The Boy’s School in Smock Alley Theatre is at once the most beautiful and hellish theatre venue in Dublin. Lined with a four-storey ramp that climbs up the high-ceilinged room, the space is dominated by a redbrick facade containing arched windows and doorways – the remains of an older building the space was built around. It is beautiful and inconvenient, precious and precarious – one could argue that Smock Alley’s abandon of practicality in order to preserve its aesthetic is a metaphor for the endless fight to keep art alive in a capitalist-controlled world. That said, it’s an absolute pain to light.
I am involved in the Scene+Heard Festival of New Work in three capacities: lighting designer, producer and volunteer. That may sound like a lot, but in a festival consisting of 86 productions running three times apiece it barely scratches the surface of this mammoth undertaking. Scene+Heard has tapped into a much-sought resource working artists of all strands of performance need: a safe space to experiment with, and receive feedback on, new work. As such, they’ve received an incredible response and were not able to accommodate all its submissions even with their generous programme.
Scene+Heard is the brainchild of Creative Producer Caoimhe Connolly. I asked her where the idea for the festival came from. “I work on TV, film, theatre, festivals and with educational institutes all over Ireland, and I began to notice that some of the work could be underdeveloped or very self-indulgent”, Connolly tells The University Times by email. “I thought it would be hugely beneficial for artists to have an opportunity to test an excerpt of the work in front of a live audience to see what needed to be done before wasting huge time and money in mounting a full-scale production. It was for that reason the festival was born.”
That programme did stretch far enough to boast a number of Trinity graduates, working in every role from writer, to designer to actor – in some cases all three at once. Two such productions are the projects I am involved in, Click This and Owned, directed by Trinity alumni Sarah Bradley and Ailish Leavy respectively. Click This is a script in development, a darkly comic look at the effect our social media addiction is having on the way we think and feel, whereas Owned is a devised performance confronting the reality of slavery in the modern day. These are two staunchly different examples of Scene+Heard productions, but each resonates with the theme of this year’s festival, “Stories from the Zeitgeist”. I asked Connolly about the choice of theme: “When you read 500 scripts from all over, you begin to see the threads in themes and similar conversations cropping up everywhere. Each maker thinks their story is completely individual and for sure, their attack on the subject usually is unique, but it’s funny, each year we get a definite sense of what’s on the forefront of people’s minds, like a collective consciousness that will have a certain focus on stories that have been resonant with the Irish people that year. For example: refugee status, the Irish legal system’s attitude to abortion and rape, Tinder, click bait, mental health, the rise of the right, Trump, escapism and ‘Fairytales for Adults’.”
The only difference between slavery in the 19th century in the United States and trafficking today is that a human life is now worth considerably less
For everyone like me who has never heard this exotic word before, “zeitgeist” means “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time”, or to be literal, “time ghost” in German. It’s fair to say that we are living through a time which one can already feel developing into a defining moment for us as a people, both socially and, of course, politically.
It’s important to remember that these are all works in progress, and may be altered drastically before they are staged in their full form. Ailish Leavy’s concept for Owned began shifting, as so many devised pieces do, once she and her ensemble commenced research back in December.
“Initially, this piece was about the Irish slave trade in the 17th century, but as I conducted my research, I began to think about the idea of slavery in general and whether or not it is a racial issue”, Leavy tells me by email. “On further consideration, it became clear that slavery has been part of our lives since the beginning of civilisation. It was and is purely about profit. The only difference between slavery in the 19th century in the United States and trafficking today is that a human life is now worth considerably less. It is becoming blatantly clear that people are being treated as nothing more than commodities.”
Meanwhile, the ever-looming shadow of international terrorism is confronted in Faux Amis’s play International Relations. The play is inspired by writer Aoife Meagher’s experience of being in Paris during the 2015 terrorist attacks, during a short holiday with her French boyfriend. The play looks at five young people from cross-cultural backgrounds struggling to communicate, both culturally and linguistically (the play is written in French and English), over dinner on what transpires to be an historical evening.
“I wanted to create a play that started a conversation around change and difference in the hope that some of the threads we explore might inform a wider conversation about embracing diversity and cultural exchange”, Meagher tells me via email. “The play was inspired in part for me regarding my own experiences in France, and the challenges that come with building a life with a partner from a different culture. I wanted to talk about all of these things – but of course, filtered through our own humour, and with elements of our cripplingly embarrassing real-life experiences. It’s no joke to be the only potato-person in a room full of French cheekbones.”
On the other end of the zeitgeist, Trinity alumni are working in one of theatre’s most popular genres of the moment: children’s theatre. Drawn with Strings and Bombinate Theatre are sharing a slot to premiere their works in progress, Dragons Don’t Play Jazz and How To Be A Superhero. How To Be A Superhero is the latest project from Bombinate, last seen in Smock Alley for the First Fortnight festival with their award-winning play Half Light, an uplifting exploration of mental health. It follows the adventures of Susie and her Super Shredder across Dublin. Dragons Don’t Play Jazz, written and directed by Sionnán Ní Nulláin, tells the story of a little girl and a dragon who bond over a love of jazz music. Ní Nulláin’s intention is to look at the typical experiences that children go through, from moving home, to starting a new school, to loneliness and the loss of a loved one, but through the lens of an exaggerated world.
In such an immense programme, issues inevitably come up in relation to marketing and audience numbers. At times, it can be difficult for the individual shows to be heard amongst the scores of productions on offer. I was interested to know why Connolly prioritised getting the work onstage over a less packed, but potentially more marketable, festival model. She tells me that the drive behind the festival is not just to get bums on seats, but to make sure the right people see the right shows.
“[The festival] takes place just before first round of Arts Council Project Awards each year, and around the same time that the various Fringe and Theatre festivals nationwide start looking for and locking down their programme. A person with a vested interest will have a much stronger idea of what it is your art is about if they see a work-in-progress as opposed to reading a written proposal. We receive a huge amount of submissions each year for this reason, so we try to showcase as much as we physically can. We also run Producers Workshops, put out an open call for performers who are not already attached to a project and are constantly introducing people to make sure that each piece of work has the support/team it needs to be [produced].”
She is having her first ever birthday party, and as we sing her “Happy Birthday” and partake in some lemon drizzle cake, she tells us about the strange episodes she would have growing up
Many of the productions I touch base with have benefitted from Smock Alley’s Generator Programme, a training programme for creative producers which teams participants up with several shows to help with their management and publicity. Both Ní Nulláin and Meagher are full of praise for their generator producers, Neasa O’Callaghan and John Dennehy respectively. Meagher is in awe of Dennehy, who has “been a guiding light in making our show come to life. John came to us with all the tips and tricks he had garnered from the Generator Programme, ready to put them to use in real life, and I am frankly astounded at both his reserves of energy and his sheer determination in promoting and producing this show”. Dragons Don’t Play Jazz has also benefitted immensely from the programme, with O’Callaghan helping the team to book workshops with primary schools.
My trip to Scene+Heard during the first week of the festival brings me to The Birthday Party, a one-woman show being developed by Mayo artist and Lír graduate Áine O’Hara. The Boy’s School has been strewn with balloons, party hats and glittery decorations, encircling O’Hara who is bound to a chair. After a kindly audience member unties her, she introduces herself as 73-year-old Maisie (based on the artist’s grandmother) who died on her birthday in the year 2000. She is having her first ever birthday party, and as we sing her “Happy Birthday” and partake in some lemon drizzle cake, she tells us about the strange episodes she would have growing up, of which she never spoke for fear of being taken to an asylum. O’Hara formed the piece from hospital records and stories of people with mental illness from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. It is evident that this research sought to to find out if people’s attitudes have changed in the last few decades.
Cue a sharp key change as O’Hara’s birthday party is cleared away to make room for its slot partner Something Blue, which brands itself as a dark comedy. The festival has made an effort to pair up plays with similar themes – such as Drawn With Strings and Bombinate, or Owned and its partner Syrius which deals with the refugee crisis. Perhaps based on their themes of “subverted celebration”, The Birthday Party’s companion piece is about a bride who, unable to deal with her fiancée’s sudden death, replaces him with a fashion mannequin. The next morning I saw the show’s producer on Facebook asking if anyone wanted a strapping, lipstick-covered mannequin she had going spare – let’s hope it continues its acting career elsewhere.
The two pieces feel radically different, yet it’s fascinating to see how they both interpreted the same trope in such variant styles.
Outside in the front of house, volunteers shower us with questionnaires asking us to give feedback on the performances we just saw. They have also lined sweet jars along the wall with the name of each play pasted on the front, beside a bowl of bonbons, and ask us to drop a sweet into the plays we’d like to see more of. The small lobby is packed with people just coming in, going out or milling around with a drink waiting for the next round of plays to commence. It’s impressive how such an enthusiastic, busy atmosphere has been cultivated in such a small space – but after all, as Connolly says, the people here are the ones eager to find new work and get a taste of the “zeitgeist”.
Before I leave, I meet an actor from the play I was lighting in the Boys’ School. I am relieved to learn that despite the cacophony of plays, lack of resources and awkward venue, audiences were all too happy to come and see the show – and that despite the dodgy lighting rig, they were able to see the stage.
Correction: 5.15pm February 18th, 2017
An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that Caoimhe Connolly is the Director of Programming and Finance of Smock Alley. In fact, it is Cliona Dukes.
Scene + Heard: A Festival of New Work is running in the Smock Alley Theatre until 4th March. The full programme can be found on the Smock Alley website.
