Acclaimed for staging 'gutsy Shakespeare on the cheap', Loose Canon's new interpretation of The Duchess of Malfi marks a shift in their approach, writes Peter Crawley.
Although the low ceiling and bright decor of a room in the Ringsend Community Centre may not appear out of the ordinary, it feels like more than just a rehearsal space. It is a temple. The hushed tones of the five people here, the meditative precision of their movement and the apparent air of ritual make the visitor feel like a trespasser on sacred ground.
Jason Byrne, the artistic director of Loose Canon Theatre Company, leads me away from his rehearsal of John Webster's Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi for a moment, ostensibly so that he can have a cigarette, but also to allow the actors to "acclimatise" to my presence. "Someone has entered and they have to acknowledge that," he says between drags. The atmosphere is not one of mock reverence, however. There are far more practical reasons for the apparent serenity. "There's very little to talk about," he says matter-of-factly. "It's all action. When we're talking, we're not doing anything. This requires a minimum of words."
It is not an exaggeration to say that there has been a profound shift in Loose Canon's approach to theatre. Since 1996, the company had staged "gutsy Shakespeare on the cheap", as co-founder Willie White calls it. "That was Loose Canon's shtick." Acclaimed for the clarity of their interpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies from the Bard, to Thomas Kyd to Webster, their economic approach might have been rough-hewn (Loose), but the text was still central (Canon). Today, however, things have changed.
Loose Canon has become a consciously actor-centred company. "Well, it's a progression," says Byrne. "In the past, I felt that we leaned on text," he stresses. "We leaned on narrative. I stripped everything back so that just the text was clear, so I ended up with productions where actors became very still and static, even muted, in an effort to make the meaning emerge from the story. After a while, I felt that the actors were just becoming invisible on the stage. And some of the actors agreed."
Operating with a full-time ensemble of director and currently four actors, the company is unique in Ireland's theatre scene, where performers are usually employed on a freelance basis for strict rehearsal schedules and limited runs. Five weeks, for instance, would be considered a generous rehearsal schedule by any production's standards. The Duchess of Malfi has been rehearsing for 10 months. Byrne estimates that some of the actors have been honing their performance style with him for two and a half years, "but the text came into the room 10 months ago".
Back in that room, individual rehearsals of separate dialogues and vocal exercises unfurl in wandering counterpoint, occasionally forming accidental harmonies. The actors then conclude their individual exercises to converge for the climax of the play.
Performing a scene awash with anguish and fury, Deirdre Roycroft exacts taut movements, repeated actions and impassioned language. This summons to mind the mores of Japanese Kabuki theatre, where numerous styles of performance, including dance and speech, coalesce into an unorthodox whole. Balanced on the balls of her feet, the Duchess seems unaware that her duplicitous brother (played by Karl Quinn) is slowly stalking her, like a panther. The actors frequently interrupt rehearsal, for no discernible reason, asking to go back a few lines and then begin again. The effect is hypnotic.
"The things is," Byrne later explains, "Deirdre was never repeating anything. What she was trying to do was to let go of the things that were stopping her: anything that stopped her from surrendering. Whenever she tries to be proactive, that's when it falls down." Byrne refers to the theorist and actor Stanislavski's concept of Organicity. "The nervous system is engaged through an authentic line of impulses in the actor, which means it's authentic behaviour rather than a demonstration of behaviour. This is what we're working on. The actors try to discover their own behaviour and this is then harmonised with Webster's narrative, so the spectator is able to engage with Webster through the actor's reality . . . does that make any sense?"
What does become clear in talking to the director is Byrne's abhorrence of clichés. He seems dogged by the notion that styles and systems become stale from overuse. Loose Canon's previous approach had never been considered hackneyed, however. "Well, I was bored," he counters. "I felt we had flashes, yeah. But they were fortuitous. I felt that it was like listening to a recital. There wasn't any viscerality. Nothing at stake." Centring on the approaches of such drama-theorists as Stanislavsky, Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, while training extensively with acrobatics, there now seems to be plenty at stake.
"In the grander scheme of things, it's not esoteric," Willie White says of their focus, "but it is a little bit unusual in terms of the practice in this country. It's a totally different way of making work. It arises out of improvisation, honing the improvisation, elaboration of the story and then an encounter with the text." For White, what distinguishes this approach from the norm is "the diversity of activity", otherwise, "the writer is fetishised".
No such fetish extends to Webster, whose famous tragedy has been "cut to shreds" according to the director, in order to accommodate his small cast. Byrne has even found an innovative way around what he previously regarded as the "problematic fifth act".
He's cut it completely.
The idea is still to reconcile the author and the performer, although there remains a peculiar tension in Loose Canon's approach. Byrne wants to create a "rough and ready" production in spite of a 10-month rehearsal period; the actors are free to improvise, although they have a strict repertoire of precise movements; Byrne wants to create art, but to dismantle the artifice - to dissolve such conventions as the fourth wall and upset the suspension of disbelief so that there exists no barriers between the performer and the audience. An embarrassing illustration of this arrives when, in this hushed sanctuary during a pivotal moment in the play, my mobile phone starts ringing.
"Don't worry," whispers Byrne as I stab it silent. He says it's good to upset the applecart sometimes. Elaborating later, he adds, "That didn't bother them. When you're phone went off, it was real. And when something real happens it always throws anything that's false into relief. So when I get up and I walk among them [in rehearsals\], if there's any disparity between my reality and their reality, then we're doing something wrong. They shouldn't look like plastic flowers in the back garden, the reality should be all the same." Byrne now considers the pretence of the fourth wall a sort of hypocrisy.
'That's not real. Every spectator recognises that hypocrisy through the nervous system. Everybody can feel it." The director offers a more extraordinary illustration of this shared experience, recalling last year's production of Macbeth, performed as a three-hander. One night, during a particularly difficult scene, an errant Leaving Cert student strolled onto the stage and stood beside Lady Macbeth during her speech. "It was absolutely phenomenal," nods Byrne. "I was looking at them thinking, there's no difference between these realities. The veil hasn't been torn down. She's still \ and she's aware of this boy standing beside her, but she's carrying on." Here boundaries are being dissolved. Suspended in the fluid space between actor, author, director and spectator, no one is the sole arbiter of meaning. "I think art needs to be constantly moving forward," says Byrne. "I don't know if theatre needs a revolution . . . I think that we did."
The Duchess of Malfi is part of the the Dublin Fringe Festival and opens in SS Michael and John Church on October 7th