Post-dramatic stress disorder

Theatreclub asked a simple question online: ‘What did you learn today?’ Over the course of a year more than 4,000 people responded, and from these answers a play was created.

THE SCENE looks festive, in a sad-clown sort of way. Six people sit behind a long desk wearing children’s party hats, held fast around their chins with elastic.

"I'm not taking this seriously enough," says the actor Conor Madden glumly. Finally Barry O'Connor moves to an electric keyboard and begins a tentative vamp, but the life has gone out of the party. It's nearing the end of rehearsals for the fifth episode of Twenty Ten, Theatreclub's crowd-sourced chronicle of 2010. Or to put it another way: the actors have been onstage for 10 months.

The director, Grace Dyas, has an idea. “What about musical chairs?”

Madden agrees. “Secret musical chairs,” he says.

"Aloofmusical chairs," Dyas clarifies.

The cast begin to play musical chairs, aloofly, but there is some confusion. “We’ve come to this before. Some people play these games differently,” says Dyas. “We don’t need to Google the rules.”

In the space of two years, Theatreclub has built a reputation on breaking the rules. It was formed by three former Dublin Youth Theatre members, the writer/director Dyas, the writer/ actor Shane Byrne and the writer/director/ actor/designer Doireann Coady, who together have been uncommonly prolific, staging eight productions (all of them new or devised), curating two micro-festivals of new work by emerging artists (The Theatre Machine Turns You On, Vol I and II), touring their works and delivering a disproportionate number of sensations.

First there was Dyas's lyrically depressive look at binge-drinking, hard-partying young women in 2009's Rough.The wild energy and playful junk culture of Theatreclub Stole Your Clock Radio What The Fuck You Gonna Do About It?followed. Then, more recently, at last year's Absolut Fringe, came the staggering, divisive and unprecedented Heroin, which now returns for the ReViewed programme of the forthcoming Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. The formal daring and political urgency of Heroin showed Theatreclub's agenda went far beyond fun and games, disproving anyone who dismissed the company as well-connected scenesters for a hip, distractible following.

Twenty Tenbegan as a year-long game. For 365 days, beginning on January 1st, 2010, people were invited to respond anonymously to the same question via e-mail: "What have you learned today?" The result is a year in the life of thousands of individuals (Theatreclub received more than 4,000 anonymous replies). Edited into a performance text of six parts, each episode covers two months from 2010, with one final "box-set" performance lasting seven hours. Those responses range from personal reflection to political statement, from solipsistic to showboating, from banal to devastating.

There are obvious perils to such a process, as anyone familiar with either Britain’s Mass Observation movement of the 1930s or a heavily subscribed Twitter account will know, not least of which is the shapeless litany of individual impressions. “It doesn’t feel as though there isn’t a shape or a tone,” says Dyas. “For every eight ‘domestic’ entries – ‘The soap is gone’ – there’s a really punchy one: ‘My friend’s younger sister died this week.’ Our job was to find a commonality.”

Whether they are reporting about their recent break-ups, their developing crushes, the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, the arrival of the IMF in Ireland, how they’ll get through the winter without money: they are doing the same thing. “For me, it’s about the feeling of a collective unity, that people feel the same things at the same time and you’re not as alone in the world as you might seem.”

Reticent to edit those words into a dialogue (“It wouldn’t be good theatre”), they have instead allowed accidental correspondence, lines of harmony and dissonance that resemble a collective unconsciousness.

“Sometimes it happens,” says Coady, who is co-directing. “They do answer each other, they call out to each other.”

The performance set-up will be mistily familiar to anyone who has seen Speak Bitterness, by the Sheffield company Forced Entertainment, in which seven performers deliver a list of responses from behind long desks over the course of a two-hour show, which can also be seen in one durational performance that lasts six hours (albeit without an interval). Is Twenty Tenthe sincerest form of flattery?

"There's a similar intention behind Speak Bitternessas we have with this: the durational thing, how its organised," says Dyas. "We did look a lot at Speak Bitternesswhen we were talking about this."

It isn't the first time that the company has worn its influences on its sleeve. "Everyone reminds you that you can't be copying other people or trying to be like other people," Dyas once told The Irish Times,but the company is clearly searching for the right tools of expression when traditional forms aren't supple enough for fragmented contemporary experience. "We were hungry to start a scene," Dyas said about the company's origins. "The people going [to theatre] are not the people we want to come. What's going on on the stage is not what we want to do. We wanted to jumpstart something. I didn't want to recreate something."

The Dublin theatre company Passion Machine was an early influence, where Dyas remembers touts hustling for tickets outside the SFX (“Why wouldn’t people want to go to theatre?” she asks, with customary winning rhetoric). Under the influence of Willie White, then artistic director of DYT and the company Brokentalkers, they discovered “the energy and down-to-earthness” of Forced Entertainment and Quarantine, assisted by White’s DVD collection. “Don’t be pretending that I’m not here,” Dyas said chidingly of fourth-wall dramatic conventions. “I wanted that challenge and something that was really relevant to people. Not metaphors about lakes and rivers – things that were actually about what was really going on.”

For those who wonder where the energy and engagement of Irish playwriting has been diverted, Theatreclub and a new generation of adventurous theatremakers may be the answer.

The group has its detractors, the most wounding of whom suggest its members are aesthetically jejune and the professional darlings of an in-crowd (the company name doesn’t help). They bristle at the suggestion. “We just work really hard,” says Coady. “People didn’t just turn around to us and hand it to us on a plate.”

If anything, they are a hard company to turn down. “There has never been a moment when Willie [White, the outgoing director of Project Arts Centre and the incoming director of Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival] or Loughlin [Deegan, the outgoing director of UBDTF and the incoming director of The Lir] or the gods of Irish theatre pointed down and said, ‘They should have it,’ ” says Dyas. “Those doors are closed on us all the time, but we keep banging on them.”

A lot can happen in a year, particularly to Theatreclub, and without the linking logic of a play’s dialogue, learning lines for six hours of performance seemed like an inordinate feat. To aid recollection, the performers arrived at a bizarre system of mnemonics. For a line about peanut butter, for instance, Byrne listened for the word “crippling”. “I’ve changed it in my head to ‘cripipling’, which is like PBJ, which is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so next it’s the line about peanut butter.”

In performance, it makes the words flow, but in rehearsals it makes it difficult to start a scene over again from the top. “The machine doesn’t go backwards,” said Dyas. “It only goes forward.” She may as well have been talking about the company.

Twenty Tenruns from tomorrow until September 15th, with a seven-hour performance on September 17th at 11am as part of Absolut Fringe. See fringefest.com