On the edge where magic happens

The tale of the last survivor of a city of sensual excess, a woman encrusted in salt for centuries, emerged from Olwen Fouéré’s double-life existence, an extreme place beyond language

JUST OUT OF A taxing, day-long rehearsal, Olwen Fouéré sits perched on an otherwise soft hotel-lobby armchair, the kind that only the determined can avoid slumping into with languid relief. Instead, this actor, known and admired for the intensity of her performances, radiates fervour in describing her upcoming show, Sodome, My Love.

“I am very interested in extremes and extremities,” she admits. “I think that’s where, at borderlines, things come into relief.”

This latest role, as the last survivor of the biblical city of sensual excess, is a worthy addition to an extensive repertoire of dramatic performances in which Fouéré occupies lives lived on the razor edge.

As the child of Breton parents, growing up in the west of Ireland in the 1950s, Fouéré has only known life on edges and borderlines. “If I spoke French I felt very much that I was in the confines of the family,” she says. “If I spoke English, I felt it was part of my process of assimilation. So I was very conflicted between the two. And I sort of stopped speaking for a year. I realised somewhere in my three-year-old brain that I existed in between those two languages, in between those two cultures. And that is the space that made me a performer. The place that is sort of beyond language and in between language.”

Fouéré's discovery and experiences of Sodome, My Love, by French author Laurent Gaudé, reflect this double-life existence. She first came across the play's title while in Paris, reading it in a brochure at the Odéon Theatre, and was immediately curious. She searched for and finally found a copy of the play while attending another performance.

“So I bought it immediately,” she says. “I went into a cafe in the Place de la Sorbonne, it was about 11 o’clock at night, and I read the whole thing. And talk about contagion. I got a fever. I just said, ‘I’m going to do that, I have to do that’. ”

Gaudé’s play describes a woman buried in salt – not completely transformed into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, but covered in a crust of it for centuries. When the rain begins to fall, the salt melts, and she emerges from her saline prison. The story she tells of the malicious destruction of her society, governed by sensuality and Dionysian passion, forms the monologue that Fouéré not only performs but has also translated.

Fouéré’s newly formed development entity, The Emergency Room, enabled her to secure the rights both to perform the piece and to translate it. The idea is to have The Emergency Room pick up where Operating Theatre, the company of which she was an artistic director and which dissolved in 2008, left off.

“I wanted to have the name be an extension of Operating Theatre, because it’s the same aesthetic principle that’s driving me,” she says. The concept behind The Emergency Room “supports the individual artist in a collaboration with an established production company”, with the aim of attending to “projects in need of immediate attention, those burning things that have to be done”. As it is still in a formative stage, it has (and will hopefully continue to maintain) the kind of flexibility that will enable Fouéré to act swiftly on urgent theatrical projects.

“I’m not quite sure what form Emergency Room will take,” she says. “Maybe it will remain completely amorphous, adapt to whatever situation is necessary, like any emergency room. If it’s a head wound, you do that, or if it looks like the heart is giving out, then you concentrate on the heart.”

Having received an Arts Council bursary to establish The Emergency Room and explore three projects, Fouéré approached Rough Magic Theatre Company with the play and her ideas, and got a warm response.

“I spoke to Lynne , because we had spoken a lot about working together but had never worked together before, and she was immediately very interested in the idea. And even without reading it, she just said: ‘This is exactly what I’m looking for.’ It was just a kind of a moment.”

The Emergency Room allowed Fouéré to be able to pay herself to do the translation ­ and once again return to that space “beyond language and in between language” where she grew up. “The fever of discovery fed into the fever of translation,” she says. “Once I started, I had to keep going, because you get into this place where you’re completely immersed in that world. So I used to keep going for hours on end.”

Fouéré describes how she did most of the translation in the west of Ireland, in her father’s study, “sitting in his chair with his old jacket on the back”. She started at 10am one morning and didn’t let up until 7am the following day, “then watched the dawn coming, and saw a hare wandering along the road, hopping over the fence, just seeing everything come to life”.

She went downstairs to the kitchen and was drinking a glass of wine standing at the range when her husband, actor David Heap, walked by. “He looked at me and said: ‘You look completely crazed.’ Because he said I was like this” – Fouéré pulls her face into an expression of other-worldly intensity – “I was high as a kite.”

IN REHEARSALS, she and Parker have been equally tireless and passionate about drawing out the many subtle aspects of the piece. Fascinated by the mysterious swell of primal urges lurking below the consciousness of the piece, Fouéré is intent on embodying and expressing its many unsettling, subversive messages, which defy accepted social mores and polite society, while sacrificing none of its ambiguity.

“It’s obviously connected with sensuality and that kind of Dionysian understanding of the world and our existence,” Fouéré says. “And that whole-body, Dionysian element being a portal to a much higher dimension and a much higher level of existence. We know it’s there and we drive it underground, or our ancestors drove it underground in this case. You can’t drive something like that underground. It will re-emerge in some form.”

In both life and work, Fouéré seeks out these borders, extremes, no-go areas. In her unconventional relationship set-up (with two men in an open triangle), as well as in her restless shifting between Dublin, Paris and New York, she pushes at the limits of independence, cultural awareness and passion. Playing roles such as Salomé (directed by Steven Berkoff), Maeve in The Bull, the Cailleach in The Rite of Spring(both directed by Michael Keegan-Dolan) and Paula Spencer in La Femme qui se cognait dans les portes(The Woman Who Walked Into Doors), she seeks out extremity to detonate its explosive dramatic potential.

“When you are that extreme,” she says, “your ability to experience is heightened.”

According to Gaudé, this sensual, “seismic” consciousness is particularly embodied by women. “He really feels that seduction is a subversive act,” says Fouéré. “It can be completely innocent, but it has a subversive dimension. Sodome embodies so many female archetypes: Circe, Medea, Medusa, all of them. And most of them are archetypes which may seduce, but they inspire fear.” This primal, sexual power, Fouéré feels, is “something that should be celebrated. Why isn’t it celebrated? And made into, you know, a church?”

For Fouéré, theatre represents yet another boundary, a place of resistance, where limits can be transgressed, extremity explored and a buried life force reawakened. “Transcendence really just occurs in that space between,” she says. “The collision between the audience and the actor is the place where the magic happens.”

In the invocation of that magic, Fouéré is prepared to go to extremes. Even to embodying a woman finally, after millennia, emerging from a tomb of salt.

“Theatre is exactly the place where we converse with the dead,” she says. “On a good night, you know that you’ve hit some strange vein. And that is connecting you and the audience, and you know that some of them are feeling it. It’s like being an explorer. You go to the most impossible place, and try and see what is possible beyond that.”

Sodome, My Lovepreviews at Project Arts Centre, Dublin tonight and on Monday, and runs from Tue, Mar 16 until Sat, Mar 27