Theatre: Make drama out of a crisis

“So it’s something that gives you a little insight into somebody like that. It’s a play that addresses how people move on in their lives, in a different country, in a different culture, where people have forgotten the conflict that brought them there. You can be in theatre that is a world of its own, a goldfish bowl where you don’t have an awareness of the world. Or you can be in theatre and realise that it’s a huge resource.”

Certainly, as far as Ni Chaoimh was concerned, it was a moment where the theatre company’s disparate artistic, social and political strands converged. Now Calypso is reviving the play for an Irish tour, with Madeline Appiah again as the traumatised survivor retelling her life to Michael James Ford’s staid writer. As it has done for more than a decade, the company intends to highlight the paucity of socially committed, politically aware theatre on Irish stages.

This time out, however, the company does not feel so isolated. With Fiach MacConghail, the newly installed Abbey director, proclaiming the national theatre needs to be at the forefront of social and political change, Calypso’s once distinctive ethos is now looking like a broader manifesto. Ni Chaoimh has just been appointed an associate director at the Abbey.

So does the future of Irish theatre lie with political drama? According to Ni Chaoimh the answer is a resounding maybe. Even with Calypso, where each project is about raising awareness on a set subject, Ni Chaoimh says preachiness has to take a back seat once the curtain goes up.

“Didactic is a word I absolutely abhor,” she says. “If it’s not a good play, it just doesn’t have any value. The first thing is about entertainment — you have to enter-tain people, you have to make them laugh, make them cry. If you’re not doing that, I don’t know what’s the point. But I also think the criteria for what makes a good play has to be evolving all the time and we have to open to that.

“Another part of our remit is not even so much about the content. It’s more about making theatre accessible and entertaining for people who are normally marginalised from it. There’s a lot of talk about that, but people don’t do anything about it.”

Founded in 1993 by the actor and playwright Donal O’Kelly and the author Charlie O’Neill, under the artistic directorship of the one-time Glenroe actress Ni Chaoimh Calypso has evolved from staging early plays about El Salvador to looking at more locally focused issues. It also looks beyond the theatrical world by performing at unconventional venues such as mental hospitals and refugee centres as well as running extra-curricular programmes such as Tower of Babel, a multicultural youth theatre group.

But while the company’s sincerity and dedication is evident, some may feel its subject matter is slightly beige in its consensual political correctness. In its shocking way, even genocide is uncontroversial — we all know it is wrong. On a more mundane level, plays such as Roddy Doyle’s comedy Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner dealt with latent racial prejudice within an Irish family; scandalous though such attitudes are, few would argue for racism.

“Well, we brought that play into prisons; we had prisoners slagging off that play,” says Ni Chaoimh. “And we were told afterwards that one fella who was particularly racist was nearly beaten up by the others who felt he was letting them down. So it’s reaching a broader audience. If you can put something on a stage that moves people, that causes individual change in one person, then you’ve achieved something.

“And even on the most literal terms, these are the things that are happening – Irish people are meeting Africans, living together, having babies and you’ve got to address that. And who’s writing about it?” It may bother Ni Chaoimh that few Irish writers tackle such issues, but it does point to the perils of a primarily politically oriented theatre: it may inspire good polemics but less impressive plays.

“It definitely makes it harder to find good pieces of work, than if the world is your oyster,” she says. “That’s why we’ve had to commission so much work, because a lot of existing work doesn’t fit.”

Hence plays such as Stolen Child, a drama Ni Chaoimh co-scripted with Yvonne Quinn about abuses in the old industrial school system. “The whole thing (about such abuses) broke around the time we had finished the play. It seems like old hat now, but it wasn’t, it was a big revelation to me.”

That such powerful themes can suddenly be dismissed as old hat points to another limitation of overtly issue-driven drama: it tends to date very badly, a danger of which Ni Chaoimh is aware.

“We lived up in Donegal, in Mallin Head, when I was young and were obviously very close to Derry, so the Troubles were very real for me,” she says. “I had been going out with someone who was throwing stones at British soldiers and at the time my politics would have been very extreme republican: it wasn’t worked out, it was just black and white.

“But of course it’s the shades of grey that become much more interesting as you grow older. And now, if you do something like Freedom of the City, that’s now a historical play. So it’s just trying to keep pace.”

For all the political commitment, it appears Calypso is as interested in raising questions as it is hectoring audiences with right-on solutions. If Linden’s Rwanda drama is morally cut and dried, the company’s next play, by Donal O’Kelly, set during the 1916 rising and to be staged at Kilmainham jail, is more of a minefield.

“You ask anybody nowadays what does 1916 mean and you don’t know what to expect,” says Ni Chaoimh. “So it’s a very interesting yardstick if you want to say ‘Where are we now?’ That was Ireland then and that’s what these people did in order to release us from something else. But what has happened in the interim?” Such a project may auger reasonably well for Ni Chaoimh’s input into the Abbey. But for all her passion for political theatre, she knows it is not necessarily the most directly effective way of changing the world. “It’s the only way I can tackle it, with my set of skills,” she says.

More pertinently, she seems to concede that while a national theatre has a place “at the barricades”, as MacConghail puts it, it should look further afield.

“It’s only one strand of the national theatre. A national theatre is there to put on all kinds of plays – Irish plays, international work, to try and give us a taste of what’s happening in the world at large. But what is important is that you’re trying to reflect those changes in Irish consciousness.”

The tour of I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document... starts at Liberty Hall, Dublin, on January 31. Go to www.calypso.ie for more details