As Rough Magic marks 25 years of making theatre, founder member Lynne Parker recalls the early struggles and looks forward to the future
‘YOU LEAVE your ego at the door,” actor Barry McGovern confides, during a short break from rehearsing Rough Magic’s new production of Michel Tremblay’s extraordinary choral drama
Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer
. The white light of an early spring morning floods the rehearsal room, but the ensemble cast transform the space into a dark sultry summer night with their overlapping voices. McGovern’s orotund bass pulses underneath the buzz of Cathy Belton’s soft cries; Aoife Duffin’s laughing phrases lift the baritone whispers of Diarmuid Noyes’ affirmations of passion. Jane Brennan and Eleanor Methven share sentences. Arthur Riordan and Darragh Kelly share sighs. Ronan Leahy and Aíne Ní Mhuirí divide a confessional proclamation between them, while Ruth Hegarty builds a powerful rhythm with a chorus of repeated “nos”. There is something deeply moving, almost religious, in the way the discrete voices begin to fuse into one.
As director Tom Creed waves an invisible conductor's baton and brings the crescendo to a close, I know why I have been invited to witness this piece of theatre in the making. This was supposed to be an interview with Rough Magic artistic director Lynne Parker, who was honoured with a special tribute award for her contribution to Irish theatre at The Irish TimesIrish Theatre Awards last week, but Parker continually deflects her own achievements to what she calls the "core collaboration at the heart of Rough Magic", indeed at the heart of the theatre. Watching the rehearsal of Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summeris like a physical embodiment of that theory of creative communion.
"Rough Magic is a system," Parker explains, "based on a team, on the idea of the collective. It has never been spearheaded by just one individual. It's been based on partnerships, on pluralism, all along and there's great strength in that. I think it's very clear that [ The Irish Timesaward] is about Rough Magic and the work that we've done as a company over the last 25 years. It's not about honouring me, and I'm be taking the award on behalf of many other people: all the designers, directors, actors we work with. They may not be on the books all the time – we couldn't afford that – but their energy, their opinions are vital. Really, it is that ensemble ethic that has ensured that Rough Magic has survived this long. Because we're a collective, we can support a myriad of ideas, styles, projects, so that we've never just been one thing, and that has made it easier to sustain over such a long period of time."
Parker could sit and refract attention all day – “leaving your ego at the door”, as McGovern puts it, seems to be a fundamental Lynne Parker strategy. It is all about the company, the collective. However, as Pauline McLynn acknowledged in her tribute to Parker at the theatre awards last week, it is her commitment to Rough Magic over the past 25 years that has ensured the theatre group still exists and thrives when many of its fellow-founding members – writer Declan Hughes, McLynn herself, actor Stanley Townsend, among others – have moved on.
PARKER REMEMBERS the excite- ment of the company’s first few years, when, having graduated from Trinity College, the group of like-minded theatre-lovers decided to found their own company to produce the work that they wanted to see in Irish theatres. “There was nothing for us here as young artists in the 1980s,” Parker explains. “There was a terrible inertia in established theatre at the time. The Abbey had closed down its director programme, the work that it was doing was retrospective, and there was still a feeling that the Abbey was looking at Irish plays for Irish people. There was a definite suspicion of the younger generation too, and I remember when I worked at the Abbey for the first time, there was this attitude where they couldn’t see how this little girl who came in on her bike was a director. A director was a middle-aged man who spoke with a posh accent and wore a suit.
“But we chose to set up a theatre company in Dublin,” she continues, “when many of our friends went to New York. The contemporary international work that we were interested in just wasn’t being done at all and that was our opportunity. But it wasn’t just that we were giving ourselves work to do. We believed that this was work that needed to be seen here. We were very much driven by what we felt nobody else was owning up to: the huge influence of American and British film and television on our generation, the importance of those cultures on our doorstep.”
Introducing the work of Caryl Churchill, David Mamet and Howard Barker to Irish audiences for the first time, Rough Magic quickly made a mark on Irish theatre culture. "The show that really put us on the map," she remembers, "was Top Girls. Somehow we managed to get Arts Council funding, which was sort of unheard of at the time. It was different working in the theatre then. In the 1980s, it was possible to live on virtually nothing, so we all signed on, but were working 24 hours a day in Players Theatre putting shows together. We did seven shows in our first year. That's just not possible for the younger generation now.
“But at the same time there’s greater opportunity for them than we had. There is more support, more bursaries, more opportunity to travel. I mean there were no drama studies at the colleges [in the 1980s] and I suppose part of the excitement for me was that drama was extra-curricular, that it was mischief: it was mitching. Although I did get my degree in the end – a miracle – all of my focus was in Players. At the same time it was a valuable way to learn about theatre, and I got a trade out of it.
“When we started Rough Magic,” she continues, “there was a real lack of enthusiasm for finding the next generation of practitioners. You couldn’t get arrested. But that’s all changed now, and while it’s more difficult for younger artists to produce work now, people are actually looking for them, and looking at them.”
IN FACT, ROUGH Magic has been one of the major agents of change in supporting emerging artists, through their landmark SEEDS programme, which is now in its fourth cycle. As Parker explains, “it came to a stage where we – Loughlin Deegan and Ali Curran were with the company at the time – felt it was necessary to introduce ourselves to the next generation of theatre artists. We thought, ‘How are they going to start in the theatre world? How are they going to make the transition?’
“We started with writers, offering them development, but it soon became clear that that wasn’t enough, that there was a huge, real gap for training directors, production managers, designers. Now it is the energy of these younger theatre-makers that is taking Rough Magic into the future.”
This year is the 25th anniversary of Rough Magic’s founding, and Parker has taken this milestone as an opportunity to bring together some of the company’s original members and their new SEEDS recruits. “But it’s not just that we’re doing a retrospective,” she is keen to make clear, “because the retrospective work will actually be looked at through new eyes, by the SEEDS directors. Then we will be showcasing new work by people like Arthur Riordan and Hélène Montague who have been working with Rough Magic for years. So the whole thing is very much about now. Even though some of the people involved have been with us from the beginning, what we’re doing with our anniversary celebration is brand new.
“Twenty-five years is a real achievement,” she continues, with pride but avoiding self-congratulation. “And in this current [economic] climate, we can’t help but remember how lucky we are, how our very survival through one recession and into another is a feat in itself. I mean, there were times when I had to seriously consider the company’s future, the viability of its existence, especially when the first group of members began to move on and that initial drive we had was changing.
“But then I realised that the company itself had only just begun and that there was a massive amount of potential that needed to be realised. I mean, I worked myself a lot in London in the 1990s, and very successfully, but it was different there – the very context in which I [created] work was not there – and I made a decision then to put my energies into working here, with a company of intelligent actors and artists, where we could be responsive to the world around us.
“But reflecting on how important that has been to how Rough Magic developed over 25 years makes me worry about the undermining of the company in the contemporary funding climate. Because there is an undeniable value to the fact that groups of people of a like mind can come together for a shared experience, over and over, evolving, getting better all the time.”
Even though Rough Magic’s future is secure, Parker extends her thoughts beyond the company, in a statement that encapsulates Rough Magic’s contribution to Irish theatre. “The company is a vital part of the ecology of the arts and I’d hate to see that disappear.”
Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summerruns at the Project Arts Centre until Mar 28. Rough Magic mark their 25th anniversary with a series of events including workshops and performances at the Project Arts Centre from Apr 2 to 5
SPELLBINDING TOUCH OF MAGIC
Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summeris Rough Magics 100th production. Last year saw Rough Magic launch one of its most ambitious productions, The Parker Project. A tribute to Stewart Parker, Lynne Parker's playwright uncle, Parker says "Stewart of course had a huge influence on me and my discovery of the theatre."
Other highlights from the last 25 years include:
1984 Top Girlsby Caryl Churchill, Project Arts Centre
1985 The Caucasian Chalk Circleby Bertolt Brecht, Project Arts Centre
1991 Digging for Fireby Declan Hughes, Project Arts Centre
1995 Danti-Danby Gina Moxley, Project Arts Centre
1996 Northern Starby Stewart Parker, Project Arts Centre
2004 Improbable Frequencyby Arthur Riordan, O'Reilly Theatre, 2005 Don Carlos by Friedrich von Schiller, Project Arts Centre
2005
Don Carlosby Friedrich von Schiller, Project Arts Centre
