Bedrock Theatre's Jimmy Fay and Alex Johnston tell Peter Crawley about their eclectic cut 'n' paste approach to dissident writers, esoteric theorists and popular culture - and about The Massacre@Paris, their version of Marlowe's bloody play.
It begins with an atrocity. Religious extremists slaughter 3,000 people. An escalating cycle of violence aims at achieving a regime change. Stabbings, smotherings, poisonings, shootings and lynchings amass.
After an energetic run-through of The Massacre@Paris, Bedrock's adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's blood-soaked dramatisation of the St Bartholemew's Day massacre, I wonder if violence is a perennial fascination of the theatre company.
"A lot of our works deal with violence," shrugs Jimmy Fay, artistic director of the company, "but violence is too broad a word."
"A lot of my work is about it, but not all our work is about it," Alex Johnston shoots back at Fay, and a brisk verbal tussle ensues as they briefly outline their production history.
"[What about] Saved?" asks Fay. The Edward Bond play features a baby stoned to death by disaffected Britons.
"Well Saved is," concedes Johnston. "But Saved is also about deprivation."
"Arturo Ui is about . . . politics?" ponders Fay. Bertolt Brecht's play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui parodies Hitler's rise to power.
"Politics?" muses Johnston. "Mmmm . . . yeah."
"Unidentified Human Remains [and the True Nature of Love by Brad Fraser] has a certain . . ."
"Well that's more about love and sex and obsession," interrupts Johnston.
"And serial killers," finishes Fay.
Jimmy Fay and Alex Johnston might have spent too much time together. They finish each other's sentences and happily admonish each other for divergent viewpoints or mispronounced names. (When Fay mentions the influence of a "Foko book" Johnston chastens him with a swift "Foucault".) They also have similarly co-ordinated facial hair. But where Fay is a relaxed burly presence stretching his speech with leisurely stresses, Johnston is a tight ball of precise energy.
Hyper-articulate, quick-thinking and intellectually pugnacious, when he says he shouldn't be drinking coffee, I believe him.
Speaking of The Massacre@Paris's depiction of violence as a political strategy, Johnston calls it "an increasingly inefficient way of solving problems. In fact, it causes way more problems. From the first minute of the play [the Catholic monarchs] are making decisions that they think are going to work out, but everything goes wrong in the opening 10 minutes. They've started this cycle of violence and it's really hard to stop it."
Approaching the anniversary of September 11th, Fay admits, "I wanted to do a play that had something to do with terrorism and something to do with politics and to at least enter into that date a little bit. And The Massacre seemed like a really good, messy play to get your hands grubby with. It's not an established classic. You can kind of piss about with it a little bit."
The Massacre at Paris is believed to be the last play by Christopher Marlowe, playwright, brawler and reputed secret agent. It is also thought to be a corrupted or pirated text, possibly reconstructed from an actor's memory up to 10 years after the original performance in 1593.
"No one's going to say, 'You ruined my favourite scene'," says Johnston. Indeed, the liberties such a disputed text affords Bedrock supply much of the production's life force. If the analogies to contemporary politics and global conflict are not immediately apparent, updated references make the point without spelling it out. Thus blank verse is peppered with profanity, references to 16th-century Paris mingle with references to 21st-century PlayStation games, while Johnston's adaptation quotes liberally from sources as diverse as the Elizabethan stage, obscure Western movies and CNN-style media spin. As the cultural critic Dick Hebdige wrote about postmodern art, the purity of the text gives way to the promiscuity of the intertext.
"I want people not to be able to tell who wrote each bit," says Johnston, who considers himself "the guy who's in charge of the text rather than the author.
"Never mind who wrote it," he continues. "Get into it. We can iron out the credits later."
This is also true of What The Dead Want, Johnston's and Fay's most recent collaboration, which will be seen again during next month's Fringe Festival in a co-production with the Gaiety School of Acting. "Yeah, there was quotation in What The Dead Want, mainly because, like this, it was written fairly quickly."
"Who'd you do?" inquires Fay.
"I did John Berger, Walter Benjamin and, of course, Robbie Williams," Johnston quickly footnotes. "But I don't put \ in there for people to get them." Johnston insists that he dislikes attributing his quotes. "I just think, 'Why does it matter?' "
"Copyright," suggests Fay.
The director puts it in musical terms. "It's sampling. You can't help but be influenced by what you see. It's part of your imagination and it's part of the culture now. You've got so much to feed off and you can reference everything." This eclectic cut 'n' paste approach to the words and ideas of dissident writers, esoteric theorists and the mainstays of popular culture is something of a Bedrock priority. So is their pitch-black humour, which balances the mordant and the morbid, the sardonic and the sadistic. Fay recalls the company's first production as being a "Manga" comic strip version of Steven Berkoff's gritty play East. Most recently, What The Dead Want was a surreally funny piece about the "differently deceased" who, owing to some unspecified imbalance in the natural order, continue to socialise with the living.
At times Bedrock's work seems irreverent. Sometimes, as with the recent production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, it appears bleakly nihilistic. But it is invariably faithful to an artistic policy once defined as drama that "upsets the established certainties of what theatre is for and how it should be done".
Fay and Johnston met in Bull Alley (now Liberties College) in their late teens where they studied performancee. "When we started we really were out of the VEC," announces Fay, spelling out the acronym with a tough sense of pride. "Vocational Education, as opposed to academic \, like Trinity. We didn't come from dramsoc, we came from VEC." Founded with this "us and them" mentality, their first company, The Minutemen, survived only a handful of productions. "Then we split up," Fay says, casting an admonishing finger in Johnston's general direction.
BEDROCK was formed in 1993 when Jimmy Fay joined an existing company helmed by the actress Debbie Ledding, who has since departed. Where did the name come from? "It came from Debbie," admits Fay, "and quite frankly she named it after a club in London." So it's not indicative of some fundamental truth of art? "The fundamental truth of The Flintstones, I think," responds Johnston.
"But I quite like that," counters Fay, "because that's back to what we were saying about postmodernism. Sampling."
Upsetting established certainties has not always been to Bedrock's benefit. Presenting the premiere of French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès' Quay West in 1999, Bedrock fell foul of former Irish Times theatre critic David Nowlan. "If there is merit in rendering a theatre audience physically uncomfortable," began the review, "it escapes me." Although Nowlan was discussing the seating, he found neither the play nor the production any easier. The same review appeared in three successive editions ("You couldn't buy that publicity," says Fay with remarkably little rue) and the production closed a week early. Some say it almost broke Bedrock.
"Emotionally, yeah," says Fay. "I should have run it that extra week. I would never let that happen again."
Fiach [Mac Conghail, then artistic director of the Project] said it was like a torpedo hit you, and I rememberbeing very depressed at that, and thinking, 'Why do they count, critics?' And they do. I work in theatre and criticism doesn't really count for me because I never really trust a critic - no offence."
"I'm really proud of that show," says Johnston, who co-adapted it. "In some ways I'm more proud of that than anything we ever did, because I think it had great integrity."
As Bedrock approaches its 10-year anniversary, its artists remain uncompromising. While Johnston points out that The Massacre@Paris does not add any gratuitous killings to Marlowe's already corpse-strewn stage, Fay's production does provide some disturbing embellishments. "Yeah, we came up with that in rehearsal. The stabbings weren't quite working, so we thought that we'd go with a hanging." Why? "To be honest with you, it was to be more graphic." Fay concedes that some argue for a more suggestive representation of violence, but he is inclined towards realism. "We keep getting given out to for realism. I actually quite like it, because it's disturbing. It is a little traumatic, but violence is. I want the audience not to be complacent. I want them to have a reaction to the play."
Johnston (who can explain that Edward Bond's Saved is the greatest play of the 20th century because, "as Phoebe says of Smelly Cat, it works on so many levels") makes Bedrock's case strongest and with his trademark gritty eloquence. "Frank Zappa is a big hero of mine. Someone asked him why his work was full of high abstraction and shocking moments of human dishevelment. He said, 'That's what life is like.'
"I like to mix everything up. I hate writers who maintain a level of consistently high seriousness, because it means that the theatre becomes a place where you go to get injected with soul. You walk away from a theatre and go, 'Ah, I've seen a wonderful play, now I can go home feeling a better person.' Fuck that. It should be a place where you go to feel a little more alive."
The Massacre@Paris is at the Project, September 5th-21st. Booking: 01-8819613. What The Dead Want is at the Project Space Upstairs, October 7th-12th. Booking: 1850-374643
