She's wowing audiences with her scary take on Sleeping Beauty. Peter Crawleytalks to theatre director Róisín McBrinn
Most careers in theatre owe their development to a mixture of accident and accomplishment, but Róisín McBrinn believes in making her own chances. In a few short years, with a combination of talent and determination, the young Irish director has been making waves in Dublin and London.
Her big break came in 2005, when McBrinn, a drama graduate with a start-up theatre company, was selected from hundreds of eager applicants to become resident assistant director at Donmar Warehouse for a year. This was a highly-desirable position which prompted her to move to London, where she still lives.
Such a development might be considered lucky, but luck, as Seneca once put it, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Anne Clarke of Landmark productions and Una Carmody of the Helix might agree. When they held interviews to find a director for their co-production of Rufus Norris's grimly funny Sleeping Beauty, currently playing in the Helix, they spoke to several candidates. There was no competition.
"She blew the others away," Clarke says. "She came to the meeting incredibly prepared. She'd read the script and understood it. She was fizzing with ideas really, about how to do it, how to get the magic of it, and she just had a great mixture of confidence without arrogance - which is rare enough, and particularly hard to come by in a young director."
Confidence is one of the first impressions that McBrinn makes. She's a stylish, self-possessed 29-year-old, whose enthusiasm for her projects is balanced by a serious approach. "She's very clear about the projects she takes on," Clarke says. "I don't think she'd take on a project if she didn't believe she could bring something to it." Indeed, McBrinn can talk just as comfortably about the ecology of Norris's fairytale world - in which fairies taste bitter to ogres and toxic flatulence is a side-effect of strenuous magical spells - as she can discuss the harrowing background of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship (the subject of Tejas Verdes, which she directed last year for b*spoke).
McBrinn began directing when she was studying theatre in Trinity College, partly out of frustration with the few opportunities available to an aspiring actress in a college drama society dominated by male directors. Her first play as a director, she recalls, was a female two-hander called Mal de Mere, which she undertook, "only because I was only being offered parts - by boys - to play hookers. It wasn't that I wanted to direct, but that this was a cool play, for two women, that I was interested in." Encouraged by the experience, McBrinn continued directing and by the time she left Trinity, knew that "directing was exactly what I wanted to do".
"I have a profound interest in performance, specifically in theatre," she says, "and ultimately it turned out that I wanted to be involved in the creation of it, without necessarily being on stage."
For a few years, McBrinn toiled away on the usual route of the emerging director, forming her own theatre company, X-Bel-Air, to present funky productions of little-known contemporary American plays by José Rivera and David Ives. Their first production, she remembers, was staged for £100.
When she landed the coveted position at the Donmar she didn't look back. "London has been very good to me," she says, estimating that 70 per cent of her work is now done in the UK, where producing houses are favourably disposed towards freelance directors who pitch them projects. "You generate the idea," she says. "And for me, creating theatre is about innovation; unless you drive that innovation, it doesn't happen."
Although she is now based in London, with no immediate plans to return to Ireland, she is unwilling to consider herself London-Irish. "It's another place that I call home," she says. "It has afforded me opportunities that I don't know if I'd ever get here. I didn't leave in a puff of anger or anything like that. I was offered a big opportunity in London and I took it. And from there other opportunities have grown, and now they are coming from London and Dublin. There is a nomadic nature to working in theatre."
McBrinn's work has had a similarly wandering sensibility; from the magic realism of José Rivera and the urban cool of Adam Rapp - whom she discovered via the Donmar's literary department - to, more recently and slightly surprisingly, the plays of Brendan Behan and John B. Keane.
"It's not just that my taste has expanded," she says of her increasingly diverse CV, "but I think my capacity has expanded as well. I'm still really interested in cool New York writing, to be honest with you. But I have gained respect - more respect than I had before - for classics, for their strength and their impact. I think I've slightly altered my approach, so that it's not just about putting on a cool play, but finding stories that resonate with audiences, potentially creating new audiences, and also finding new modes of storytelling."
To this end, her experience assisting the Donmar's artistic director Michael Grandage, who she considers a visionary, and Kathy Burke, the acclaimed theatre director and actress still better known to the world as Waynetta Slob from the Harry Enfield TV shows, have helped to broaden her outlook while giving her great faith in collaboration. "That's one of my buzzes about directing," she says, "that you are collaborating with so many other voices with a view to creating one single thing. And it means you really get a chance to learn from other people as well."
Back in the Helix, where school audiences met Mal Whyte's cannibalistic ogress with chants of "Evil! Evil!", while first-time theatre-goers let out gasps of astonishment at every expansive set change or magical puff of glitter, it became clear how McBrinn could refer to Sleeping Beauty as "a play for little people" without underestimating the stature of the audience or the scale of the production.
Shortly after the first performance, a seven-year-old girl approached McBrinn to chat about the play. While they were talking, the girl announced, with some conviction, "Yeah, I'm never going to a Panto again." McBrinn, who had nothing against pantomime, was a little taken aback. What did she mean? "I just like plays now," the girl replied. McBrinn seemed satisfied to have opened up another theatrical opportunity. "I was like, Oh my god, that's so cool!" u
Sleeping Beauty runs at The Helix, DCU, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, until January 7th