Welcome to the sound factory. Crazy Dog Theatre founder Roger Gregg offers Donald Clarkea taste of the company's aural invention
Strange events are afoot in the western reaches of Temple Bar. Before Orpheus gets to sing his lush duet with Eurydice, some technical business has to be sorted out. "I have this Phoebe-coming-out-of-hell sound. It's Number 39," Roger Gregg says. He fiddles with an electronic keyboard and causes an apocalyptic swelling to fill the rehearsal space. Persephone, a pink fright wig on her head, a whip clutched in her right hand, ponders for a moment, before nodding her approval.
Crazy Dog Theatre, Ireland's most extravagantly ambitious radio company, is putting the final touches to its public deconstruction of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The dogs, under the direction of Deirdre Molloy, will be stepping away from the microphone and putting themselves before the public at the Project Arts Centre tonight. Mindful of the demands of live theatre, they have devised much physical business with which to adorn the aural invention that has won the company a significant loyal fan-base. But The Stuff of Myth, which stars such Crazy Dog regulars as Karen Ardiff, Morgan Jones and David Murray, is, it seems, still shaped by bangs, whooshes and tinkles.
When the actors break for tea, Roger Gregg, the company's founder and key energy source, takes me round his sound factory. "Here we have a hydrophone," he says. "Well. It's a microphone inside a washing-up glove." Sure enough, such an improvised appliance hangs suspended in a blue basin ready to amplify the sound a submerged cymbal makes when stroked with a bow. Elsewhere we discover a drum containing a hundred ball bearings and a shoe-box packed with bird-calls.
Gregg, whose shaved head and tidy beard lend him the air of a theatrical fakir, brings eager enthusiasm to his explanations of the various noisy gizmos. Raised on the outskirts of Detroit, but resident in Ireland since 1980, Gregg has been a student of radio drama for 30 or so years. While other kids were collecting rock records, he was listening intently to such masters of audio comedy as the Firesign Theatre. In 1998, when he formed Crazy Dog, he began to bring that keen fervour to bear on a series of grand dramas for RTÉ Radio 1 (most now available on CD). The Apocalypse of Bill Lizard saw the titular detective searching for the unknowable. The Last Harbringer imagined a heightened alien version of our own planet. Diabolic Playhouse made further journeys to the Wild West, the future and hell. All trade on the limitless freedom radio dramatists have to conjure up fantastic vistas. It is, thus, a little surprising that to discover Gregg inviting the public to see how the magic is made. Is this not a little like the Wizard of Oz volunteering to reveal what lies behind his curtain?
"Yes, there is that danger," he agrees. "But I also believe in the wonder of theatre. It is not necessarily the dressing that makes theatre. It is the energy and the affection you bring to the material. If you are full of energy people are prepared to see elephants if you want them to." Gregg goes on to explain that The Stuff of Myth - a characteristically unconventional treatment of Orpheus's adventures in the Underworld - will make a virtue of its reliance on the weapons in his aural arsenal. As the rower of a boat propels himself across the stage, his efforts simultaneously draw the noise of waves and weather from a wind machine. The bird-calls, cymbals and home-made creaking hinges will, Gregg hopes, add to the atmosphere of fantastic madness in the theatre.
"Normally you would have all the people off stage making these noises," he says. "Here when somebody is sharpening a knife blade, the act of someone sharpening a knife blade really is making the sound. So the torturers are actually make these sounds. That way the creation of the sounds is integrated into the drama."
WHEN GREGG IS describing the workings of his devices, one gets some sense of the eager youth he must once have been. He explains that his taste for radio drama probably dates to the eighth grade when a civics teacher played his class the Orson Welles adaptation of The War of the Worlds that famously led many in the United States to believe themselves under attack by aliens.
"This is about 1972 or 1973," he explains. "And he didn't just play the piece; he also told us the story about the national panic. When it got to the bit where it all fell silent and the Martians were attacking, I was completely hooked. I thought: this is brilliant, but it is also really funny because it caused such panic. I was laughing so hard at that idea I was picked up by the collar and dragged out of the room."
Despite this temporary academic embarrassment, Gregg successfully graduated from high school and made his way to the University of Detroit Mercy. While there he made a surprising discovery. The college, a Jesuit institution, had a programme that allowed students to spend their junior year in Ireland. He quickly calculated that it would be cheaper to spend 12 months over here than in Michigan, where he was working every spare minute to put petrol in his car.
He enjoyed his time in Ireland so much he decided to stay and began to develop a career as a radio voice-over artist. (Even if you've never listened to a Crazy Dog production, you will probably have unknowingly heard him 100 times on commercials.) He retained a nagging ambition to create radio dramas, but, before the digital age, recording such material to broadcast quality remained an expensive business. Come the mid-1990s, however, the right equipment became available at reasonable cost. Gregg wrote, directed, and played all the parts in Time Out for Bill Lizard, a metaphysical detective story, and, with no great expectation, began sending it to the commissars of Irish radio. Tim Lehane, a producer at RTÉ, spotted the potential immediately and brought Crazy Dog - then just Mr Gregg himself - to the national broadcaster.
"It reaffirmed my belief in human nature," Gregg says. "I made it and it was good. I soon had a lot of people like Morgan Jones saying they would do this sort of material for free. There were another two or three top voice-over people who said the same thing." Some may find the sheer busyness of Crazy Dog's work somewhat overpowering - a cast of one was rapidly replaced by an apparent cast of multitudes - but nobody could deny Gregg and his team have done admirable work in expanding the possibilities of audio drama. When, two years ago, Gregg was invited to join the cast of BBC radio's belated completion of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams's classic science fiction comedy, it could be seen as an acknowledgment that the mid-westerner was now part of some global wireless fraternity.
THE REHEARSALS FOR The Stuff of Myth reveal the piece to have its sensitive moments. As I sneak in, Eimear Foristal O'Grady's Eurydice and David Murray's Orpheus are tripping their way through a ballad that would not seem out of place in Les Misérables. But there is an angry left-wing undercurrent to much of Crazy Dog's work. The Last Harbringer, in particular, rails against western middle-class complacency in the face of poverty and environmental decline. Infidels, a tale of the fifth crusade, engaged with the war in Iraq. Gregg, who cites Thomas Merton, the late Catholic poet and theologian, as a major influence, seems to enjoy smuggling such political musings into his noisy romps. "A lot of the stuff we have done has been quite serious," he says.
"Infidels was originally written as a stage play in response to the first Gulf war. When all this idiocy started with George W we realised we had to say something about it. I get so angry thinking about all these right-wing people with American flags on their lapels who think God belongs to them. I believe in a God, but he doesn't care about flags."
Although Gregg is a calm man with a calm man's voice, there is certainly something of the evangelist about him. He believes in radio drama. He believes in opposing what he perceives as modern political lunacies.
"Well my wife thinks I'm a crank," he laughs. "Wherever I go I am something of an outsider. I just don't fit in. I see music I don't like. I hear slang I don't understand. I feel like a piece of tumbleweed everywhere I go."
• The Stuff of Myth runs at Cube in the Project Arts Centre until Feb 24. Tel: 01- 881 9613 or see www.project.ie for more information. Details about Crazy Dog Theatre can be found at www.crazydogaudiotheatre.com.
