Deirdre O’ Connell must be smiling. Why? Because the cutting-edge Stanislavkian approach to acting she brought to this country nearly half a century ago through Dublin’s legendary Focus Theatre is echoed by the visionary zeal of the theatre’s current director Joe Devlin.
And not just because of its current productions, Two Rooms and Mother Teresa is Dead, both of which concentrate on human relationships(the former is being staged at Andrew’s Lane Theatre until Saturday, the latter starts at the Project on August 10). Joe is also pleased at the success of the theatre's Out-of-Focus outreach programme. And while Focus is not staging the current productions in its own theatre space, that too would make Deirdre smile. The theatre is finally getting its long-overdue revamp. That’s not all.
“I actually think Deirdre is encouraging us to go out, because the building does need a major overhaul, though we still use it as a rehearsal space and studio,” says Joe. But in time we will re-open a revamped Focus. Yet since I’ve taken on the job, a lot of its developments have spread around the country. So we use the space to train directors and actors and playwrights. In fact, we have three actors’ studios and we’re opening an actors’ studio in Belfast. And I’ve set up a network between the Moscow Arts Theatre and Ireland so we’re bringing all these international strands to bear on the Focus.
“We also have an association with Siamse Tire – we’re helping the national folk theatre develop its actor training. We work with a Performance Lab in Ballymun, two of their actors are in training with us on a scholarship. We also have an associate company who are on in Dundrum so what we’ve transformed the organisation into is not just producing work for our own Dublin Company, we are now a resource for the country. So we’ve already revamped the Focus in that sense.”
Impressive, eh? So what about the two new plays? Two Rooms, written by Lee Blessing, is a Time magazine Play of the Year and fortuitously couldn’t be more timely, given that it deals with the personal suffering of a husband and wife who find themselves dealing with sudden separation after a political abduction in ‘80s Beirut.
“Indeed,” Joe agrees. “Even though the play was written in the ‘90s and is set in the ‘80s, what has happened in recent days makes the play startlingly appropriate. The play is about how private citizens suffer because of political and governmental actions and it is set in a war zone. The woman has stripped the room in her house bare to try and imagine what it would be like to be with her husband. So the two rooms refer to her emotional space and his incarceration. Though it is also a metaphor for the East and West and how the Government is trying to silence the wife.”
Meanwhile Mother Teresa Is Dead, written by Helen Edmunson, again looks at relationships in crisis but deals with the changing roles played by men and women in relationships and our increasing obsession with materialism at the expense of our spiritual lives. With this in mind, though the play was originally set in London it has been relocated to contemporary Dublin – partly because Joe believes that in a post-Celtic Tiger era Irish people have lost their sense of spiritual values.
“The play also questions the notion of marriage, monogamy and the nature of relationships between men and women in the West as opposed to in the East,” Joe explains. “One of the relationships in the play is non-monogamous so again what you have is a clash of culture, the Eastern spiritual/sexual relationship between men and women that transcends the Western, conventional, Christian notion of what marriage is. But also the play looks at how the whole commercial culture we are living in now is forcing people to look at what’s missing in their lives, which is, I believe, the shaman/spiritual aspects because we are eternally chasing after the dollar, chasing after the euro. And the pressure we put ourselves under is killing us. Certainly in Ireland we have abandoned the Church and we have thrown everything out with the bathwater and that’s why I think the play, as set in Ireland now, probably is even more resonant for us than it even was for an English audience when it was set in London.”