Footsbarn has spent three decades taking its vibrant brand of theatre around the world - and raising families on the road. Belinda McKeon meets the troupe as they head for Ireland
Back in 1989, when Footsbarn Theatre Company rolled into Moscow, its actors and crew were deflated and exhausted after an epic journey. "We'd driven for 10 days with our old trucks on terrible roads," says Fredericka Hayter, a member of the troupe since 1982. "We were completely dishevelled, we hadn't washed, we were so roadweary, and then suddenly we were moved into the diplomatic lane, all our vans and caravans, and the television cameras filming us and everything. And we were given oranges. And we said, why are they giving us oranges? What we didn't realise is that oranges were such a luxury there, they were a really big gift."
Wherever in the world its tours have taken Footsbarn since the Cornwall-born company turned nomadic, in 1981, 10 years after its foundation, the greeting has been a generous one. Pulling its caravans in for the night on roadsides in the Russian countryside during that trek to Moscow, it was welcomed with offerings of food from local farms; in the Australian outback it found itself invited by the Aboriginal community to pitch its performance marquee in a village that had always been closed to outsiders. And even at the group's lowest point, when it arrived in Valencia to a deluge that left 250,000 people homeless and ruined its marquee, only to move on to another flood and another battering, in Granada, the cash and counsel of local gypsies baled it out.
Naturally, not everyone has been pleased to see the Footsbarn people coming, with their old-fashioned marquee, their painted buses and caravans, their lively children and their scruffy dogs. When John Kilby, the company's administrator and director, helped, in the mid 1980s, to establish Mir Caravan, a travelling festival involving Footsbarn and seven other companies that would take vibrant, daring and sometimes outrageous theatre behind the Iron Curtain, the performers became accustomed to waiting for many hours at borders while frowning officials decided whether to let them pass, to the sight of secret police lurking outside their performances, to moving slowly towards towns and cities and leaving quickly, their work of subversion done.
They also became used to frequent brushes with the bizarre. Hayter's husband, Paddy, who has been with the company since its Cornwall days, remembers how the famous Russian clown Slava Polunin and his troupe were invited to take part in Mir Caravan, and how they faced the tricky question of transport utterly unfazed. "The idea of travelling in trucks, caravans and tents was part of the festival," he says, laughing. "So they were all given cars and driving licences. But they'd never driven before. None of them. And so you had these Russian clowns driving in second gear" - "vroom, vroom," says his wife, cutting in - "full of vodka. They didn't need to be in costume. They were real clowns."
Slightly less hair-raising, at least so far, has been Footsbarn's experience in Ireland. A trip here was Footsbarn's first adventure beyond its Cornish base when, in 1978, the production Arthur came to Galway; since then it has made a number of stops, most recently with Gogol's The Inspector, at the Iveagh Gardens in 2000. Later this month the company will return to Dublin to test that welcome once more; at the invitation of the businessman Harry Crosbie, the Footsbarn marquee will make its home for more than a month at George's Dock in the IFSC - the site of the Spiegeltent during last year's fringe festival - to stage two Shakespearean productions, The Tempest and Perchance to Dream . . . . , Footsbarn's reworking of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth and King Lear.
They may not have anywhere to park their caravans just yet - in the five years since Footsbarn last visited, central Dublin's commune-friendly open space has shrunk to the size of a pinhead - and some of the group are dismayed by the ticket prices (€25 for previews, €33 thereafter), but they're looking forward to the run.
Well, most of them are. One member, Julie Biereye-Méziat, will come here with mixed feelings. Playing Miranda in The Tempest and Juliet in Perchance to Dream, Biereye-Méziat will be centre stage, but it could be for the last time, at least where Footsbarn is concerned. Having been born into the company (to founder member Margarete Biereye), in 1978, and having spent every day of her life since with her fellow Footsbarners, either on the road or living at the company's base, a custom-built village in central France called La Chaussée, and having married and given birth within the company, the young actor has decided, after Dublin, to strike it out alone, moving to Paris to work as a freelance actor. Well, not entirely alone; her husband, Guillaume Méziat, who will play opposite her in both the Dublin productions, and their four-year-old daughter, Xena Lucia, will come along. It will be the start of a very different way of life. And, as Biereye-Méziat tells stories of growing up in the Footsbarn clan, it's hard not to think it's a way of life she might very quickly tire of.
As a child member of the travelling group, she has seen and done extraordinary things, been to extraordinary places during extraordinary times. One of her earliest memories is of a 14-month tour of Australia, in 1985-6, two months of which were spent in that Aborigine village. The group attempted to return the hospitality by inviting the Aborigines into their tent, she says, but the response was a wary one. "They wouldn't even come in the first time," she says. "They were too scared. We had to take the whole roof of the tent off so that they could still see the outside."
Leaving Australia was hard for the then seven-year-old; having dived into crocodile- and shark-filled waters, having jumped over snakes in the bush, having woken to find a herd of camels staring at her through the window of her mother's van, she had picked up a taste for the outdoors.
But more wonderful places - India, South America, Russia - beckoned, and with them more new friends, more incredible experiences. "I remember in Russia, the play we were doing was one that was interdit; it was forbidden to perform. It was Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. And it was one of the first times a theatre company had ever performed that play in Russia. It was a huge success: the tent was packed, people were coming out crying and roses were being thrown at the end of the show."
Biereye-Méziat and the other children of the company played parts in this production as they did in all the others, she says. It's a sign of how seriously even the youngest members of the company were taken as actors that one of Biereye-Méziat's first roles was as one of the children of Macduff, in Macbeth, murdered in cold blood by the king, played by Paddy Hayter in that production. Her young daughter will appear in the shows that are coming to Dublin. "She's very proud of her parts," says Biereye-Méziat. And, although she's seeking a change of life for her daughter, Biereye-Méziat has no regrets about the life she's given her so far. "I'm very happy that she was born in Footsbarn," she says. "I think it's great for kids to be born in this group and to travel. When she was seven days old we went on a huge tour to Poland, the Czech Republic, Holland, Berlin, Spain."
Wasn't it incredibly difficult to rough it over such a distance with a tiny baby - and a firstborn, at that? Biereye-Méziat smiles, shakes her head. "I'm so used to this kind of life that for me it's normal. She was there, and I breastfed her for a year, so there was no problem about that. She just followed us along, and she was with us, me and her dad, all the time."
Most of the 40 or so children born in Footsbarn since 1971 have had similarly well-travelled starts to life, even though the idea of taking a newborn around the world in a caravan is not one that most parents would relish. But then these people aren't most parents, or most people, and, besides, a glimpse of their living quarters soon puts paid to any visions of hardship. Paddy and Freddy live in a cosy, brightly painted van that is crammed with both trinkets and the stuff of everyday living; it is also relatively spacious, however, with a steering wheel at one end and their bedroom, curtained off by a piece of coloured gauze, at the other.
They met at a festival in 1980, when Freddy, then living in Suffolk, decided to abandon everything and become part of Footsbarn. She, too, had her children in the company, but, unlike Julie, she's staying put, designing lighting and making masks, watching as the troupe gathers new members everywhere it goes. When I visit, they're just back from a three-month tour of India, and a stint in Korea will bring them up to their Dublin dates later this month; given that some Indian actors and musicians climbed aboard earlier this year, expect to see some Asian faces at George's Dock. In such a manner does the troupe grow, and in such a way does it change.
Julie Biereye-Méziat will come back often, she says, because Footsbarn is her family, and her family's family, but she knows that change will feel odd at first. "It's such a strong thing, Footsbarn," she says. "You're really protected from the real society. We lived in our own world and in our parents' dreams. And when you come out of that, it's kind of scary. You see so much of the world, but you're always protected."
Perchance to Dream . . . . previews at George's Dock, Dublin, on June 14th and 15th, then runs until July 3rd. The Tempest previews on July 6th and 7th, running until July 24th