Tony McCleane-Fay put his travels on hold to become head of UCC's theatre. Mary Leland asks him if his decision is paying off.
When Tony McCleane-Fay says he and his wife, Monika, spent 15 years in Britain, that's not to imply they stayed very long in any one place. Moving like theatrical itinerants through the realm they scooped up enough experience to satisfy their wanderlust - for a time. And that time is to be spent in Cork, where McCleane-Fay has for a year been artistic director and theatre manager of the Granary.
Originally part of the old maltings on the banks of the Lee, and relocated to a purpose-built venue on the Mardyke, the Granary is a branch of University College Cork, allowing for a partnership that gives it a dynamic and even provocative potential, emphasised by the previous artistic director, Ali Roberston, and which McCleane-Fay is determined to exploit, especially as a focus for new ways of experiencing theatre.
Rehearsed readings with guest lecturers and directors, critical debate through specialised academic programmes, multimedia presentations, workshops, improvisations, installations, recitals and performance all contribute to a profusion of events that distinguishes the Granary in an otherwise largely conventional city. It's a place where things happen, and McCleane-Fay's job is to make sure that, like fate, they keep on happening.
"The Granary exists for two reasons," he says. "It's primarily for the students, for use by the college drama society, Dramat. That's what it was set up for, and we mustn't lose sight of that. The students select the plays and direct them, and this is their rehearsal and performance venue. But secondly the theatre is used for the drama and theatre-studies programme in the English department, for the three-year BA and the one-year MA courses. I have no academic role" - unlike a previous director, Vic Merriman - "but there is a third strand, probably the most interesting to me, and that is the placing of the Granary as a niche venue, with shows that won't be put on elsewhere in Cork."
Nothing too hard there, I think to myself, but McCleane-Fay is ahead of me. "Theatre is not safe and should never be made safe. It's a place for taking risks, for using companies like Loose Canon or the UK's Forced Entertainment or Goat Island from America: companies that play with the whole art form of theatre, smudging the different elements and possibilities into one another. That's what we want to be doing, and that's what's going to make the Granary into a really important local and national venue."
In fact the Granary has always had a bit of an edge, a more adventurous spirit than bigger theatres. A small and relatively unattractive blunt box with no wing or backstage space, it has a design that ensures a certain austerity of approach. Or, sometimes, a challenging degree of innovation. The theatre also has always had a few visiting and professional productions on offer to the public. But now it's easy to see where McCleane-Fay fits into the energising philosophy of UCC's current style: this invigorating sense of creativity has a bite, a licence that is not random or even particularly liberal but is focused and purposeful and moves way beyond a campus-based vision.
It's not that Cork has not already introduced some successes: Corcadorca, Disco Pigs and Bedbound are just a few reminders. Ursula Rani Sarma's Blue, at Dublin Theatre Festival, is another. Cork Midsummer Festival last year also hinted at talent for the near future, and the just-over fringe festival - one of Robertson's lasting gifts to the city - kicks accurately into the discovery of new imagery from new materials.
The problem is that McCleane-Fay's commitment to "fragmentary" drama might reduce the availability of the Granary for more straightforward text-based work. Its backlist is impressive enough - Rani Sarma, Oonagh Kearney, Ray and Linda Radleigh and Felix Nobis to name but a few - to make this possibility a worry for others in Cork. Acknowledging that the Granary is a critical element in UCC's drama studies, local companies also insist it was the one venue in the city that took on cutting-edge work - "the people," said one director, "to whom we all turned, the most hospitable to that kind of work."
By "that kind of work" he means the new writing from Kearney (Calling Hilary winning an award, Urban Angels and Counting To Infinity being more recent plays, with projects continuing for the Abbey, Corcadorca and Rough Magic) and a few others.
But who knows what's simmering away in Dramat and the English department as a whole? Pat Talbot's new scheme at the Everyman Palace to encourage playwrights (it includes but is not exclusive to a €10,000 award for a new play) suggests there is potential for serious exploration.
On its own, new terms, however, the Granary can become a really important venue. McCleane-Fay endorses the idea of "total theatre", and his programme incorporates the academically based Perforum series of talks and workshops, as well as Rebus, dedicated to performance research, and a directed play-reading schedule that, from October to December last year, included work by Abi Morgan, Sarah Kane, Michael West and the Presnyakov brothers directed by Tom Creed, Thomas Conway, Jason Byrne of Loose Canon, Adam Curtis of UCC's drama department and the choreographer and dancer Cindy Cummings.
McCleane-Fay has a little money to spend on commissions and guest lecturers and directors - Thomas Conway was funded to direct Once Upon A Bar Stool, written by Nobis for the fringe festival, for example - but most of the finance is going into maintaining the theatre. "But we are spending to generate," he says, "particularly to generate material which will travel to other venues and other countries - and as they go they will take the Granary name with them."
He speaks as a traveller himself. Although now involved as a postgraduate student rather than as a teacher in UCC's MA in drama and theatre studies, he hasn't lost the sense of a world elsewhere. He and his wife left Wexford and its Theatre Workshop for England with, he says, big dreams of making it in social work.
Being in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and the US - and, before a planned trip to Australia, visiting Wexford in 1998 and setting up Bare Cheek Theatre Company - all diverted the vocation for social work into another channel.
And then, after 13 productions in Wexford, including bringing A Is For Everything to Project in Dublin, they realised the trip was over for the moment. "We had to settle for the sake of the children - they needed a bit of stability - but the long-term plan is for India." Cork and the Granary have to be grateful to the children. India, like Australia, is on hold.
