There is a wealth of quality theatre coming out of Cork, but local funds to keep the ball rolling are scarce on the ground, writes Mary Leland
When Fr Mathew, a play by Sean McCarthy, opened earlier this year, it seemed like a swallow announcing a summer of new playwriting in Cork. It could be argued, of course, that only the playwright has a Cork provenance: the production company is Yew Tree Theatre in Sligo and Fr Mathew himself came from Tipperary.
But it was a commission by the Cork Opera House and a premiere at the Half Moon Theatre which finally brought this exciting and engaging work, directed by John Breen, to public light.
That was in January; Tilt, written by UCC graduate Ailís Ní Ríain and performed at the Granary in a co-production with the New Works from Liverpool, came in April. This year the Midsummer Festival offered some remarkable local productions; one of them, Lynda Radley's The Art of Swimming, grown from old photographs and new research in the local city library, recently ended its run at the Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe and will play at Dublin's New Theatre in Temple Bar next month. Also in September, Cork's Granary Theatre will see the joint premieres of two plays commissioned and presented by Meridian Theatre Company: Knock 3 Times by novelist Gaye Shortland and Love, Peace and Robbery by journalist Liam Heylin from Waterford.
This sudden flock is not to take away from productions such as Declan Hassett's Survivors, which had its premiere last year at the Cork Arts Theatre, where Patrick Galvin's early play The Cage was also given its first performance and where Dolores Mannion is inviting new Irish writing.
It would be hard to blame anyone scanning this year's Midsummer Festival for thinking that the city is alive with production companies and playwrights, but this is not the case. As writer Ray Scannell and director Tom Creed agree, everyone is going away.
Scannell, based in London and pinned down as he rehearses a part in Knock 3 Times with Meridian, insists: "We have to go: the key to it is going away. There's always been some good work going on in Cork; as to whether this year is a coincidence or a groundswell - maybe it's a bit of both. The Midsummer agenda has always been to team local talent with international material and that came true this year, but the home-grown stuff shouldn't necessarily remain here.
"There are limitations in terms of one's career if you stay based in Cork: London gives more of a platform if you want to go any further," he adds.
Playwrights, like any artists, will find their own place, especially as "going any further" from Cork could easily just mean Edinburgh - and why not, might wonder anyone looking at Enda Walsh's achievements? Cork, says director Donal Gallagher of Asylum Productions, is a good "taking-off place" and points out the emigrants: Oonagh Kearney working in film studies in London, Lynda Radley in Glasgow, Usula Rani Sarma, writer of (among other plays) The Spider Man for ITV Junior Workshop and the Cottesloe Theatre (2006), is moving on from a residency in Galway to a production in New York.
TOM CREED, ASSOCIATE director with Rough Magic and maintaining his local involvement through his Playgroup company, says that although a lot of his generation of practitioners - many of them graduates of UCC's Dramat like himself - have moved on, the "Cork thing" is still current: "It's interesting that so much of it gets clustered around the Midsummer Festival. Part of that is the relationship with Cork theatres, venues which provide a platform making the realities of production more feasible."
More feasible means funded. When Creed reviews the home-grown material included in the 2007 Midsummer Festival, he realises that much of the work was generated by the writers themselves and then produced on a shoe-string. The Rough Magic policy, expressed through its Dublin-based Seeds programme, seeks interesting new work over a two-year cycle, which also supports directors and designers, all of whom are included in a mentoring programme with leading international writers and directors. There's nothing like that in Cork (or like Druid's or Fishamble's programmes), although places such as the Granary, with Tony McLean Fay or Donal Gallagher's Asylum set-up, run fairly intensive workshops and reading sessions, while Jack Healy's Theatre Makers has a weekly "working actors' workshop" at the Firkin Crane.
The lack of commissioning budgets is something Meridian, for one, is trying to deal with. The company's artistic director, Johnny Hanrahan, explains that a proposal developed for Cork 2005 was an open invitation to people who felt they had a tale worth telling. "There was no prescriptive direction," he says. "There was no given theme and the basic idea was to run workshops following interviews with people who had something to say - the only other criterion was that the story had to relate in some way to the city of Cork."
The workshops tackling material offered through this programme, called What's the Story?, had their own value, but mentoring was not a formal part of the process. The goal was to provide a set of prompts which would spark individual responses, and for many participants that was as far as it went. At the same time, it was clearly stated that any raw material could be turned into scripts by the company, which is what was done by Hanrahan himself in the plays Crystal and The White Lady.
"I found it very beneficial personally to work on this material," Hanrahan remembers. "Some very vivid and idiosyncratic memories emerged, but the rules of engagement were completely open and in its essence the project became a company resource with many ramifications." Liam Heylin, on the other hand, took the model offered as a way of developing his own theme based on prison life, while Gaye Shortland's play has nothing to do with the project at all, stemming instead from a straightforward invitation to write a play from scratch, having already adapted her novel Mind That 'Tis Me Brother for the stage.
AS A COMPANY, Meridian is committed to the production of new plays, and funds commissioning fees from its own budget. For others, the struggle is not only getting a work to the stage in the first place, but expanding the audiences afterwards through touring. Donal Gallagher, for example, could get Meat by Neil O'Sullivan to the Granary for the Midsummer Festival, where it had deserved success, but can't bring it on tour, while Ray Scannell's captivating Mimic, also introduced during the festival, deserves a much wider audience. O'Sullivan is a former winner of the Corcadorca new playwright award but this prize, awarded every two years, has been discontinued for budgetary reasons, as last year's grant just covered its production of The Tempest.
Even at that, the feeling is that the scheme was only moderately successful and that there has to be a better way of accessing new writing. "It was incredibly time- and resource-consuming," says Corcadorca director Pat Kiernan. "We were getting plays that had been sent everywhere already - it's not so easy to unearth the original voice."
Whether or not the Midsummer Festival is one of those better ways might have to be more closely evaluated, especially as the production imprint of former director Ali Robertson was still on much of the theatrical offerings this year. His successor at the festival is William Galinsky, who appreciated the quality of the programme he had inherited and would now like to see local writers become more ambitious.
Coming from a London context, in which funding cuts under Margaret Thatcher's premiership influenced the length and size of new plays so that one- or two-handers of 60- to 70-minutes' duration became an acceptable norm, Galinsky believes that writers should be told to write big dramas, to let their imagination drive them forward.
"I'm not sure that mentoring is what is needed. We've got to look for a quality product and then to give the proper support," says Galinsky. "Now, writers are producing what they're used to seeing, TV-drama-length pieces. I think a play should be 90 minutes without an interval or nine hours with three intervals; those are the best models I've seen."
Yet Pat Kiernan, noting how modern theatre-makers were reducing aspects of new plays to suit production costs, feels that there is also an onus on writers to learn the language of theatre. He still believes, despite his work with large productions such as The Merchant of Venice or Woyzeck, that the most influential piece of theatre in Cork was Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs. This set a pattern which new writers seem determined to follow.
Not Sean McCarthy, though. His original version of his two-act, three-man play Fr Mathew was a solo act, Conversations with a Statue, which was worked on through several manifestations. Its final two-hour length is, says John Breen, an indication not only that McCarthy knows how to build the dramatic tension and how to hold an audience, but also of its "huge story - not one you can tell quickly".
Fr Mathew is at Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo on Thurs-Sat, and then tours. The Art of Swimming is at the New Theatre, Dublin on Sept 11-16. Knock 3 Times and Love, Peace and Robbery are at the Granary, Cork on Sept 10-22
