going to be quite a big deal. It's interactive in one sense; like trying to find your place on the stage."
After we sealed ourselves into one of these tiny cubicles, arranged with a couch for the reclining spectator and a chair for the actor ("It's almost like the opposite of the psychiatrist's chair," Quinn assured. "The person on the couch doesn't do the talking."), Quinn recalled the genesis of the idea.
"There was a moment when it crystallised in my mind, when I was in Germany to see an opera that I was supposed to be directing. It was a really odd experience. When you're on your own your mind behaves differently, doesn't it? You are looking around you a lot more, there's no one showing you this and that. So it becomes this sort of heightened experience. First of all I thought if we could find this way of making a performance with this singular heightened experience, this singular intensity, where the mind is more awake because you're on your own, this would be a way to make a performance."
While he considered this in the hotel room, Quinn got a phone call to say that the soprano was sick, and the show was cancelled. "So I was there on my own questioning, why am I here? Did the show actually exist?"
IT'S THIS COMBINATION of stimulation and awe that Quinn is hoping to achieve with the juxtaposition of enormous scale and acute intimacy of One. "I think the feeling you'll get from this is just how immediate it is," he says. "The audience is going to feel very awake." Does he feel, then, that audiences are traditionally passive in the theatre? "It's one of the reasons we did this project," he nods. "I feel that the audience becomes passive sometimes when they're watching a live show and they don't really think about - or probably don't even realise - that what they're watching is a live show.
"Here, you definitely know that the performer is a real person. It's an awakening for the audience that theatre is live and unique and can't be emulated by any other form. You're putting yourself in the hot zone. There's no just sitting back."
At times, though, Pan Pan's more glib writings make the project resemble a broad panacea for almost every ailment in contemporary theatre: "As we observe a meteoric rise in cinema-going and a crisis in theatre attendance, the perception of audiences of actors is an uncertain one . . . Once an audient has experienced a close meeting with an actor, he or she will feel naturally more connected to actors in live performances." The actors, who have already let Quinn's camera into their bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms, will now stand before their spectators shorn of the protection of character or script, exposing themselves to an extraordinary degree - even performing their first audition piece. "I just hope I don't get somebody I know," one actor told me.
Quinn may speak of the actors as collaborators ("It's their material. All I'm doing is facilitating that with theatre.") but he understands that with the performance contract so denuded, the actors seem vulnerable.
"Making a show or a performance with anyone is all about trust," he says. "So what we were saying when we rang the first actor was, 'trust us'. We're doing this for positive reasons. We want you to work, not just with us, but also with the entire acting community. It's hard to go beyond that: you either trust me or you don't. You can't explain everything."
STILL, WITH THE surprises that Pan Pan tends to keep in stock, it is not always easy or wise to take Quinn at his word. Can a director who has sprung microphones and cameras on his unsuspecting audiences, who has deconstructed Macbeth and located it in a schoolroom, or who is currently working on a project called Oedipus Loves You really believe in the redeeming quality of theatre? Will he let the healing begin, or is he just being facetious?
"No," he replies. "In the beginning you think 'healing' is slightly hippyish, slightly new agey. But actually if you figure out what it means, it's just a way to describe what we think is closest to the experience the audience is going to have and also to our artistic aims. We do think that this show is a process. Bringing the audience through the process suggests the healing nature of having a series of experiences."
For all the documentarian efforts of the book and the film, Quinn is still excited by the ephemeral nature of the live performance.
"I think it's important that part of theatrical history and personality is not lost, and a lot of the time it is lost. It dies with the actors or dies with the memory. Documentation of this kind of living artwork is very important."
Yet, with just 10 performances of One, nobody will be able to record or even take in the totality of the performance. Despite its reliance on intimate individual exchanges, the experience is ultimately as collective as that of any theatre where spectators exchange their experiences and interpretations. As Quinn says, when the show is over "the performance will continue fluttering down the street".
"This is a once-off event," he says. "It's not going to happen again and it's important in life to take stock of the present. The past and the future aren't that important - especially in the theatre. What's important is the intensity of the present."