Irish theatre currently appears to be experiencing exciting rebirths at such regular intervals that it is in danger of becoming a habit. However, even the international success of young playwrights such as Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh is being overshadowed by the triumphant rise of the director Conall Morrison.
Having secured an opening-night standing ovation at the Abbey this week for his lively version of Boucicault's frenetic melodrama The Colleen Bawn, Morrison is now reviving his award-winning stage adaptation of Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn for the National Theatre in London. Rumour, well supported by his obviously happy association with the Abbey, has selected him as a potential artistic director of Ireland's National Theatre, if and when the current incumbent, Patrick Mason, decides to vacate the position.
Morrison would seem ideal. The playwright Tom Murphy, who was among the attendance at the Abbey opening, describes him as "the most exciting new force in Irish theatre" and regards this new production as "wonderful, creative theatre."
According to Murphy, who has long supported the idea of living theatre and working actors, Morrison's version of The Colleen Bawn is hugely important, "not only because Boucicault is very important as an influence on Shaw, Synge, O'Casey, Flann O'Brien and Beckett" as well as the European Absurdists, Ionesco and Pirandello, but because it represents a great confluence of play, director and actor.
For Rough Magic's artistic director, Lynne Parker, another of Ireland's outstanding theatre directors ,Morrison is "a real theatre man". "
Outgoing, disconcertingly articulate for a very fast talker, an actor's director, Conall Morrison (32) is as committed to the classics as he is to new Irish writing. He is friendly, approachable, energetic, inventive, realistic, physically tough enough to survive the demands of a high-pressure career, and certainly successful enough to be aware of it and enjoy it.
Still single, he is widely regarded as "great company". Earlier this year he was appointed one of two associate directors of the Abbey. It is a two-year contract. While the Abbey's structure is something he enjoys, he is equally at ease with the wider freedoms of his profession.
Born in Co Armagh, the middle of five children of Derry parents, Morrison attended St Patrick's College, Armagh, adjacent to the cathedral. His father taught maths, Morrison's worst subject, at St Patrick's. Even as a schoolboy he was always interested in literature and theatre and also liked basketball.
At St Patrick's he was lucky enough - or rather unlucky enough - to be on a very strong team. The first five were on the Ulster schoolboy squad, while four of that five were also on the all-Ireland team.
Theatre took over. As a schoolboy in 1980, he saw a Field Day production of Friel's Translations. Having sent an early play to Brian Friel, the young Morrison was pleased to receive a reply from the playwright, who is married to his Auntie Anne.
"Too much dialogue" was Friel's opinion. "Don't tell me, show me." For Morrison it was a lesson about the clarity of action on stage. It is something he has never forgotten.
A highly visual director, he is interested in detail and calls upon a variety of visual devices, whether it is one actor on stage with a candle or 32 actors pretending, as in Tarry Flynn, to be chickens. "But," he says, "a detail is worthwhile only if it is noticed."
At 18, he set off to study literature and philosophy at Edinburgh University. He left within a year but remained in Edinburgh, having become involved in student drama as well as community theatre.
With four years of practical theatre work behind him, Morrison felt it was time to return to formal study and completed a BA degree in theatre studies at Liverpool Polytechnic. On graduating in 1991 he moved to Dublin, a city he felt he should know better, particularly in the context of Irish theatre.
His versatility is well established, as evident from his production of Gary Mitchell's In a Little World of Our Own and As The Beast Sleeps, as well as Tarry Flynn, The Colleen Bawn and Morrison's own play Hard To Believe, a powerful tour de force monologue commissioned by Bickerstaffe which was performed by Sean Kearns at Andrews Lane Theatre in 1995.
Last February he won The Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Award for Best Director for the Abbey Theatre production of Tarry Flynn, and In a Little World of Our Own.
As a writer he has also been busy and has written many works. Rough Justice, a play about punishment beating, and Green, Orange and Pink, a satire about North of Ireland attitudes to sexuality, have been produced in England.
In a recent interview, Morrison described writing as "very punishing" but he clearly both enjoys and needs the challenge of it. Actors are important to him, and in an effort to come closer to the performance experience, he appeared in several productions while at Liverpool and is a talented impersonator.
Unlikely to strike any observer as an angry young man of theatre, Conall Morrison's anger is best described as "selective". Should he in time progress to the artistic directorship of the Abbey, he would certainly exercise his ambition of providing "wall-to-wall Shakespeare and the entire Jacobean canon as well as new Irish writing". In short; something for everyone.
