The people in this photograph are all rising stars of Irish theatre. Rough Magic's pioneering Seeds programme, which pairs young bloods with seasoned hands at home and abroad, has nurtured acclaimed works such as Mark Doherty's Trad and Gerald Murphy's Take Me Away. This year's scheme, which should lead to productions at the 2007 Dublin Fringe Festival, has formed an ensemble, with designers, producers, directors and writers developing work as a team. Peter Crawley asks the participants about their goals.
1 The workaholic
Lisa McGee, 24
At school, in Derry, Lisa McGee's performances were "passable", but by the time she got to Queen's University in Belfast she realised she couldn't act. She turned to playwriting and, with her debut, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, discovered a work method. McGee's imagination is fired "when big things happen to small people"; she takes items from the evening news, then twists them "out of all recognition". In just 14 months of professional writing she has written for theatre, film and television. Now that she's working on her first feature film, while developing a teenage mystery show for BBC2 - "Closer to Twin Peaks than to Hollyoaks" - and awaiting a residency at the Royal National Theatre, you wonder what she needs from Seeds. "In theatre you have much more control over your own ideas. And I've never had a chance to develop work over such a long period of time. With Seeds I want to produce a really solid play that I'm proud of."
2 The stylist
Deirdre Dwyer, 23
When Deirdre Dwyer realised that she had become one of the oldest performers in Waterford Youth Drama, she knew she needed another way to stay involved in theatre. "I've always been interested in art and fashion, and I thought design would be a nice way to go about it." Within a year she was working professionally, balancing the low-budget naturalism of teen drama with fantastical imaginings for the
street theatre of Waterford's Spraoi Festival. Now based in Cork, where she studied theatre and English at UCC, Dwyer is looking forward to developing without the constraints of minuscule budgets. "The capability to think on a large scale is where I want to get to," she says. "It's very difficult for a designer to create work in the way that a director or producer can. But at last Seeds is a bit of recognition that design is what I'm doing."
3 The equestrian
Sophie Motley, 22
"It's just something I was always interested in," Sophie Motley says of the shamefully overlooked topic of her university dissertation: the role of horses in performance. The roots of hippodrama, as you know, are in 19th-century London, where Shakespeare's history plays were enacted with full battle scenes. Sadly, Motley holds little hope for furthering her explorations during Seeds. Interested in theatre since her childhood, in Shropshire, Motley turned her hand to everything from acting to lighting while studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Eventually, one role became an obvious choice. "With direction, you're able to work with everything," she says. She has since directed the dark drama The Pitchfork Disney and constructed a musical in 24 hours. "I'm very much aware that I'm a young director starting out," she says. "The best way to learn is by watching people at the top of their field." As for Seeds, "it's like being ushered into the theatre world with a giant arm around my shoulder."
4 The illuminator
Sarah Jane Shiels, 22
No offence intended, but does anybody aim to get into lighting? "I definitely fell into it accidentally," says Sarah Jane Shiels. "Although I have a degree in theatre studies, I didn't study lighting. It was my hobby."
First asked to operate lights as a 14-year-old in Dublin Youth Theatre, Shiels, who is another Trinity graduate, admits to developing an obsession about their glow.
"I would walk into a theatre and look for the lights, to see how they worked, how they looked. It was the dynamic of lights and movement, with bodies and space, that really got to me. When I saw it done well, it brought the show such added depth and quality. I aspire to that." Her ambitions for Seeds? "I'd like to become more experienced, to work with different forms and to find my own design voice. It comes through time."
5 The thinker
Stacey Gregg, 23
King's College Cambridge suited Stacey Gregg well. "There weren't gowns and formal dinners," the Belfast-born writer recalls. There was politics, however, and, as co-ordinator of the student executive in 2003, Gregg presided over a rent strike opposing increased living costs. "There was a scandal within the college," she remembers. "It got a bit stressful. I came out of it not unscathed and thought I'd rather do a play, really." Naturally, then, she has turned to the rosy escapism of adapting Greek tragedy for a Northern Irish context. "My version of Antigone has a lot of black humour, and I don't labour the myth," she says. "I don't come from a theatre or university background. My worst fear is to write exclusive theatre." Now finishing a documentary film as part of a master's degree at Royal Holloway college, in London, she made her pitch for Seeds by writing a historical comedy about the travel industry. "There's a lot of comic scope," she says. "Venice was the Magaluf - or 'Shagaluf' - of 1790."
6 The facilitator
Cian O'Brien, 25
In college, Cian O'Brien says, you get roped into things, and somehow he always seemed to end up producing shows. "I really enjoyed it, but there never seemed any formal way of approaching it. When Seeds came up it was an opportunity I couldn't pass by." Producers tend to be personalities as much as multitaskers. "I like to have six or seven things going at once," says O'Brien, currently the administrator of Focus Theatre while freelance-producing such new shows as Making Strange's majestic Hedwig and the Angry Inch. "Understanding where the artist is coming from, but maintaining the business side of it, is the tightrope the producer has to walk." Good example can sharpen a person's vision, and O'Brien is looking forward to observing Loughlin Deegan, Rough Magic's respected - and perhaps sometimes feared - power broker. But does O'Brien have the producer's all-important chutzpah? "Could your article mention that Hedwig is on in Project until July 15th?" Apparently so.
7 The self-deprecator
Fintan O'Higgins, 30
"Rough Magic are such a well-respected, well-established and good crowd. To have them invest time and money and confidence in me is a great boost," says Fintan O'Higgins, a compellingly enthusiastic but endearingly hesitant speaker. To begin with, O'Higgins wrote for his own satisfaction, starting with Headlong, a "masculine and shouty" affair about four paratroopers. "I was writing in the dark, really," he says. "They started out extremely simple, but with every successive play I'm trying to push myself." Having quit a master's in screenwriting in Leeds to take a job writing storylines for Emmerdale - he's now writing for Fair City - O'Higgins wants to apply his surer grasp of story structure to more sophisticated and ambitious dramas. "I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I want to write a story and to entertain people," he says, even if soaps leave little room for monologues and musical numbers, both of which he loves. "Honestly," he mock scoffs, "there's no vision."
8 The traveller
Conor Hanratty, 25
"Moshi moshi," says the voice from Tokyo. Conor Hanratty, now observing the work of the Japanese theatre director Yukio Ninagawa, has accumulated some serious air miles. Having studied Noh theatre at Trinity, and trailed its influence from a master's at Royal Holloway to a scholarship in Japan, Hanratty considers how Asian aesthetics mix with Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. "Well, you can read my book . . ." he says. (He hopes to publish one on Ninagawa next year.) With a production in Tokyo still to direct, a summer course in Greece to help organise and a paper in Helsinki to present, Hanratty's unflaggingly jet-set version ofacademia certainly has its attractions. But he is not ready to choose between scholastics and stagecraft. "What I really like about Rough Magic is that they combine a commitment to older texts along with new writing - and not just plays from Ireland," he says. Or, as one of his specialist subjects has put it, all the world's a stage.
See www.rough-magic.com