The size of the audience members is irrelevant, says Veronica Coburn, who's directing a play for children for Barnstorm. Christine Madden reports. Once upon a time, in a big blue house sitting in the crook of a lane that wound around a cathedral and smelled of baking bread, a group of people came to create theatre for children.
From the back of the house, they looked out into gardens and meadows stretching over hills to the horizon. Not far away, if they walked back along the lane and down the steps and through their town, was a castle on a hill opposite theirs.
The time is now, as Barnstorm Theatre Company enters its 12th year. Since 1991, the company has produced and performed children's plays in Kilkenny, taking them on tour through the rest of Ireland, and has provided opportunities for local kids to get involved in theatre and dance. For its new production, Little Victories, the company has invited Veronica Coburn to Kilkenny to direct.
Coburn's work with Barabbas and keen interest in the art of the clown, while not necessarily directed at young audiences, has nevertheless captured the interest of children's arts and theatre companies. After her production of Blowfish at the Ark, for Dublin Theatre Festival last October, she directed another children's play, The BFG, at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght. Now there is Little Victories.
What is the distinction between children's theatre and "adult" theatre? "I don't know," she says. This flat answer comes across not as an admission but as a window into her artistic ethos. "I don't make adjustments in how I approach a work. I would use the term 'children's theatre' because it's a term that's used. But I'm trying to make, to shape a piece of theatre. The size of the audience members is irrelevant."
Even sitting across a kitchen table with a mug of coffee, Coburn is something of a clown herself, not in a foolish way but in the mystical, expressive way of performers who embody their often darkly comic roles. Her closely cropped hair ensures nothing competes for attention with her face and its mercurial expressions; she speaks with her entire physicality, gesticulating, reaching into and reordering the air around her, standing and demonstrating her points.
She hasn't chosen to move in the direction of children's theatre. "I was asked to do these productions," she says. Yet "I really like children's stuff, children's books, and I have a love of clown. I love its central naivety, its central truthfulness".
The art of clown and buffoonery pulls together the strands that Coburn believes are essential to theatre. "An absolute priority for me is truth and the emotional connection," she says. "You also need cerebral stimulation and a visual aesthetic." These have been lacking in recent theatrical trends; however, "I think there's something in the air at the moment", the beginnings of a change of mood or emphasis in Irish theatre.
Her production for Barnstorm is more traditional, or narrative, theatre than clown. Written by Shaun Prendergast, Little Victories depicts how seven-year-old Tony comes to terms with his father's death. His sorrow and alienation make him reject any male friends his mother brings home, until she meets Gordon and wants to marry him. A trip to France and a new friend, Josie, eventually help Tony find his way back to the business of living.
"What I find exciting about this play," Coburn says, "is that it's about very human things. It's a great oul' crashing drama." Key to her production has been paring away extraneous elements to bring out its poignancy and message. The original production of the play, for instance, featured masks, an element Coburn frequently uses to great effect, most recently in The BFG, but this and other details fell away. "I needed to reread the script to find out what's important to the piece and not the production . . . sometimes, during rehearsal, you're looking to iron out things that catch your eye."
One new element Coburn is very excited about comes before the play, to set the mood. "John Ryan has composed 20 minutes of pre-show music," she says. "The first 14 minutes is calming, then the next six minutes up the ante on it. Then the music comes back down again." She's delighted with this, as "nine times out of 10, theatre starts too fast for me", she says. "The lights go on and the characters appear and start talking . . . When it starts that fast, I'm on catch-up for the next 10 minutes." With something like the classical overture, the audience gets an opportunity to warm up, to prepare itself for the action.
The set for Little Victories, featuring a wonky kitchen with imploding floorboards, also has "coherence" in the play. "I really like sets that make sense in a production, that aren't just a backdrop." And the cast and crew are fantastic, she says: all elements that come together to complete a production that "has a dynamic".
It's all a part of the process for Coburn, who, despite her rapt interest in creating dramatic spectacle, doesn't lose her playful attitude towards it, nor her ability to experiment and take risks. Her face twists into a teasing grin. "Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don't - feck it."
• Little Victories is at the Watergate Theatre (056-61674), Kilkenny, before a 12-week tour of Galway, Monaghan, Tallaght, Athlone, New Ross, Waterford, Longford, Sligo, Mullingar, Limerick, Cork, Blanchardstown, Glasnevin and Dún Laoghaire.
