They take commitment and trust and can lead to the creation of better theatre - but do ensembles have a future, asks Peter Crawley.
Something mysterious happens when a team of rowers work together in perfect sync. The boat seems to take on a momentum of its own, its movement becomes effortless.
"In moments like that, the boat seemed to lift right out of the water," David Halberstam wrote in The Amateurs, his book about Olympic rowing. "Oarsmen called that the moment of swing." The moment of swing goes by different names among different disciplines, but you know it when you see it. Rowers may call it swing (swing musicians rarely call it rowing), but the theatre has a word for such collaborative harmony too. It's called ensemble.
Ensemble can be just as elusive in definition - it means quite different things in the spheres of fashion or classical music - but theatre-makers have settled on a more precise meaning, and with it, a full-time company of performers has long been an aspiration of the Irish stage. Sadly, it's just not the sort of thing that's done here. In the US, the ensemble is a gutsy venture for naturalistic path-breakers or downtown experimentalists. In Europe it is a generously funded reality among the most celebrated theatre institutions. In Ireland, however, it is either a relic of a bygone age or a passing fancy; a dim memory of the Abbey Players on one hand, a pipe dream of every naive company on the other.
The case is growing, however, to make it something more tangible. Following Rough Magic's "Seeds" project, a course that exposed new directors to European methods, there was a rash of ensemble envy. "When we realised what they were able to do with the ensemble structures, we were kind of jealous and blown away," the director Tom Creed told me last year. "And, on a smaller scale, I don't think it's unachievable in this country. It's not about temporary communities that get together for just two months. Each production is able to build on the previous one."
Until recently, though, you had to look abroad for any examples.
One of the most renowned actor-driven ensembles in operation is Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, a group that began in a school basement in 1976 with nine members (among them the theatre's founder Gary Sinise and John Malkovich), and now celebrates its 30th year with an ensemble of 35 - including actors, directors, writers and several who multi-task.
"Steppenwolf provides an artistic home in which the individual artist can cultivate the whole range of their expressiveness," explains Martha Lavey, an ensemble-member and the theatre's artistic director. "The other thing is that actors here - ensemble members and otherwise - have a much greater sense of ownership over the production. The notion is that one is an artist in the theatre, rather than simply hired to do a job."
Steppenwolf, however, is not a full-time company. Its members actually are hired to do a job, receiving payment only when they are working on a production. The pungent naturalism of Steppenwolf, the Chicago style, seems unthinkable without constant collaborative evolution, but the title of "ensemble member" now seems almost honorary. Their film careers may have limited Joan Allen or John Malkovich's commitment to the stage, but neither is likely to be asked to return their membership cards. "The feeling has always been that the contract works best when it's entirely voluntary on both halves," says Lavey.
Lavey does attest to a community built on trust, however, in which actors are frequently cast against type, or can branch out into directing and writing. "We take chances on each other," says Lavey, simply. "Acting can be fierce and uninhibited when people trust each other."
The division of labour is quite different with an ensemble such as New York's experimental and irreverently named National Theatre of the United States of America. The NTUSA's highly physical and generally off-the-wall performances are concocted without a director. This doesn't leave them rudderless, company member James Stanley explained during their last visit to the Dublin Fringe Festival, but lets the group becomes its own director.
"It's definitely a more complicated process," Stanley said, "but the more minds that are put to one task, the better people are going to do. If we can make those [ decisions] collaboratively, I think the show will be stronger."
Anyone who decries the slow development of a similar Irish physical theatre should look beyond the cliches of literary heritage and a writer-centred culture; physical theatre like director-centred theatre, hasn't developed because there are so few groups around to create it. Every aesthetic requires a structure.
The feted young Hungarian company Krétakör, for instance (whose name, derived from Brecht's play, translates as Chalk Circle), has developed a more considered balance between the authority of the word and the expressiveness of the performer, taking such works as Waiting For Godot or A Clockwork Orange and using them as a spring-board for improvising new drama.
The company's artistic director, Árpád Schilling, tends to describe the processes of his 39-strong company in statements that are gnomic, brusque or broadly philosophical.
"Krétakör stands for an intellectual magnetic field," he responds, when asked how his ensemble is maintained, "where a group of thinking people try to ask questions regarding a problem they experienced, [ while presenting] it with the tools of an artist . . . The cohesive force which keeps the company together does not weaken and the audience does not lose interest."
The dynamic of the ensemble and its director - "an intellectual experiment where dictatorship and democracy interact" - is Schilling's theatrical model for personal improvement through the bonds of community. "He that wants to speak to people while avoiding himself and his companions had better keep his mouth shut," says Schilling. Quite.
Until recently it has been hard to look for the fruits of ongoing collaborative endeavours on the landscape of Irish theatre without turning away disheartened. The collapse of the Abbey's permanent acting company may have been a high-profile and unlamented deterioration, but more recently the Dublin company Loose Canon's modest attempt to retain an ensemble of four actors quickly became unsustainable. A rule of thumb is that any young company now pursuing ensemble methods only see state subsidy in the form of the dole.
There is, however, a more confident response to the ensemble naysayers which has grown more vociferous since the summer of 2005: "Well, look at Druid." The culmination of DruidSynge, in which all five plays of the Synge cycle were performed by a company of 17 professional actors, may have been an astonishing example of ensemble in action, but it also represented the fruition of a 30-year collective ethos.
"There are things that can be achieved with an ensemble, a set of understandings, that simply can't be achieved outside of it," says Druid's Garry Hynes. The final stage of DruidSynge - which won the Judges' Special Award at The Irish Times Theatre Awards on Sunday - maintained an ensemble company for six months, with the added continuity that it featured Hynes's two company co-founders, Marie Mullen and Mick Lally, whose connection to Druid began with their first productions of Synge in 1975.
"One of the fundamental reasons why both [ Martin McDonagh's] The Leenane Trilogy and the Synge cycle would have happened", says Hynes, "was the opportunity that it afforded us to work with a group of people over a big project. And I noticed a striking development in the course of DruidSynge, in particular, in which the individual sense of responsibility on the part of each actor was far, far greater than you would get when somebody's coming in for one specific production, and then leaving again."
For the actors who gave up other opportunities in their commitment to the project, Hynes calls it "an act of faith". For the company, she says, developing an ensemble counts as "a crystal part of Druid's future plans". "I passionately believe in the notion, while being very realistic about its difficulties," says Hynes. Such is the prerogative of a theatre director - to strike a careful balance between vision and pragmatism.
For all its difficulties, DruidSynge was an ensemble achievement, a feat that was somehow greater than the sum of its parts, where neither writer, director nor performer was subordinate to the status of the other.
But while the dynamic of an ongoing ensemble is, by definition, repeatable, the poignancy of DruidSynge is that despite a victory lap of international tours, it may have been a one-off. An inspiring example of what theatrical gems can be borne of ensemble methods, it showed an Irish theatre in the moment of swing . . . Even if it was just a moment.
