If anyone with a bit of oul' artistic talent, ie, someone not cut out for the real world, is at a loose end, there is a great job going down at Dublin's Project Arts Centre. According to a piece in this paper the other day, the Project is planning a playwright-in-residence programme. When it gets going, the "residency" will provide a writer with an income, that is "enough to live on", for two years.
There is nothing new here, you will say. The writer-in-residence racket is going on a long time now. But of course the big worry for would-be incumbents is: how much writing will have to be done in the two years? Who will say the stuff is up to scratch or not? Will you be thrown out on your ear on East Essex Street after three weeks if all you have produced is two lines of dialogue for a half-imagined character in an unknown location?
Relax. Calm down. God, you creative types are such worriers; it's a wonder you ever get any work done at all.
Now listen carefully to this: "We will offer that residency to someone who wants to create a space to reflect on their own work. We're not saying they have to write anything. Or they might use the two years to write a book of poems. If that's what happens, that's what happens."
So says the Project's artistic director, Kathy McArdle. Refreshing, what? No nonsense about production schedules, no deadlines, no bureaucrats breathing down your back, no reports to be made, not a word at all to be written if you don't feel like it.
The only thing you must remember is to avoid something called commodification: "Project is not about commodities. If you look at the crisis in theatre, that has to do with the level of commodification in contemporary culture, the emphasis on consumption. People come to the theatre expecting to consume a product rather than experience something."
All right, we'll keep that in mind. But look, get this job and you could be up the road in the Palace or Oliver Gogarty's or the octagonal bar of the Clarence for the entire two years drinking your head off, if you wanted to.
And fully employed, paid, and with absolutely no guilt at all about the thing. Well, maybe just a niggling little bit. Perhaps asking yourself, in the early hours of the morning, as you stagger along the cobbled streets to your playwright's residency, if you are credibly fulfilling the agreed role of being "someone who wants to create a space to reflect on their own work".
Though confused with alcohol, you remind yourself that the contract is not to actually create such a space, but merely to be someone who wants to do so. And of course you are such a person - sure why wouldn't you be. A little later you would like to create a space to reflect in privacy and utter silence on your own hangover, but when the head clears, you are quite happy to think about work once again. Not to actually do any, mind you, but certainly to have a good think about it. And then, by gum, it's almost lunchtime.
Three months down the road, and let's be honest, this is the life. Then one fine day you arrive in your residency to find a number of people floating vaguely around you, only with marginally more purpose than the same people, Project employees it seems (you are not sure), have been showing since you arrived.
No one is gauche enough to ask you how your work is "going", but there is some kind of aura about, some kind of meaningful artistic silence. Then as suddenly as they have appeared, the figures are gone.
But you are unnerved. The same day you begin to work frantically. You take few breaks, and stay out of the pubs. You hit on a novel way to deal with a traditional dramatic tale, and the thing takes shape. Act one is completed in four days. Within two weeks you have a first draft of what you are confident will be a successful play.
The next day, you call together the Project's artistic staff and present them with the typescript. Their reaction is one of deep unhappiness. They are loath to say what exactly is wrong, but a spokesperson finally lays it on the line: your play is a commodity. Its plot and structure can be accurately summarised. Its characters are disappointingly three-dimensional and fully formed. The whole thing sits within the conventional artistic model of production and consumption, and falls very short of the uncommodifiable experience the Project wishes to, well, project.
You are a broken being. You offer your resignation instantly, but as a commodity it is naturally refused. You have 20 months of your residency left, and you must serve it out. More degrading still, you will continue to be paid. This is artistic hell, and you are the damned.
bglacken@irish-times.ie