Jason Byrne lurches, shoulders first, into the centre of the ring of actors, like a prop forward into a scrum. We await an explosion, some sort of magisterial tirade but none follows; instead, he draws them around him, quietly explaining and coaxing, marking infinitesimal shifts in position and emphasis, before hurling himself back to the other side of the rehearsal room. It's Saturday afternoon, and in the course of an hour, two pages of the text of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy have been subjected to an intense degree of scrutiny, and lovingly reworked until they begin to breathe.
Loose Canon, the Dublin-based company of which Jason Byrne is artistic director, has been in existence for only 18 months, but has managed, with its productions of The Tragedy Of Julius Caesar, The Revenger's Tragedy, Measure For Measure and The Duchess Of Malfi, to establish a small but loyal following and earn appreciative reviews. Expectations have been created of coherent ensemble work, lucid verse-speaking and energetic treatments of plays that many young theatre groups would shy away from. In fact, Loose Canon's recent production of Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi, a work that is bleakly tragic but unconvincingly plotted, compared very favourably with the more elaborately staged Cheek By Jowl production that was seen at the Dublin Theatre Festival two years ago.
Simplicity of presentation, bordering on asceticism, has become the company's trademark, but in this case, the "theatre of poverty" approach is a necessity rather than an affectation. The young actors, who have come mainly from drama schools and the university dram socs are merely subsisting, and there is no money in the kitty for such luxuries as sets or costumes. Doublet and hose have been banished, along with any other period trappings; nor is there an attempt to use elements of design to bring multiple perspectives or layered interpretations to the work. There is only language and performance.
Having performed at The Crypt at Dublin Castle, Players Theatre and the City Arts Centre, Loose Canon are graduating to Project @ The Mint this week, with their new production of The Spanish Tragedy. Jason Byrne and the company's general manager, Willie White, are both pleased and a little apprehensive about the prospect. "It is exciting. We feel that our audience is growing. We're even getting grown-ups coming who aren't related to members of the cast," Byrne says, laughing.
Despite their choice, to date, of plays by Shakespeare, Tourneur, Webster and now Kyd, Loose Canon are not, Willie White says emphatically, aiming to become Elizabethan and Jacobean specialists. "We have chosen these plays partly because of their enormous casts, from 13 to 17 actors, and because of the opportunity they offer for strong performances, with everything pared back to the minimum."
"There are practical considerations too," Jason Byrne adds. "It saves us having to pay royalties for translated texts, for example. But the most important thing is that this kind of drama is very good training. Having to concentrate so hard on the verse helps us to be specific about the story. It demands discipline and clarity, which develops and tests you. So, while this is our niche at the moment, that may change."
All fine and laudable, certainly, as far as Shakespeare and Webster are concerned, but isn't the choice of The Spanish Tragedy scraping the bottom of the barrel a bit? Let's recap on this play, a somewhat crude forerunner of the enormously popular Elizabethan genre of revenge tragedy. Also known as Hieronimo Is Mad Againe, it was a huge hit on London stages in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The plot is action-packed, bloodthirsty and complicated, but the gist of it is that Hieronimo, marshal of Spain, is seeking retribution for the murder of his son, Horatio, whose crime was his love of the wrong girl, Belimperia - her father, the Duke of Castile, had other matrimonial plans for her.
To trap the two murderers and wreak his revenge, Hieronimo stages a play and they are killed in the course of the action. The unfortunate Belimperia kills herself, as does Hieronimo, having first bitten out his tongue. The play-within-a-play as a device for unmasking a murderer was taken up by Shakespeare in Hamlet, which took the conventions of the revenge tragedy to an entirely different level.
Jason Byrne puts up a spirited defence of Kyd. "It's a great play. It's special because so many other plays sprang from it, Hamlet being the obvious example. But yes, it is uneven and a bit patchy. It's difficult to find a through-line in the narrative. We have done quite a bit of cutting and we've also added some quite good scenes that were written by Ben Jonson." This isn't cheating, apparently, since Jonson's scenes were added in Kyd's own day and this doctored version of the play was widely performed.
The problem with the play, however, as with many of the other revenge tragedies, is that the events of the plot are so cataclysmic and violent - and highly improbable - that they tend to overwhelm the characters and turn them into pawns or reversions to the emblematic figures of the medieval morality plays from which they evolved. It's difficult to be moved by the protagonists' appalling predicaments since they are themselves allowed so little insight into them.
"There is a preoccupation with gore, in Jacobean tragedy especially," Jason Byrne says. "People have come out of our productions making references to Quentin Tarantino's films, but I'm trying not to be graphic about the violence and to concentrate on the characters' reactions to it. In The Spanish Tragedy we have a man trying to deal with his grief over a horrendous murder. His need for justice become a desire for vengeance which leads to more deaths - everybody is murdered.
"I agree that it is a clumsy piece of writing, but it is a lens through which to look at the issue of revenge, which is still with us today with capital punishment - though I'm not trying to be at all preachy here. Kyd is an important writer because he set the trend, although the ideas are not realised as masterfully as in Marlowe or Shakespeare."
It's clear that with Loose Canon, Byrne is much more interested in developing an ensemble, exploring what it means to be an actor and "what happens in that concentrated hot spot, the playing space that is the theatre", than in excavating the world-view of the Elizabethans. He is aware that audiences might find these plays difficult.
"That can be a worry. You wonder are people going to understand this, or care. But even with The Duchess Of Malfi, with its problematic fifth act, audiences seemed to get a lot out of it. What we're doing is risky, but that's what makes the challenge. When these plays gel they are superb, but when they're off they're particularly tedious . . ."
The Spanish Tragedy previews at Project @ the Mint, tomorrow night and Saturday night, and opens on Monday September 1st.
