Forcing the truth to emerge

Theatre involves an 'industrial process' and is 'ossified'. Yet acclaimed documentary maker and director Alan Gilsenan also loves its primitive, ritualistic, sacred nature, and is back directing drama, writes KATE HOLMQUIST

‘I THINK ANY decent production has a longer rehearsal period, and the notion of being able to produce a great piece of theatre in four weeks is in some ways crass.”

Director Alan Gilsenan, who has made ground-breaking TV documentaries and thought- provoking experimental films, freely admits to a "love-hate relationship" with theatre. He's been living on "a production line" with one creative project after the next over the past couple of years, doesn't like the nine-to-five routine and is happiest creatively when he is with his wife and daughters and walking the dogs in Co Wicklow, where he watches very little TV apart from The X Factor.

“There’s an industrial process to theatre,” he says. “Wham bam, you produce your sets, your ideas, from day one and you follow a timetable. It seems to be very antiquated. I think Irish theatre, particularly, is very ossified, is very self-referential, and sort of defines itself. We think of theatre as being somehow radical, but it’s a bit like having an office job. I suppose the thing about the theatre rehearsal space that always attracts me is that very strange relationship.”

Gilsenan has the standard four weeks of rehearsal for the renowned Scottish play, Knives in Hensby David Harrower, which opens at Dublin's Smock Alley on Monday, and praises producer Anne Clarke for providing the creative support required to accomplish something worthwhile in this time frame. "But I think in the broader sense of theatre, there is a slight production line about it and that manifests itself in the productions. There isn't a sense of allowing people to take risks or explore different ways of approaching it, so you can get into a sense of 'this is the right way to do it', and this is old- fashioned."

A board member of the RTÉ Authority, he is critical of the stasis imposed by middle- management in the arts in general. Gilsenan’s inclination is for “the radical”. His documentaries – on a range of raw topics, such as emigration, dying, mental illness and even lap-dancing – have covered controversial issues with empathy and audience appeal, and have helped define the contemporary Irish consciousness of who we are and how we got that way.

On the surface, directing for the theatre would seem to be the opposite of directing documentaries. For the audience, a piece of theatre takes place in linear time, even when it seeks to undermine the very concept of the linear. There is a sense of ritual, and there’s no cutting-room floor when performances fail. Documentary, on the other hand, involves recording many hours of interviews and imagery, then editing them into a story that will generally be seen in the privacy of the viewers’ own homes. In the theatre, everything starts with the script; in documentary, the script may be the last thing to be written.

For Gilsenan, there are similarities between directing for both screen and stage. “You need a comfortable trusting environment where people can say what they feel, and part of that is pushing them, dragging things out of them,” he says. “One of the things about documentary is that you have a strangely privileged position because, on one level, it’s a formal, slightly artificial situation that allows you to ask slightly difficult questions. ‘How do you feel about dying?’ is a question a family member would never ask.

“In a strange way, people are more honest with you – but I think the fundamental principle is the same , which is that you have to have an atmosphere of trust, comfort, and the comfort to mess up.”

HE WAS ATTRACTED to directing Knives in Hens, which has had many acclaimed productions around the world, because it is, in essence, a European folk tale.

“It has an extraordinary simplicity, it has a simple narrative which is very powerful, and somehow, paradoxically, within that story there is a huge complexity. deals with metaphysical concepts, deals with them in the context of a simple, sparse style of drama. When I read it first, on some instinctive level it brings to mind the playwrights I love – it’s a bit Shakespeare or Beckett or Lorca or Genet, but in their very different ways, certainly of language but also of ritual.”

During rehearsals last week, Gilsenan gently guided actors Vincent Regan ( 300, Troy), Lorcan Cranitch ( Ballykissangel, Cracker) and Catherine Walker ( The Clinic) through a rehearsal. It was like watching a good, laid-back psychologist in a productive group-therapy session where the psychologist's contribution is to listen 90 per cent of the time and give well-considered direction only when it is necessary.

“I would always be attracted to intelligent, difficult, challenging actors, and I have three in this production,” Gilsenan says. “And a lot of people say don’t cast him or her because of that, but in actual fact a production is better for that sense of rigorous engagement and challenge and questioning. Sometimes it can be challenging and sometimes it means you have to go a long road to get somewhere, but I think ultimately if you can pull the strands together, it’s better.”

Is directing for the stage like being the benevolent parent of creative children? Gilsenan answers: “There are frustrations in it, one has to be careful about the balance of that. . . one has to be very careful that the difficult child doesn’t get all the attention.”

Directing theatre and documentaries have this in common, Gilsenan says: “I would feel quite strongly that some people, even some directors, mistakenly think that directing is about getting what you want, and I think that if you get what you want, that’s hugely limiting. The part of the job of the director is to bring out the truth from people, whether it’s actors or people in a documentary, it’s a way of helping them find their self-expression. . . there is nothing worse than a free for all. You are walking a very fine line in terms of being able to give a clear confident sense of direction and within that allow for freedom.” He is aware that some actors go into theatre for the wrong reasons.

“You’d be very conscious that for some actors theatre is seen as a right of passage to get to the higher plane of film, and film people are generally quite sniffy about theatre. I think there’s a very uneasy relationship between the two – theatre is the opposite of the film. You see some plays trying to achieve the status of film, using multimedia or, in the West End, sets that seem almost to be movie sets.”

“That’s not what attracts me at all. For me it’s their differences that are attractive. It’s the primitive nature of theatre, the ritualistic, sacred nature of it, that almost religious experience of people in a room, and a ritual invariably of a story being told and an image that is ultimately revealed – that’s what’s exciting for me in theatre, not a theatre that tries to attain realism.” Gilsenan is attracted to the dance theatre of Jerome Bell and has been working on a project for several years that he hopes to realise on the stage. Working within constrained budgets and having to get bums on seats are a false economy, he thinks.

“If there is something fresh and exciting people will go. I was in Sadlers Wells recently to see a dance theatre piece and I was amazed at this youthful, articulate audience who would go to cinema, who would go to theatre, were interested in music, they were not the audience you would see in the theatre here. There is still an extraordinary deadness. When you go to the theatre it is a predictable, dead experience. I’m not saying this is going to be different, I may very well be falling into that trap as well. I don’t think theatre is dead, I think theatre will always find it’s way out, it may not be through conventional theatres, you need to take risks, you need to find a vision.”

IF HE HAD A MAGIC WAND and a blank cheque to create a radical new Irish theatre for the 21st century, he would, he says, “encourage writers to develop in the longer term. Good plays take a long time to write. I would bring in visionary artists in different fields, not people that are just successful and you’d get some glamorous feature about – actually people who are provocative figures. You can fail with absolute tosh so why not fail gloriously?”

But is Gilsenan himself a radical? “That’s for others to decide,” he says.

Knives in Hensruns at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin until Nov 28