Indulging in what it means to be human

From clowning around in Barabbas to the serious business of directing the Abbey’s production of ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’, Mikel Murfi has never lost sight of the unique relationship between actor and audience

‘I AM JUST a giddy goat,” says actor and director Mikel Murfi. “A real gabby guts. Let me talk and I will.” Fulfilling his promise, an hour flies by as the animated Murfi talks about what he calls his “accidental” career in the theatre; a career that nevertheless has been marked by some of the most exciting performances in Irish theatre in the 1990s and his emergence as a major director in the 2000s.

Murfi doesn’t particularly enjoy interviews. “I don’t really understand what interest anyone would have in what I do,” he says. “There it is on stage. The rest is, well . . .” However, “If it helps to sell more tickets for a show, then I’ll do it, absolutely. You owe it to the people who have agreed to work with you and if you can help to get an audience in the door, sure that is what you have to do.”

The people who have "agreed to work with him" in this instance are the 15-strong cast of Arrah-na-Pogue, currently running at the Abbey Theatre. Perhaps partly because he is an actor himself, Murfi is effusive about their commitment and performance as an ensemble and the collaboration that makes theatre possible. He has seen the play at least once a week since the production opened on December 20th.

“I am contractually obliged to,” he explains, “but that’s not why you do it. You want to see how everyone is getting on. Your responsibility as a director doesn’t end on the first night; you might not be onstage every night but you are one of a team and you are there to see it through.”

It is difficult to think of a director more suited to creating a new production of Boucicault's energetic melodramatic romp than Murfi, whose background in clowning and physical theatre has lent him a recognisable directorial vision. Having trained at the prestigious Jacques le Coq school in Paris, he was one of the founding members of the Barabbas trio, devising and performing in remarkable productions such as Half-Past Eight Mass of a Tuesdayand Come Down from the Mountain John Clown, John Clown, which gradually saw a physical theatre tradition emerge from the fringes of Irish theatre. The emphasis of Murfi's training, and of Barabbas' early work, was the idea of theatre as "play" – not the staging of a play-text but the imaginative state of playfulness – and the use of the red-nose mask of silent storytelling instead of dramatic text.

“When you think about it,” Murfi says, “it was a pretty crazy time in Irish theatre. I mean we were not alone. There was Pan Pan starting up; Bickerstaffe, Corcadorca, Corn Exchange came soon after. But I suppose that the remarkable thing was that this was the early 1990s. 1993! I mean we were just miles behind European theatre, in terms of developing a non-literary, non-text based theatre, and I think we still are.”

Murfi's first foray into directing was by invitation rather than design. "Actually," he explains, "none of it [his career] was really planned. It was my brother Phillip, who knew what a messer I was, who told me to join Dramsoc [at UCD]. And I was a jack-of-all-trades there, the way you are in college, not specifically an actor. It was Gerry Stembridge then who offered me an acting job in a TV series called Nothing To Itafter I graduated, when I thought I'd just probably go off and do a HDip. It's mad but I never made a formal commitment to [acting], it just sort of came up. Eventually I thought, well, if I can make some sort of a living just working with the people that I want to work with, well then isn't that just brilliant."

Directing became an extension of his desire to work with like-minded people, when Declan Gibbons, then artistic director of Macnas, invited Murfi to devise and direct a piece for the company, the first time Murfi was to work outside of Barabbas. "It was terrifying," he remembers, but it also led to a larger scale collaboration on The Lost Days of Ollie Deasyfor the Galway Arts Festival in 2000. Since then Murfi has gone on to direct several important new Irish plays: the premiere of Mark Doherty's Trad, Carmel Winter's strange and brutal B is for Baby(nominated for several Irish Times Theatreawards this year), Enda Walsh's extraordinary play The Walworth Farce and Walsh's latest play, Penelope, for Druid Theatre, which met enormous acclaim in 2010.

Murfi has also starred in Enda Walsh's work over the last few years, taking on the role of Patsy in The New Electric Ballroomin 2008, and he speaks of the experience as one of the most "barmy and brilliant" ones of his life, terrifically important both for his acting and his directing career. "Enda is one of those writers that gets deep into your subconscious," he says, and Murfi understands from having performed in Walsh's work, "about the deep psychological journeys that you have to go on as an actor with him. So I suppose if there was a link between acting and directing, it is that for me. I don't really see myself as a director, as such – I approach it more as a facilitator. You are trying to stay ahead of and support the psychological territory of the actor, while remaining outside."

As a practical example, he talks about the dynamic of being in the rehearsal room for Arrah-na-Pogue, how he would "hop in and out of a scene, not instead of the actor, not showing them what to do, but so that I understand what it is to be looking out at what we are producing as well as looking in. I suppose the thing is about respecting the boundaries. I would be really annoyed if the actors saw me as some dictator-director; that's not your role, you are a collaborator."

The collaborative process is one reason why Murfi doesn’t really like interviews: why talk about himself when he is just one of a team? “I think that the only people who might find what I do interesting are the ones already in the room,” he says.

Similarly, he thinks that the only thing that matters every night in the theatre as the curtain rises is the relationship between what is happening on the stage and those who are watching it.

“There is a tendency sometimes to be always intellectualising theatre, I think. So, what does it mean? Is this a metaphor for society? But when you are working you are not consciously doing that. And in some ways,” he offers by way of conclusion, “it is not that different from any other job, even if you have the privilege of making your own hours, and doing what you want, and no stability.

“People think that being creative is something totally different from the regular social contract, but it is just that we get to indulge in what it means to be human more than other folk.”

Murfi has a lot more to say about that – and about the many other Irish theatre practitioners he admirers, about theatre criticism and theatre history, about how chopping down a tree at his home in Sligo can sometimes be the seed of an idea; yes, he could talk all day. However, there is practical work to be done and he bounds off to do it with an exaggerated walk – ever the clown.

Arrah-na-Pogueruns at the Abbey Theatre until Feb 5. Peneloperuns at London's Hampstead Theatre from Feb 10-Mar 5 and the Studio Theatre, Washington DC from Mar 15-Apr 3