The Repertory Experiment of nine actors performing three plays is paying dividends, writes Peter Crawley
For someone who might currently be the busiest actor in Irish theatre, Peter Daly seems remarkably relaxed. It is late in the sixth week of his rehearsal schedule and Daly, a physically nimble performer with clear gentle voice, is running the second show of his day, a highly physical production of Metamorphosis for director David Horan. About an hour earlier he had been in another rehearsal space, 10 minutes' walk away, for the highly surreal comedy, Mr Kolpert, directed by Tom Creed. The following day he would be returning to a highly naturalistic production of Chekhov's early play, Platonov for director Darragh McKeon.
The servant of many masters, Daly is at the very centre of The Repertory Experiment, a project in which one cast will perform three very distinct plays in rotation for three and a half weeks during the Dublin Fringe Festival. As the only performer to play a role in all three productions, Daly is like the interstice of a Venn diagram - the point where all shows overlap.
"On paper it's hard work," he says, "but in reality . . ." He shrugs. If anything, Daly would like to be more involved. In Metamorphosis, Steven Berkoff's adaptation of the Kafka novel, he plays two cruel and malevolent figures, but both are walk-on roles. In Mr Kolpert, a darkly amusing farce by David Gieselmann, he plays a pizza-delivery man with about 15 accumulated minutes of stage time. Platonov makes more demands of him, but, where the eight other members of his new acting ensemble appear in only two shows each, stretched between three, Daly has come to feel like a guest performer.
At an early forum - The Repertory Experiment is being meticulously analysed with weekly discussions involving all the participants - Daly explained his feelings good-humouredly. "There are four actors in Metamorphosis at a banquet and four actors in Mr Kolpert feasting," he said. "I'm just nibbling."
In every other respect, however, you might wonder if Once-Off Productions has bitten off more than it can chew. In recent years the ensemble - a full-time company of actors who perform various plays in repertory - has come to resemble the holy grail of independent Irish theatre.
The model is more familiar to the well-subsidised theatres of Germany, Hungary or Russia, while the theatre beyond is based almost exclusively on freelance contracts: actors simply come and go, and even if a company finds a perfect dynamic, its associations dissolves with the final bow.
The ensemble, though, is the structure that Druid and Rough Magic have been pursuing, albeit unofficially, featuring many of the same actors across their productions. (So far, DruidSynge has come closest to illustrating the connected benefits of a single ensemble sharing a body of work). And in this year's Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, director Loughlin Deegan has deliberately programmed a stimulating strand of work from some of the world's leading ensembles (SITI, Krétakör, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord) with professional workshops attached.
"Clearly, the model of the future is repertory," says Tom Creed, as though it is the only sensible conclusion to draw, as the three directors take their lunch break. A frighteningly well-informed theatre practitioner, as likely to reference 17th century French theatre as he is to identify current trends in Berlin, Creed also recognises repertory as the model of the past.
"Essentially all of the great theatrical movements that have ever happened, really, were based around companies, be it Shakespeare [ and Lord Chamberlain's Men] Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, Molière's company [ The Troupe de Monsieur], Joan Littlewood's company [ Theatre Workshop] in Stratford, The Abbey Players . . . all were companies that developed an aesthetic and developed a way of working with each other so that you didn't have to learn the relationship with the other people every time."
Creed and McKeon first developed ambitions to replicate the repertory model while travelling around Europe during the SEEDS mentoring programme with Rough Magic.
"Seeing companies rehearsing one show during the day and performing another at night, and watching the actor who plays King Lear one day playing the old guy in the background the next night," recalls Creed, "the idea was to really stretch a company and to have works that talked to each other and developed a relationship with the audience."
COMBINING FORCES, CREED, McKeon and Horan secured Once-Off Productions to manage their efforts, and the experiment was granted €90,000 from the Arts Council to make the project happen. All they needed was to agree on a cast.
"There's that funny thing where actors get to see a million directors working," says Horan, "and directors never get to see each other at work. We're not in each other's rehearsal rooms, but we did have to come together on casting."
Each director held the power of veto on casting decisions. "Somebody might have been perfect for Metamorphosis," explains Horan, "but wasn't going to work in the part they needed in Platonov or Kolpert. We also had to agree on format and rehearsal schedule. And in the proximity, I've been pleasantly surprised that we have actually gotten to know, to a greater extent, the way the three of us approach our work. That's a nice side benefit."
The casting was clearly an issue - the final performer was not agreed upon until a couple of days before rehearsals began - but, given the demands of six-week rehearsal schedule for six days a week to cover three separate productions, it takes a particularly adventurous actor to commit to the experiment.
"There is a particular kind of actor who's up for it," admits Creed. "Those are the kind of actors I'm attracted to." Or, as McKeon puts it: "the actors who accepted were the actors we were going to need. They know that it's a big challenge."
None of the plays has been chosen for thematic or stylistic similarity - if anything, they are wildly diverse - but for the project to be more than simply an endurance test for nine actors, each production must inform the others, the plays need to speak to each other.
"Already we're finding that it is good for the actors to have an experience like this," says Horan. "Both myself and Tom had our first day of rehearsals this week on Tuesday after a five-day gap" - during which Platonov, which uses all nine performers, had been rehearsing. "But we both found in our separate rehearsal rooms, that there was very little delay in them remembering where they'd left off a whole five days ago." In fact, Horan felt that his show had improved in those days without contact. A change is as good as a rest, goes the maxim, although an actor working a six-day week might not thank you for saying it.
"The actors are now physically tired," concedes Horan. McKeon, who had one week of rehearsals to go, nodded. "Yeah, that's a major issue." On a Thursday evening in Dance House (one of the three rehearsal spaces), fatigue was an issue under discussion in the weekly forum. Thomas Conway, the theatre director and Druid's literary manager, chaired the meeting as though it were a cross between an artistic panel discussion and a group therapy session.
"How do you find the shifts?" he asked, referring to the balancing act of remembering different plays. (A common, nervous gag, is about turning up on stage in the wrong costume.) "Has it been a strain on the performers?" There was general agreement that it had, yet their enthusiasm for the project had not seemed to diminish. Paul Reid, whose astonishingly physical work that day playing the insectoid Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis entitled him to be exhausted, wondered if he could retain that intensity on his next job. "I'm looking forward to seeing how I approach it."
David Heap appreciated that the competing performances forbade the actors from falling into comfortable habits. And while he spoke of how civil it was for a director not to have to retreat from the world within the repertory model - in a way, one felt, that the actors still must - Tom Creed announced, quite genuinely, that he had not experienced a bad day of rehearsals. "And that's because we don't have time."
Yet for all the easy accord, and the directors' insistence that this process makes it easier for them to exchange free and frank feedback ("For the theatre to get better," Creed told me, "we need to get over this 'Darling, you were marvellous' nonsense.") there was a slight sense of rivalry between them.
Away from the group it was suggested to Peter Daly that the directors must have found it sensitive to allow their cast to see other people. "It's like an open-relationship," he agreed. Without the competiton? "Well, maybe there is that competition. I've wondered: 'He's got you up on the floor already? You've done a run?!'" There is no harm for a company, though, if the directors are keeping themselves on their toes.
As the forum wound down in the late evening, the discussion became more purposeful, more ambitious. "If the effort is pulled off," said Heap, "it would be an absolute travesty not to repeat it next year." Tom Creed, as ever, was looking forward and harkening back. "We could reinvent the term theatre company into what it used to be," he said as the group prepared to split again. "Not an administration, but a genuine company."
The three plays of The Repertory Experiment run in rotation from tonight until Sept 22 as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival. See www.fringefest.com