It has been a good year for Marion Wyatt: first 'Singin' In The Rain', now 'Man Of La Mancha'. But she has always been a woman to make things happen, writes Mary Leland.
'We were always singing for some cigire or other or performing at a sung mass at the Honan. There was always something going on," says Marion Wyatt. Indeed there was, and the kind of schooldays the Cork theatre director remembers were the kind that kept the children off the streets.
Elocution; Irish dancing; choir and choral groups; the piano accordion; a mother at home cooking, knitting and embroidering dance costumes; an Irish-language teacher who was a member of Compantas Chorcaí; art classes from Maighréad Murphy and Leaving Certificate tours of the city's architecture led by Murphy's husband, the sculptor Seamus Murphy; debating competitions; concerts at community socials; Scenes From Shakespeare at the Feis Maitiu; and, at 14, the best- actress award at West Cork Drama Festival for The Righteous Are Bold.
A Cork childhood, in other words: an accumulation of linked experiences that Wyatt recites like an agenda of opportunities, all of which she grasped.
If it's a Cork litany, geographically and perhaps even professionally limited, Wyatt's grasp exceeds its boundaries. Lamplit at her production desk - well, plank might be a better word - in the auditorium of Cork Opera House while the stage fills with the cast and colour of Man Of La Mancha, in its first dress rehearsal for the run that opened last Wednesday, she is also the director of the Singin' In The Rain that opens opens at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on July 13th.
Laden with plaudits from its Irish première, at the Everyman Palace in Cork, the transfer to Dublin (and back to Cork in the autumn) will mark her seventh theatre production since December last year. Yet right now, apart from some potential work at the opera house during Cork's time as European Capital of Culture next year, she has no idea what she'll be doing next. That's the way it works, particularly in Cork: you strut your stuff and then you wait, possibly for months, for the phone to ring.
Except that Wyatt has never been much of a waiter. This writer has not always rated her work very highly, but there is no suspicion or resentment in her welcome today - or ever, in fact. It's a question of balance. What's done is done: if experience doesn't fulfil her expectations, then so be it; "you learn from that and move on".
Wyatt makes things happen: this is a woman who learned bookkeeping while working at a pub, who was a base operator for a taxi company - putting on a Tops Of The Town show at the opera house at the same time - who established the youth-theatre branch of the Everyman Palace with Michael McCarthy and who, with her qualifications from London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, taught speech and drama in two boys' schools for nearly 20 years.
That all began when, after leaving school, she joined Montfort College of Performing Arts, an academy run by a teacher called Eileen Nolan. Singing and poetry and performance were all very well, but this is where she got to grips with the more urgent realities of theatrical life, such as time management, commitment and discipline.
"I had already joined the Montfort Singers, and Eileen Nolan had been my elocution teacher at school, and of course I was going to the Everyman plays, which in those days were in the CYMS hall in Castle Street. That's when I began to realise that theatre was where everything came together.
"Later I was asked to play a part in the Everyman production of Luther, and then Mick McCarthy, who saw my interest, encouraged me by giving me scripts to read, and he also invited me to work as assistant director on The Silver Tassie. It seemed very grand to me, although of course I didn't do any directing at all, but there was a lot of singing and choral work and movement in that, and even just observing the process was enormously educational."
Education is something Wyatt has never been wary of, taking it where she can find it to fit in with circumstances that, with marriage and three children along the way since she arrived in Cork as a five-year-old, have changed and changed again.
It was the early death of her father that sent her into Henchy's, the pub where she learned to keep books, as she was the eldest in a family needing her help, but she established a small studio for herself at the same time. "I thought that I wanted to build something, a little empire, perhaps on the model of the Montforts. But no, I never wanted to leave Cork, and I've never worked outside of Cork; even when the chance to teach in England came my way I had no real interest in going."
I feel I lived in much the same Cork as she did, and I respond to her apparent satisfaction with the city with some impatience. To me there seem to be no replacements for the icons of our time, for people such as Moriarty, or Aloys Fleischmann, or James Stack, or Charles Lynch, or Seamus Murphy or Gerald Goldberg. Good things are happening here, with good people involved in them, but that sense of overwhelming stature and personality seems to be absent. Perhaps we each have a list of our own - certainly we agree on Eileen Nolan - and I mustn't ignore the possibility, either, that Wyatt herself will be, to many young people of today, the icon they remember in later years.
After all, she can herself quote the Janacek sisters as schoolmates. She can mention Stephen Daunt's Youth Theatre Cork as a formative influence, which also allowed her the pleasure of directing the young Pat Kiernan, now of Corcadorca. And there was Tommy Burke of the opera house, who would let her hang around backstage to watch how costumes and props were managed and to understand the mechanics of getting it all together.
Her own list of credits is imposing, covers all the theatres of Cork and several outside; it includes productions of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Eclipsed, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Plough And The Stars, Female Transport, Once A Catholic, Agnes Of God, The Woman In Black, Kindertransport, Butterflies Are Free and Torch Song Trilogy. Pantomimes at Cork Opera House or the Everyman Palace are the only events for which, she says, she is signed up 12 months in advance.
She has also adapted many works for the stage, including Little Women, Thunder Up The Gully, Men Should Weep, A Kind Of Loving and Alice In Wonderland - this last a reminder of a steady string of productions with students and youth groups. Nor is she without civic recognition, winning, among other tributes, the Cork City Council Drama Award in 2002.
As I watch the uninterrupted rehearsal, listening to Camille O'Sullivan's metamorphosis from chanteuse to soprano, I wonder if this isn't, at last, the time for Wyatt's light to radiate beyond Cork's self-satisfaction. A few things are coming together: she believes that the VEC is contributing to the rebuilding of technical and technological as well as performance skills that have been dribbling away to other cities over the past few years. There is the emergence of Goldenboy Productions, the company behind Singin' In The Rain, one of whose directors, the choreographer Donna Daly Blyth, has worked with her on many occasions.
With fellow director David Hayes the company aims to present high-quality musical theatre based in Cork but with a national profile. A few of Singin' In The Rain's lead roles were filled by guest players - as they will be in the recast Dublin production, when the Olivier winner Paul Robinson, among others, joins the cast - but local performers did all the rest, and in the case of Man Of La Mancha two of the three main characters are from Cork.
With last year's achievement of a master's degree in drama and theatre studies from University College Cork, and with the success of Singin' In The Rain, she feels she has moved on to another, more challenging level of theatre production.
Dale Wasserman's Tony-winning adaptation of Don Quixote has been on the Cork Opera House cards for four years or so, but the call wasn't made until last January. Although it's a big-budget affair, she designed the costumes herself, and Bryan Flynn, the production's musical director, is recycling his Jesus Christ Superstar set, which both keeps the budget tight and gives them more control over the show's style. That matters greatly in a show that Wyatt admits is hardly even a musical in the popular sense of big choruses and tap routines.
In talking about it as enthusiastically as she does, she stops herself, afraid that it may be just an old horse she's trying to make gallop. "But at the same time it has great imaginative scope: it's a story of the inner spirit and the revival of self-belief, like Don Quixote himself, really." And perhaps a little like Marion Wyatt too.
Man Of La Mancha is at Cork Opera House until Saturday; Singin' In The Rain opens at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on July 13th
