An ambitious staging of Titus Andronicus will use Jean-Guy Lecat's techniques to make the stage a tool rather than an obstacle, writes Karen Fricker
A young actor is walking backwards on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, reciting a passage from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. At a point about a metre behind the proscenium arch, he is halted by the voices of several dozen other young people shouting "stop!", as they have been instructed to do when they feel the actor has lost contact with his audience. That moment feels remarkably obvious: his voice loses resonance and starts to sound reedy and faint, and even for people sitting in the front stalls, direct eye contact with him becomes impossible.
The man who has set this exercise in motion, Jean-Guy Lecat, grabs the opportunity to drive his point home. "What did we learn? We hear the actor when he is in the same space as us. Beyond that point on the Abbey stage, he is in another room."
If we accept Lecat's premise - and having witnessed this simple demonstration, it's hard not to - it is clear that most of the productions staged at the Abbey fight an uphill battle to make any real sort of contact with their audiences, given the inherent deadness of the upper two-thirds of its stage area. Highly useful information for those currently contemplating the Abbey's architectural future, to be sure. But this exercise in theatre space was not the benefit of the powers-that-be of Irish theatre, but rather for those at the beginning of their careers in theatre, architecture, and fine art. It was part of a week-long workshop funded by the Arts Council and organised by Siren Productions as an offshoot of its staging next week of Titus Andronicus at Dublin's Project Arts Centre, for which Lecat is designing the sets. The production is remarkable both for the complexity of the story behind it and for the participation of Lecat, undoubtedly one of the most experienced and knowledgeable figures in the field of theatre architecture in the west.
From 1974 until 2001 Lecat worked for English director Peter Brook's Paris-based Centre International des Créations Théâtrales (CICT), on the now legendary world tours of such productions as The Conference of the Birds, The Ik, The Tragedy of Carmen, and The Mahabharata. In a capacity Lecat describes ohis English-language CV as "technical director and space designer", he travelled ahead of the rest of the company to locate and transform performance spaces, often in non-traditional sites such as quarries, warehouses, museums, sound stages, markets and cloisters. His work on these spaces included creating or redesigning stage and seating areas and backstage and front-of-house facilities, and the creation of workable acoustics. Many of these improvised theatres - including the Tramway in Glasgow, Barcelona's Mercat de les Flors, the Ostre Gasvaerk in Copenhagen and the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt - became permanent venues on foot of the CICT's innovations.
SINCE THE MID-1990s, Brook's work has become increasingly intimate and capable of fitting into existing theatres (as was the case when his Le Costume visited the Tivoli Theatre for the 2001 Dublin Theatre Festival); consequently the challenges for Lecat at the CICT decreased. Four years ago, he left the company.
"Twenty-five years was enough," he explains. "Peter Brook and I knew each other so well that we didn't have to speak any more. The risk is not to be creative any more, but to reproduce what we know, and not search." Searching is a key word in the Lecat lexicon: it has very clearly been a guiding principle of his professional life, and not something he was ready to forsake even when reaching an a point in his career at which others might have taken up early retirement or a cushy desk job. Instead, on leaving the CICT he co-wrote a book about his work with Brook (The Open Circle: Peter Brook's Theatre Environments, with Andrew Todd), set up a Paris-based consultancy to work with theatre architects in the creation and renovation of theatre venues, and he works as a freelance set designer and workshop leader.
It was at the first such workshop he ran in Dublin - in August 2003 - that Lecat encountered Selina Cartmell, the artistic director of Siren Productions, who was then brainstorming a staging of Titus Andronicus, one of Shakespeare's earliest, bloodiest, and most challenging plays. "A group of us were sitting at lunch at Sherry's on Abbey Street, and I was sketching ideas on a placemat," relates Cartmell. "I wanted Jean-Guy's ideas. What interests me about him is his view of theatre and the world - with Jean-Guy you always get the bigger picture. He gave some ideas and suggestions."
At some later point - which neither party can exactly remember - Cartmell asked Lecat to design the sets for the show, and he agreed, joining Cartmell's regular creative team of lighting designer Paul Keogan, composer Denis Clohessy, choreographer Ella Clarke, and performer Olwen Fouere, who will square off as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, against Owen Roe's titular Roman general.
AT THAT EARLY stage, Cartmell planned to present Titus in a cash-and-carry space on Thomas Street where, in early 2004, she directed Fouere in the performance piece Passades for Operating Theatre. Complications prevented the use of that space; undaunted, Cartmell and producer Maura O'Keeffe shifted their ambitions to the even more complex prospect of transforming the disused Iveagh Markets on Francis Street into a workable theatre. This was a project that had Lecat written all over it, and the Arts Council weighed in with a €95,000 grant, a sizeable figure made available on a once-off basis via the council's new, flexible project grants system.
The scale of this project required another financial or producing partner, which did not materialise. Earlier this year, rather than abandoning Titus altogether, Cartmell and O'Keeffe opted for the more conventional performance space of Project. While this caused some disappointment, Cartmell says that many of their earlier ideas will be maintained, particularly as regards the stage- audience relationship. The action will take place between two banks of seating, to give "the sense that the audience are inside Rome, that they are witnesses and complicit in the action. This is a central idea for Jean-Guy, in everything he does - a sense of intimacy created between performer and spectator."
THIS IDEA RECURRED again and again in Lecat's early November theatre architecture workshop. The larger point of the exercise on the Abbey Theatre stage was to underline the "one room" principle that Lecat, along with Brook, holds central: that traditional proscenium theatres, in which the overall space is divided into two separate areas for stage and audience, are antithetical to the purpose of theatre in the first place - that is to create direct and intimate communication. Nearly all of Brook and Lecat's theatre designs use a circular configuration, with the stage thrusting into the audience space and - another central principle - the action taking place on the floor rather than on a platform.
"There is no reason to have a raised stage, only tradition," intones Lecat sagely, leaning against the Abbey's raised stage. "The natural line of human vision is down. Why should we sit in a theatre and look up to see the action?" A final governing principle is minimalism: "If we work long enough with the actors, we don't need anything on a stage. Maybe a costume to say when and where, or something like a carpet, but that's it."
This could be interpreted as a self- defeating principle, given that Lecat is, among other things, trying to reinvent himself as a set designer. But young directors need encouragement and collaboration, he feels, in order to have the courage to "use the space more than build the set".
The message that comes through overall from Lecat is one of refreshing humility, which Cartmell says has helped her greatly as the Titus process took its many twists and turns: "Hekept my feet on the ground when I felt I wasn't getting enough money or support. He said, 'No one asked you to do this play. You initiated this, and it's easy to be self- indulgent when things are going wrong. But the important thing is to keep in mind the story we are trying to tell and the questions we are trying to ask'."
This humility has also come through in Lecat's rough-and-ready approach to the production process - flying economy, staying in digs, and weighing in on such tasks as set painting when the budget did not allow for extra staffing.
"I suppose I could be working with established directors and making lots of money. But I prefer to do what I've done all my life, which is to do what I like and take a risk. It's important when you are 60 years old to be pushed by the young, who see the theatre for the future," says Lecat. "We will never find the exact form of the theatre - fortunately. What interests me is to continue to search, to search, to search."
Titus Andronicus opens at Project Arts Centre on Mon at 7.30pm and runs for one week only, closing on Sat