Shona McGarry
Societies Editor
Players on a Week Six night is never quiet. And Co-op directors on day one of Week Six are never easy to get a hold of. Hours of rehearsals and last-minute costume checks stand between me and an elusive interview with anyone remotely involved with this year’s show – the curiously-titled Orb of Azazel: A Cattermonkey Uprising. When I do get a chance to talk to Oonagh, one of the directors, it’s an hour until the curtain rises on Co-op 2012, the creative lovechild of Jack Gleeson, Neil Fitzpatrick, Heather Walsh, and Oonagh O’Donovan.
First things first: what is a Co-op? We’ve all heard of the supermarket, and the bank, and the bookshop, but it’s safe to say this isn’t any of those. Oonagh tells me it’s “the biggest production we do every year and it’s not even based on drama.” So what is it, then? “It’s all about the experience we have,” she says earnestly. “We try to get every different, any kind of person we can, get them involved in our production.” So Co-op isn’t full of your typical artsy, denim-jacketed, drama student? “It’s just a way of getting people into the society who wouldn’t normally be involved in Players.” Co-op is a bit of a unique experience, then: it’s something that you might as well audition for, even if you’re an Engineering student whose last foray into the theatre was your fourth class school trip to The Ark. It’s not all about the drama kids, but that’s not the only thing that makes it a Players anomaly. It’s the only Players production that has its roots in a strong tradition – even if that tradition does involve time travel, misfits, and someone saying that their testicles have retracted. And believe me, I didn’t make any of those up. Not even the last one.
The Wright Brothers meet a D4 and a sex maniac
Oonagh laughs when I ask her about this traditional format. “There’s a group of ragtag misfits who get together to fight evil and save the world and travel through time.” Did they have that this year? Of course. “And there are these really specific ones that we’ve upheld, like God has to be part of it, one of the main characters has to die, and there’s a line that’s said… ‘How cold are you?’ ‘So cold that my testicles have retracted.’” Additionally, within the tradition of even having a Freshers’ Co-op, comes the method of writing it, something that this year’s directors couldn’t emulate. “There’s a whole Co-op tradition that directors go away for a week and write it. Then they would have most of it done, they would have this great bonding trip.” Sounds like a good time. But what happened? “First of all our schedules completely conflicted,” but after that it was a decision “to write the play around them.” That meant taking daily two-hour rehearsals, where improv was the order of the day (“Really fun games, really high energy. The first three weeks were an introduction into improvisation, and every week we’d push them harder to more difficult improv games…”) and then, after-hours, putting a show together. Oonagh admits that “the writing process was hard. Sometimes you’d be writing eleven hours a day. You were just so exhausted.” Characters that the cast made can be seen in the finished product. “We really got into building up characters which I found encompasses the whole co-op ethos.” This isn’t a case of four people coming together to write their own play. This is a project that involves everybody to come up with the creative goods. And if improv isn’t your thing, it doesn’t matter. Co-op can lead you to other theatrical places besides the stage.
the evil conquistadors hear some unwanted information
Talking to the resident techie, Deirdre van Wolvelaere, proves this point. Initially planning on getting involved in the tech side of things, she ended up auditioning for Co-op 2011 and spending six weeks in the Co-op machine. As Oonagh says, after Co-op people “just want to get involved and stick around.” Now a self-confessed Players addict (“I just love Players” she says, before calling the lighting guy, Jonathan, “the best person I’ve ever met.”) Deirdre agrees. After Co-op she started “going to get-ins” – the Sunday set-up of the shows for the next week – at first just “waiting around, being told to do stuff.” That “waiting around” soon turned into a position as Tech Manager, which, she says, came about by being patient. “People think to get into tech here you need to know stuff, but you don’t at all. You just have to hang around and be interested, and, as much as it sucks, you have to be patient.”
So, now you know how to become Tech Manager – audition for next year’s Co-op, stick around, spend your weekends in the theatre and soon you too could be wearing a black committee zippy. But here’s a trickier one: how to become a producer of the biggest production in Players? House Manager Donal McKeating – one of this year’s five – explains. “Producing is a sign that you’re involved in Players,” he says, and Co-op itself can be “a stepping-stone to something else.” But don’t go thinking that producing is a definite path to directing. “I don’t think one leads to the other,” he says. Add to that the fact that only one of this year’s directors is a former producer, and you’ve got a case against the common belief that Players is a clique. Oonagh acknowledges this, saying that “a clique does form around [Co-op] for a while, but I think that’s just because you’re in such an intense experience for six weeks, and that would happen naturally.” Deirdre agrees, as far as tech is concerned, anyway. “We’re there of our own time, not getting paid… we did four days work and we probably had a total of eight or nine hours sleep. An unbelievable amount of work went into it.” When you’re in an enclosed environment for such a long time – think the first half of Michaelmas term – it’s no surprise cast and crew become closer than bark on a tree, to use an expression that I picked up from watching too much SpongeBob SquarePants. However, set-and-poster designer Grace Healy admits that she didn’t immediately warm to Co-op when she joined Players as a first year.
“I had issues with it,” she says, curling up on one of the old rehearsal room chairs. “I feel like sometimes it gives out the impression that you have to ‘get in’ to Players and that Co-op is your ‘in’, and if you’re not in Co-op you haven’t got ‘in’ with ‘the Players’. You hear that phrase being bandied about a lot.” However, like Oonagh, she believes that the clique “does fade” and only thinks that the drama society is cliquey “in the way that all societies are.” The difference, she says, is that “if you’re not contributing, you can’t stick around.” Whether you think it’s cliquey or not, everyone is playing their part in one way or another – through producing, set designing, poster making or even just going to see the shows. Having not been involved in Co-op before, she now describes herself as a “fan”, and sees Co-op as an important part of making sure that Players remains a vibrant place that thrives on “new faces”. “That’s another reason we’re not a clique,” she says. With Co-op, “we’re not looking for new people to add to the clique. The hope is that the co-oppers stick around and contribute.” Grace herself is the whizz kid behind the set – with its ever-changing murals and innovative two-storey design – and the deliciously old-style poster. “I love old-y stuff,” she says, grinning. “I found a really old map of the world from like the 1600s. It’s really inaccurate. Hopefully it’s eye-catching enough.” As for the set: “Our main idea was that we were going to have a rotating platform which would have been class. But if the design doesn’t match the script you have to cut it…” Of course, neither Grace nor her set constructer, treasurer Jack Toner, laid their eyes on the script until it was written, and that wasn’t until week three. She says that it was “very collaborative. I’m really happy with how it is now.” And so she should be – it’s not every day you see a set that is at once some godforsaken town in the Irish countryside, and Einstein’s secret base in Antarctica.
einstein copes with impending doom
Speaking of godforsaken towns and secret bases, what about the actual show itself? It’s all very well to sit around discussing light boards and eleven-hour shifts, but if the show’s no good then no amount of fancy tech is going to save it. Fear not. It’s a bit of a revelation. Thursday night was a predictable sell-out, and the cast attacked their script (and their stage) with gusto. The premise: seven (or something) misfits go on a quest to capture a magical orb before evil bandits get there first. (“It’s from the bible,” Oonagh tells me. “These angels had this all-powerful orb and… if any man were to get their hands on this orb they’d only use it for evil.”) The misfits are – among others – a memorable Irish lad who only wants to play a bit of GAA (Tomas the hurler who ends up in Morocco for a match while wearing a soccer jersey was one of the brightest stars), a D4 chap with a degree in Gender Equality with a very square pair of glasses, and a chavvy girl who only talks in sex metaphors – and the evil bandits are a bunch of camp conquistadors. Along the way they meet a funny little group of colonials – all drawn-on moustaches and khaki shorts – a girly James Joyce, the Cripple of Inishmaan (“I’m not drunk, I’m just severely crippled”) and the Wright Brothers (“two wrongs don’t make a right, they make two Wright brothers.”). As if that wasn’t enough, the live, dressed-up band played a series of songs that the actors roared along to, and the whole thing culminated in a showdown at Einstein’s secret lair in – you guessed it – Antarctica.
Tea with the explorers, a vampire, and a rhino head. All in a Co-op day’s work!
If this year’s co-op has taught us anything – besides the fact that anything drink-related is usually a winner – it’s that it has no creative limits. With co-op, anything goes. Einstein can be a girl (a very exuberant one). It can accuse itself of having racial stereotypes. You can say ‘F the Brits’ if that’s the main thing on your mind. And you can go anywhere in the world, even if it’s just to hear some of the most ear-scratching accents imaginable. Not to mention the fact that you can make hand-puppets relevant to just about anything. The only thing this year’s effort was sorely lacking in was a typically sloppy Co-op kiss. (There was one tiny one, but I’m not counting that. They made up for it with the sex jokes. And the bit when someone says: ‘You’re sure about this, Einstein?’ to a girl in an Arnotts lab coat.) There was even a pub brawl thrown in there, a bit of IRA action (an IRA letter read out in a D4 accent was one of the most sparkly moments), and a lecture from an economist. It really has something for everyone. As Donal says: “That’s the beauty of it. And I think it always is a hilarious show, so to see something like Co-op is something just so different. It is ridiculous, there’s hundreds of characters. Anyone who isn’t in Players will go and have an amazing time.” Deirdre says that “seeing it work just makes all of the hours that we were awake and not sleeping worth it.” On opening night, Oonagh suddenly sees the week flashing before her eyes. “We’re planning the get-out already,” she says. “It’s terrifying that we’re already planning that far ahead.” And that’s the challenge of Players – great shows go up and down in the course of one week, during which – this time – you could find yourself in Antarctica, a pub fight, in the presence of WB Yeats, or on the SS Suffragette. “You really feel part of something,” says Donal. “It reminds everyone why we’re here.”
the Cripple of Inis Maan and associates spot something in the distance…
