The Public, once thought unstageable, is troubling but beautiful, its director tells Peter Crawley
It begins simply enough. In a room backstage, a controversial theatre director has a tense discussion about his artistic policy with four white horses. Once the horses are shooed away, the director defends his gender-swapping production of Romeo and Juliet against the objections of the public; or, more specifically, the audience; or, even more specifically, three identical men wearing false beards. Then Federico García Lorca's 1930 play, The Public, gets a bit weird.
In a Spartan rehearsal room in The Lab on Foley Street, with drapes gaffer-taped to the wall and bubble wrap covering the windows, Randolf SD|The Company are busy divining a path through Lorca's surreal play. In private, Lorca spoke confidently of its "openly homosexual" content, yet it is a play he left unfinished, and one that he asked his friend Martínez Nadal to have burned in the event of his death. It was considered so unstageable that it was not produced until 1986, and when The Public opens in Project it will be its first professional production in Ireland.
As the rehearsal progresses you begin to understand why so few have been keen to approach it. As Juliet rises from her tomb to tell her new suitor, another horse, of how "the rats bring me tiny pianos, and little lacquered brushes", it is not immediately clear why it deserves the degree of concentration that this young company are bringing to it.
But as the actors Joe Roch and Megan Riordan repeat the scene, his horse moving through a series of poses with balletic precision, while her Juliet climbs down from an emotional peak that she and the director simply refer to as "rrrrgh", the non-sequiturs and plot fragments of Lorca's text begin to assume a strange sort of shape. And they do so against the strains of Peter Cetera's unspeakably cheesy 1986 power ballad, Glory of Love.
If the dialogue is surreal ("We must pass through your womb to find the resurrection of horses") the instructions of director Wayne Jordan are more firmly rooted. In his mid-twenties, Jordan approaches the scene with a choreographer's eye for movement and a psychoanalyst's attentiveness to the unconscious impulses behind abstract images. "The 'stinging swarm of magnifying glasses' is really important," he advises Riordan, "because it's describing the people outside."
What that stinging swarm of magnifying glasses will make of The Public when it opens is difficult to guess, but with only their fourth production in three years, Randolf SD are becoming harder to overlook. They clearly don't scare easily.
"The play is actually harder to read than it is to stage," Jordan says later. "If you work at it, you begin to realise the poetic logic and it doesn't seem as anarchic. I don't think it involves Freudian ideas of the subconscious to the extent that Dali does. I think what Lorca is doing is setting up an argument about transformation and the masks people wear. [ Picasso's] Guernica is the one thing I remember bringing into the rehearsal room first; in Guernica and [ TS Eliot's] The Waste Land, both those artists take Western traditions and tear them apart in order to sew them back together.
"What Lorca is doing is quite similar, in that he rips apart a classical tradition - we've got Bells and Vine Leaves [ two characters] at the Roman ruins, we've got Shakespeare's Juliet, we've got Helen of Troy - what he's doing is dismantling the Western canon at a point when modernism is the means of engagement."
Jordan develops this idea of transformation with so many references to theatre, pop culture and queer politics that his conversation almost requires footnotes. People change, he says, with a nod to Angels in America, only when God splits your skin with a jagged thumbnail, rearranges your intestines and "it's up to you to do the stitching".
He mentions the 1980s TV show Manimal with as much affection as a quote from Oscar Wilde's treatise on The Soul of Man: "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing." Jordan stops himself. "Am I going all over the place?" he asks.
Actually, it's The Public that goes all over the place. Inspired in the US, begun in Cuba and finished in Granada, Lorca's play is in some ways a treatise about theatre, but also about the right to love, in all its dimensions.
In much the same way that the smokescreens of the avant-garde allowed political theatre-makers to smuggle meaning into oppressive societies, surrealism offered Lorca a means with which he could explore his own sexuality. "Romeo can be a bird, Juliet can be a stone; Romeo can be a grain of salt, and Juliet can be a map," says one character. "But they'll never stop being Romeo and Juliet." The politics of such sleight of hand seems almost quaint in the age of Brokeback Mountain.
"Lorca's problem is that he doesn't have a language to speak in," Jordan says. "So he's constantly approaching it from new angles. He doesn't have a word to describe what's happening to him personally, or there's no kind of social model or channel with which to imagine it."
Written just before the fall of the Spanish dictator Primo de Rivera, The Public preceded a time of immense artistic freedom for Lorca. His most famous works - Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba - were written soon after it, when Lorca developed his poetic dramas as the government-appointed director of La Barraca. But Jordan is aware that some may find his early attempts at the avant-garde either irrelevant against the artistic freedom enjoyed today, or simply impenetrable.
"A lot of my work is about helping people into the play. It's constantly referred to as a "lesser" play of Lorca's. I don't think it is. I would certainly hope that parts of the play will trouble people, because they are troubling. But so many beautiful and devastating things happen - sometimes in just the flick of an image."
He agrees that The Public demands patience, "but most of the great experiences I've ever had as an audience member required patience and engagement, and they paid back for it 10-fold."
For all the amorphous development of The Public, the dialogue between characters and their costumes, its procession of gender archetypes, there is also a more direct call for a revolution in the theatre. Would Jordan like to see one himself?
"I just make what I make," he says. "But, yeah, I would like to see something different. I think theatre should be part of the fabric of society - okay, it's a fringe art - but it could be more rigorous in the way it applies itself to our relationships with each other. I'd quite like it if the plays I went to see were a little bit stranger. Then it would probably be more real to me."
The Public runs Apr 11-22 at Project, Dublin
