Theatre sites for more eyes

The Dublin Theatre Festival is following the hottest trend: site-specific shows. What’s the appeal of real live spaces?

LOUISE LOWE, the director of Anu Productions, has a way of seeing things. “I’m looking up constantly,” she says, as we wander through the tortuous back streets of what was once Dublin’s infamous red-light district, Monto, in a soft, grey drizzle. “I read once that to understand a city you need to look up.” (This is also the tell-tale sign of a tourist.)

She leads the way from the Lab on Foley Street, where one of her extraordinary shows, World's End Lane, has been staged, through a small green park, where her first home – a block of flats called the Cage – once stood, before cutting on to the narrow Railway Street, towards Sean MacDermott Street.

We pause under a looming concrete wall with iron rotary fans rusting in their frames; an arched green door, creeping with graffiti, stands below a white tile crucifix. This is the rear of the building for her next project, whose façade identifies it as the Monastery of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. “It was never known as that, obviously,” Lowe says. “It was only ever called ‘the Laundry’.”

This is also the name of her new production at the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, the second of a four-part series inspired by 100 years in the area; the first part, World’s End Lane, debuted at last year’s Absolut Fringe and is revived at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival.

Lowe is the country's leading site-specific theatre maker, an exemplar of a form that is coming to define a country still obsessed and haunted by property. After 2005's Tumbledowntown, which led her audience through an abandoned Ballymun tower block as the structures were collapsing, and 2009's Basin, which invited us to her family home on the eve of its demolition, and similar work for Fishamble and Prime Cuts, Lowe was cited by The Irish TimesIrish Theatre Awards for presenting "challenging theatre in unusual locations that illuminates darker, often ignored parts of society".

As a child, Lowe was warned by her mother that if she was bold, she’d end up in the Gloucester Street Magdalene laundry. “Well, I’m going there now,” Lowe says wryly. “She got her wish.”

Touching on our nation's shameful history, Laundrymay be her most resonant work so far, peering deep into an almost hidden space and bringing us with her. Initially, Lowe hadn't wanted to address the space at all, and she is still wary of creating a political piece, yet the site seemed to find them. "If we're going to mark 100 years of this place, we have to acknowledge it in some way."

Lowe has a precise philosophy for creating theatre in non-theatrical spaces, one that is saturated with history, expressed physically and lyrically, but which rejects fiction. “It has to be a forensic response to the space,” she says. “There’s layers of it. You could respond to a table, an image, a light that might take you to the next place of discovery. It could be anything – the residue of what’s left behind.”

Her next piece, The Boys of Foley Street,will use "augmented reality" technology for smartphones that will show audiences "what was there, not what isthere", but Lowe's productions, which seem to mingle ghosts with performers, history with the present, augment reality already.

Such is the allure of site-specific theatre, which, between the Absolut Fringe Festival and the theatre festival, has become both a hip aesthetic and a political agenda. This year's Fringe featured 11 productions in "unusual venues", and the theatre festival has devoted a strand of programming entitled Behind Closed Doorsto site-specific work. Is this symptomatic of a contemporary theatre jaded by convention, embarrassed by artifice and fixated on reality? Or is it a restless fad for theatre audiences who want to get out more?

Dan Colley, one of the four writers of Spilt Gin's You Can't Just Leave – There's Always Something,a domestic drama played in a Georgian house, began with a fiction and went looking for a site, but the site, he says, has become "co-author" of the piece, informing structure and flow – a kitchen-sink drama in which the sink has a say in the matter. Would it be a lesser work on the stage? "It would be a much lesser experience," he says. "But it could work there."

Meadhbh Haicéid, director of Galway's Waterdonkey, brought Happeningto a suite at Dublin's Gresham Hotel, a durational work inspired by John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's Vietnam-era bed-in protests for peace. Her intention was not political in an engaged sense; it was, as the title suggested, an improvised, unusual performance in an offbeat space – off-site, or site-unspecific.

Even Veronica Dyas's immensely moving and considered In My Bed,which transformed a traumatic history into a multilayered performance in an insalubrious shed, seemed relatively indifferent to the site: architecturally, it had accidentally appropriate curlicues, but it was not the foundation of her performance.

Trade, a new play by Mark O'Halloran produced by Thisispopbaby, is set in a cheap BB in north inner-city Dublin. Does it have to be staged in a guesthouse to work? "No," says the company's artistic director, Phillip McMahon.

Initially, the company considered performing it in a theatre, then “a cool old warehouse”, before finally deciding on a guesthouse. The result is a three-layered approach: “We’re taking a really naturalistic space, a writer who is incredibly detailed and cinematic, and a director, Tom Creed, who is making the show quite theatrical.”

The biggest benefit of off-site performance is the sharpening aspect of the unfamiliar – like tourists inclining our heads to new skylines, we look afresh and prick up our ears. But in Trade's furtive meeting between a closeted gay man in his 40s and a rent boy, the audience are explicitly positioned as voyeurs. It's a hard connotation to avoid, McMahon agrees – and when most theatre is an act of voyeurism, what does it say about us? – but he feels that this production bears witness to the legacy of a generation of shame, of lives only half-lived. "You can be here easy," the older character tells the younger man. "I can't be like that. I sit here now and I'm old and there's about a thousand ghosts in the room already."

McMahon considers the other site-specific shows in the festival – Laundry, the femme fatale of The Lulu House,the silent agony of Request Programme.

“None of the Behind Closed Doors season is very cheery, is it? I guess it’s a part of the culture we’re in at the moment. There’s a big stress on investigating everything around how this country has been run. I don’t know if, at the moment, that’s leant itself to any raucous comedies.”

Why do this? Moving away from the lighting rigs, the seats, the already-insured and health-and-safety-inspected premises and, yes, the toilet facilities of theatrical infrastructure, hardly makes things easier. “It’s certainly not cheaper,” sighs Lowe, “There has to be more reason to do it. There’s easier ways and easier places.”

So what’s the payoff? Theatres, which have traditionally transported us elsewhere, aspire to be sites of catharsis – where we hit the depths and thus expel them – but when an advocacy group such as Justice for Magdalenes has campaigned for 15 years, unsuccessfully, to gain access to the Laundry on Sean MacDermott Street, where the identities of so many women and children were stripped and sundered, while the Government absorbs a UN committee recommendation for a statutory inquiry into alleged abuses, even the act of crossing its threshold is electric with significance. If catharsis will not come to the theatre, the theatre must pursue catharsis.

To those who consider the future of theatre, Muireann Ahern, curator of The Ark and the Theatre Festival's Family Season, may supply some clues. Two of her three productions are happening offsite: Kalejdoskop, by Denmark's Carte Blanche, takes place in a specially constructed maze in Smock Alley; and Berninna, by Belgian site-specific company Studio Orka, leads its young audience through a house on North Great George's Street and through an old woman's extraordinary life. These are gentle plays for an audience without preconceptions, but there's a quietly revolutionary aspect to them: the sites of make-believe, Ahern says, can be anywhere. Children may already appreciate this, while adults savour the reminder. We can transform our world and ourselves through imagination and close attention, whether in a theatre, behind closed doors or under the stairs.