A New Life: News of a promotion made a businessman give up his job for the life he really wanted. Theresa Judge reports.
For anybody who has ever dreamed of quitting a steady job to pursue a love of the arts, Michael Caven's story is inspiring but also eye-opening.
In London in the early 1990s he held senior jobs in the world of marketing and PR. Now, after 13 years of creating a career as a theatre director in Dublin and achieving considerable success, he still can't relax about paying the bills.
"Insecurity is an inherent part of the experience, and you have to learn to live with that or you have to get out," he says.
However, he has no hesitation in calling his business executive life "a lie" that he could not sustain. After six years and stints with three different companies, a turning point came during lunch one day with his employer who suggested that Caven would be the person he would shortly choose to take over as managing director. Caven handed in his notice the following day.
"I decided that was it, that I had to make the break before I was completely tied in," he says now as a 42-year-old father of two, looking back on a decision he made in 1992.
London at the time was booming - the world he describes is one of parties, Porsches and fast living. But he had something "chewing away" inside him, a dream to be involved in theatre.
"When it came to that moment, I was so desperate I would have walked 1,000 miles barefoot through the desert of the Sinai to get away and to find what I was looking for."
Six years earlier, as a history and politics graduate, he had completed a year-long course in acting and had struggled for a while to get acting work in London. When he took a job as a trainee marketing executive, his plan was to do it for a year to save money. He stresses now that the six years in business weren't a mistake, that he's very glad of that experience and that he enjoyed the inventiveness of "trying to promote the unpromotable, almost, which was financial services".
In leaving the world of business, he also left England to live in Dublin with his Irish girlfriend, Sharon, who is now his wife.
He had grown up on the Essex/Suffolk border but says he never felt fully English, his father being a Corkman. He always had "a sense that there was something that wasn't quite English about the way we grew up", a sense of being different. He and his four siblings were raised as Catholics "at a time when it wasn't so fashionable to be a Catholic as it is now". His father worked as a senior lecturer in classics in prestigious English universities and he had a public school education.
Once he had moved to Ireland in 1992, he says he quickly discovered "the other important lesson - that I'm not Irish either". And while he had "loved the place" when he was travelling over and back to see his girlfriend, he now found that his "imperial accent" evoked some less- than-positive responses. As someone who had studied Irish history in great depth, he appears to have adopted an understanding approach to some "subtle animosity", which was "very carefully done".
He stresses the complexity of his situation, and adds "England is still deliberately oblivious to its history in relation to Ireland - it's one of the uncleansed sores."
Negotiating the Dublin theatre scene, he says, is "an odd experience for people" because "if you work hard, and you do something, you can get noticed very quickly", much quicker than in a big city like London. "But at the same time a ceiling can get put very quickly on where you can get to people can very rapidly make a reputation for themselves, and then sit on that bench that they've been allowed to sit on, and stay there forever."
He says he has seen a lot of talent "stagnate, get depressed and destroyed" often because of "a sense of 'I've got control over this corner and I'm not letting someone new in'", and because professional training in theatre is still relatively new. He says that very little has changed from the days when Beckett, Joyce and O'Casey were forced to leave "in the way opportunity in the theatre is fashioned".
After setting up his own theatre company in 1995, originally called Theatreworks and now renamed as Ouroboros, he secured Arts Council funding in 1999 and received four nominations in the Irish Theatre Awards between 1998 and 2002 for work he directed.
Through all this time he has also taught part-time at third level to help pay the bills.
He says he turned to directing because he wanted to make the theatre he had always believed in - theatre that is passionate, magical, that tells big stories, that transforms the audience.
He believes in theatre that "truly impacts on the watcher so that their life, their sense of humanity, their sense of their place in the universe is increased through the experience". He doesn't believe in setting out to entertain, even though it can, in the process, be entertaining.
"I believe people want to engage demandingly with something because they don't get enough of it in the rest of their lives."
Like most people in theatre, he would like to break through "the glass ceiling" to the more heavily funded Abbey or Gate theatres. He worked at the Gate Theatre as head of creative development from 2001 to 2002, but his current focus is on directing the Irish premiere of Edward Albee's play, The Goat or Who is Sylvia, with Landmark Productions.
He has left the company he founded, Ouroboros, in recent weeks saying he felt it was time to move on.
He describes The Goat, which won the 2002 Tony award for best play, as powerful and provocative and his aim is to get full houses every night.
With his marketing background, he does not share with some of his industry colleagues a distaste for selling theatre, saying in his view "the biggest sin is empty seats".