Boomerang theatre company has teamed up with an Amsterdam group to stage John Osborne's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray - and added their own interpretation. Mary Leland reports
The thing about Boomerang theatre company, I remind myself as I stare at the camel in the stable and he stares back at me, is always to expect the unexpected. Ponies stabled in the alley - well, OK. Llamas? Three of them, munching their hay and only mildly curious - well, it is Boomerang, after all: unusual, individual, even idiosyncratic. But a double-humped Camelus ferus is, I have to admit, something of a surprise - Boomerang is sharing its rehearsal space at the Munster Agricultural Society Showgrounds with Circus Vegas
Yet if this surrealistic introduction to the company's collaboration with Made in Da Shade theatre company from Amsterdam seems all in keeping with a free-range, youth-oriented philosophy, the impression is misleading. The Cork and Dutch companies have come together for a production of John Osborne's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the arrangement has a stern professional status. Experimental, maybe, but Boomerang director Trish Edelstein makes sure that however adventurous the approach, the end result is disciplined and determined. This is not drama for young actors, but drama for young audiences, and the European money funding her company means that those audiences are European, in theatres and performance spaces throughout the Continent.
Edelstein is a director of EunetArt, a European-wide confederation of theatre companies established by the European Commission to produce multi-media drama to encourage young people into theatres. "Audiences were dropping all over Europe when this was set up about 15 years ago. The idea is to develop educational programmes which are not based on school workshop performances, but which make the theatre itself, as a place, a venue or an auditorium, attractive.
"If we don't nourish and develop a sense of artistic welcome for youngsters, then what will we do for audiences in the future?"
Largely funded by the Culture 2002 programme of the European Commission, Boomerang gave a demonstration of its working methods in Berlin recently, with a performance of two scenes from the play for fellow-directors and other theatre professionals. "It was very encouraging. I don't think there was one person who wouldn't meet my eye afterwards," says Edelstein.
Initially, the Boomerang idea was educational outreach or minority inclusion, well-meant and actually quite effective, with some excellent theatrical performances. "But what I was hearing over the years was that these teenagers found theatre boring, that they were being dragged along to see indifferent productions of curriculum-based plays; I felt that I wanted to change that attitude, in Cork at least."
In fact, Boomerang has moved quite a distance from Cork through its European connections, which in turn have brought Made in Da Shade's Ruud Laufermeijer and Made in Da Shade sound designer Marcel Wierckx to this long bare loft rehearsal space with its two-bar electric fire in the Cork Showgrounds. Ruud's earlier work in the Netherlands was orientated towards hip-hop culture and moved from there into the development of multi-media productions. Currently presenting an interactive painting performance at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York, his work stimulated the wider use of techniques combining video, sound and presence, combinations which he describes as layers of a production rather than something interwoven.
"With theatre, there's the language of the stage. The actors' presence, their movement, their speech. All live. We lay another skin over that - the language of film, of its different time-codes, different perspectives - but in such a way that the story told within the film is not an illustration of what's happening on stage, but another level of the same story."
How do the actors feel about this process of enhancement and manipulation? Is there a sense that they're being second-guessed, that their interpretation of a role is queried or contradicted by the film going on behind them?
"No," says Tom Power, who plays Dorian. "It's not us versus the video - we're working with the cameras, it's part of what we do."
They're doing it without seeing the 1945 film which is quite deliberately invoked for this production. In that movie, Hurd Hatfield played Dorian Gray, and immediately became famous for being beautiful. In retreat from Hollywood, Hatfield came to live at Ballinterry, near Cork, where his close friend, the playwright Maggie Williams, has kept his fascinating home exactly as he left it. She allowed the Boomerang team film inside the house so that its atmosphere, and even perhaps something of Hatfield's own personality, might imbue the production.
"The documentation of soundscapes is part of the tradition I come from," explains Marcel Wierckx, composer of the soundtrack for the film Sleeping Rough, winner of the Tiger Award at this year's Rotterdam International Film Festival. "What I found most interesting here was capturing the tiny sounds that go un-noticed, a crackling around the windows, for example, things that nobody's paying attention to. The challenge is to manipulate those sounds to amplify what's happening on the stage. Not making it louder, but to bring up the detail, to create something new that still retains something of the original flavour."
When the team arrived at Ballinterry, they found all that Hurd Hatfield had kept from the movie: props, costumes, photographs, letters and a video of the film itself. "So in a way," says Ruud, "this becomes too the story of Hurd Hatfield, the Dorian Gray-type he may have been in real life. A third layer is added to the performance, the story of the actor. Three different strands of the story will be present at the same time, and this is really the new way of doing things, of showing different elements in one production in which everything is equally important."
But surely the text has to be of premier importance? They agree. Without the text there would not be a play, although Ruud insists that a designer must use the strongest materials available. They agree, too, that this shared approach (which, on the evidence of this rehearsal, at least treats the text with the respect it deserves) must acknowledge that they are superimposing their interpretation, via Osborne, on Hatfield's interpretation - that their sense of the play is mediated by their appreciation of the film, which in turn is part of the memory of a story which now seems more relevant and recognisable than before.
Edelstein deliberately did not look for a classic ideal of beauty when casting. "It is the people in the play who think Dorian is beautiful, and it is they who make him believe that he is a spectator at his own life. I want a strong cast, not a lovely one, to bring out the theme that this is a play about the choices one has in life."
As she speaks, she shows me down the rickety staircase. At the bottom of which, of all things, there is a hearse, complete with attendant funeral car, which has just been parked.
This has been a very layered interview, even for Boomerang.
The Picture of Dorian Gray opens at the Everyman Palace, Cork, on Wednesday, and will tour to Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia and Belgium next spring