From chance beginnings, the Dublin Fringe Festival has become the stage for emerging talent, writes Peter Crawley.
Ten years ago, Jimmy Fay was given a simple instruction. The director of Bedrock Theatre Company had applied to the Dublin Theatre Festival with the intention of staging Caryl Churchill's The Skriker - and been declined. The festival, however, was attuned to a new energy in the independent niches of the city. Its organisers suggested that Fay organise a concurrent event with some other groups. They gave him some money, some encouragement and told him that, whatever he did, he should not call it "Fringe".
Dublin Corporation also supported the idea, merely asking that Fay not call it a "Fringe Festival". Interest from young artists was considerable, buoyed by an alternative approach to staging theatre in a city that was then (and some say still is) crippled by conservatism. In 1995, a phenomenon was born that would change theatre in the capital forever. It was called the Dublin Fringe Festival.
"Fringe was a dirty word in 1995," Fay says, his words pummelling out with the tough authority of a boxing coach. "It's used as a patronising kind of word, especially in terms of funding. It's deemed that the quality is low. But actually when the quality is high, it's probably better than what's on in the main festival. Everybody said, don't call it Fringe, because it won't sustain it - it won't happen. But in 1995, the Fringe Festival was the festival. It wiped out the main festival completely, and it was great." In that first programme lay the work of a new writer named Conor McPherson. Elsewhere, a fledgling company called Corn Exchange explored the (frankly ridiculous) notion of using a turbo-charged style of Commedia dell'arte in an unconventional performance space.
A year later, Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs launched the playwright's career and cemented the reputation of Corcadorca and those of its cast members, Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh. It would later transfer to the West End, and would go on to be adapted for film.
Today the Fringe Festival is, as Fay puts it, part of the calendar. "People who wouldn't go to the theatre the other 11 months of the year, they will absolutely go then. You'd be stupid, as a young company, not to want to be part of the Fringe Festival."
THE THREE MEMBERS of Inis Theatre, one of Dublin's most consistently inventive and relentlessly entertaining young companies, certainly seem to think so. We are sitting around a table in Bewley's Café Theatre, where Iseult Golden and Carmel Stephens will soon perform Tick My Box, a new production inspired by the phenomenon of speed dating, and their second show at the Fringe.
"The Fringe is a way of being guaranteed a review where young companies find that very difficult," says resident director David Horan. Within the quick-glance consumption of short, star-rated reviews - to which this newspaper subscribes - Horan is upfront about what is required to compete for audiences. "You need your four stars to get them," he says, matter-of-factly. But Carmel Stephens also testifies to the power of word-of-mouth, where audience approval zips around the Fringe in ultra-quick, synaptic leaps.
But doesn't mounting a show in the Fringe feel like a huge gamble? Isn't it like taking all your savings to Vegas and putting it all on red? "No it's not," says Golden, referring to the security of the festival's administrative support, publicity and even international exposure. "It might launch the show on to somewhere else. I'm beginning to feel that the downside is not so big."
Stephens concurs. "The downside is only financial," she says. "It might be a struggle to pay our rent."
Though they had performed on the Fringe twice before, in 2002 Semper Fi hit the big time by taking a simple idea for a site-specific show and quickly turning it into a near-global brand. Originally conceived with the writer Paul Walker in Dublin's Sackville Lounge, as a show based in a public toilet that didn't feature homosexuality or drug-use, when director Karl Shiels talks about the future of Ladies and Gents now, he speaks not of theatres but of cities.
"We brought it to Edinburgh from here. My idea is to get it into London and just leave it there. Manchester are taking it next year. We're talking to New York. A company in Reykjavik wants to translate it." In Mexico, he says, there are plans to build a public toilet especially for the play. "And when we leave it," he says, "the public gets the toilet." From a site-specific work to a work-specific site, Shiels sees the Fringe as a great enabler.
"You have the willingness of an audience to participate," says Shiels, "to go into a space where they haven't been before, under that whole umbrella of the festival where you know you can see something you wouldn't ordinarily see." Capitalising on a festival success is crucial, however, and Shiels agrees that a company intent on developing can't become tethered to the festival.
"The Fringe is a great environment for a company to plant the seed and then move on from there. It's a good showcase for what you can do, but you have to have a life outside of the fest as well." Generally, Shiels watches a lot of theatre, "but at festival time," he says, "I O.D."
If the Fringe thrives on the vigour of a fresh and unexpected direction, one company that might supply its regeneration this year is also new to the festival. Nervousystem, a Dublin-based full-time ensemble, follow their recent Fire Face (a stark, Noh-influenced presentation of Yeats's Cúchulainn Cycle) with a new version of Racine's Phaedra.
The play incorporates new writing from Jeffrey Gomly and employs a dramaturgical dragnet that has trapped everything from Van Gogh's paintings, Angela Carter's writings and films by Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch.
Many new companies wear theatre theory the way that many new college students wear Che Guevara T-Shirts: they often seem ill-fitting and the intent fades quickly.
So when the actor/director Aiden Condron speaks of "physical actions" derived from Stanislavski's focus on what "are really psychophysical actions", which were later pursued by such practitioners as Grotowski, Meyerhold and Eugenio Barba, that built upon "impulsive responses to external stimuli", which "create what in method acting would be called subtext" one wonders if there's the slightest danger of over-analysing the process.
Point this out and the company insist that the art comes first and the theory later, but the Fringe, as Condron puts it, "gives you a kosher licence to experiment. People expect experimentation in the Fringe in a way that maybe they don't have an interface for throughout the rest of the year." Initially attracted to the buzz of the festival, of finding an audience that doesn't usually attend theatre, and of convincing people to work with her for no money, Jo Mangan launched the Performance Corporation on the Fringe in 2002 with their dazzling inaugural production of Candide. The show went on to win awards both on the Fringe and at The Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards. "It was revived four times eventually," she recalls, "with a national tour. Maybe it needed approval from an open forum. I wonder how it would have gone if we had rented Andrew's Lane. Who knows?" The dryness of her voice, however, suggests that she knows.
When Annie Ryan of Corn Exchange asked Jo Mangan how she could afford so many actors in her two productions, Mangan's response was simple: "We're not paying them." It must have brought a haze of nostalgia over Ryan, as close to a veteran of the Fringe as it is possible to be, whose commedia version of Streetcar, she tells me, cost "a clean grand" to stage and remains the most satisfying of her career.
"I would say to people who are making Fringe work now; enjoy it, go for it, take it as far as you can. In some ways you have more freedom when you have no money and people willing to give you their free time and energy, than later." With Arts Council funding, an office, administration and a board, Ryan has everything that those people - Inis, Nervousystem and even Performance Corporation - are still urgently seeking. Her argument makes me think of Wilde's remark that youth is wasted on the young. This is not to suggest that the vibrancy of Corn Exchange has diminished since Ryan introduced her brand of commedia to Dublin (Inis Theatre even used it to develop their 12 new characters) or led an audience into the back seats of cars for the legendary Car Show. But while Ryan's voice rarely hits a register lower than the allegro of optimism, things don't sound any easier beyond the Fringe.
So what are you looking for from this year's Fringe? "I hope it's not the same old Fringe stuff," says Ryan.
ESB Dublin Fringe Festival takes place from September 20th to October 10th.
See www.fringefest.com