Exploring the underbelly

When actors use the word "joy" about their work on a Monday morning rehearsal break, you know they're on to something. The 20 members of Drogheda-based Calipo Theatre Company have other qualities that should be bottled - energy, for instance, style, originality and adventurousness - but what made them stand out from the crowd at the last two Dublin Fringe Festivals was their obvious passion for what they do. The two shows they brought to the Fringe, Love Is The Drug (a wise last-minute substitute for Richard III, which they had been considering) and Xaviers, were ensemble pieces devised by the company, skill-fully combining video images, a soundtrack by bands such as Fat Boy Slim and Placebo, and live performance in a series of short, rapidly overlapping scenes - more MTV than Robert Lepage.

Like the company members themselves, most people in the packed audiences for these shows were under 25, attracted by the mixture of media and Calipo's ease with club culture. Their competence and confidence with video and TV technology have been developed through five years of productions at Droichead Arts Centre, in Drogheda, the home town of most of the company members. Together with Declan Gorman's Upstate Theatre and a flourishing youth theatre scene, Calipo is ensuring that Drogheda audiences are increasingly well served.

Lack of funds hasn't diminished the company's commitment: rehearsing at night when they've finished working in local supermarkets and restaurants and running their own publicity campaigns with posters and flyers has become a way of life. As they embark on their first tour, they are reliant on the continuing support of Dublin's City Arts Centre and the good will of the other venues they're visiting: they haven't yet heard whether they have secured an Arts Council touring grant.

"Multi-media theatre" is an undeniably risky business, potentially presenting the worst of both forms, or simply adding screen images to live performance as decorative padding. The Calipo gang is well aware of the pitfalls. "Multi-media doesn't work as set-dressing - we've all seen that kind of stuff," says artistic director, Darren Thornton. "It needs to be rooted in the story that we're telling, as an integral part." In Xaviers, which garnered an ESB/Irish Times nomination last month for Best Production, the plot centres on the shooting of a video in a housing estate on the outskirts of a small Irish town. Images from the video, transmitted with voiceover, become central to the drama.

While this is the form Calipo have used over the past five years, first in adaptations of films such as Reservoir Dogs, Glengarry Glen Ross and The Crow and subsequently in their own writing, they are not wedded to it and recognise its limitations. "The cinematic approach works for us because we devise our own work, and write our own tailor-made scripts," says Darren Thornton. "It also suits large ensemble casts, with a mix of characters and constant scene changing. But we don't want to use the same form for everything - that would become a formula. My approach to theatre is to keep the energy flying, in whatever ways are possible."

"The most important thing," adds John Ruddy, "is our own joy in what we do. We want to communicate that."

"But even if we never changed our style, there's room for this kind of work now," says Colin Thornton, who is very critical of what he sees in Dublin's mainstream theatre, and full of praise for other small independent companies such as Tinderbox, Kabosh and Corn Exchange. All the performers are acutely conscious of the need to attract young audiences.

But isn't it a bit patronising to assume that young people won't go to the theatre unless it's wrapped in pulsating house music and video images? "I'm not talking about spoon-feeding audiences," Darren Thornton says. "But when young people go to a bad play, maybe their first experience of theatre, they never go back again. We've come across that over and over again in our workshops. Maybe they've been turned off theatre at school and they close their minds. People in their teens and 20s seem to associate one bad play with theatre in general." "They'd never feel like that about cinema, for instance," says Ciaran Kenny. "Our target audience is people in their 20s and their attention span is getting shorter. We want to really engage with them and push them beyond that."

While their exuberantly comic - and poignant - depiction of the agonies and excitements of the dating game, Love Is The Drug, was a runaway hit in Dublin's City Arts Centre and Droichead Arts Centre, Xaviers proved harder to sell to Drogheda audiences. Focusing on a well-meaning community outreach project that goes disastrously wrong, it was one of the few productions in last year's Dublin Fringe Festival to tackle socio-political issues, such as deprivation, unemployment, social and educational exclusion, poverty, marginalisation and sexual abuse - all filtered through a blackly comic script, with blunt one-liners. ("It's just about using your imagination. It's just about making us look like spas.")

This is material that the company is steeped in. To an extent, it's an exercise in honest self-examination; it emerged from their on-going community arts workshops with schools and youth training centres, where they enable participants to develop short scripts for stage, film and video, and issue certificates at the end. "We've come across all sorts of personal and social problems in the workshops. There's absolutely nothing that could shock us at this stage. We've had it all."

For the forthcoming tour of Xaviers - "a huge step for us" - which includes a visit to Glasgow's Arches Theatre as part of its mini-festival of independent Irish theatre, the script has been tightened up a little. "The story strands are still the same, but we're probing it a bit more," says Darren Thornton. "Some people thought that the authorities behind the video project were presented as stereotypes, but for us the main focus was on the kids from the estate who participated in the video. The story was about them, and the two community workers, Mark and Denise, who work with them and get drawn into their world. It looks at how the project affects their lives and their relationships."

"The young people in Xaviers are absolutely typical of people we've met in our workshops," Colin Thornton says. "The play shows how difficult it is to do this kind of community work, that you bring it home, into your personal life."

"People don't want to know what's going on in the underbelly of any small town in Ireland," Darren Thornton says. "We're raising these issues in a small, non-confrontational way."

For light relief, the company has been devising a comic mini-series for TV, working with Rough Magic Films, and they have more film projects in the pipeline. Maybe their next play could be about the shooting of their film about the making of the play about the . . .

Xaviers opens at Droichead Arts Centre on Monday, March 13th, then tours to Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast (from Thursday 16th); The Arches, Glasgow (from Wednesday 22nd), Civic Theatre Tallaght (from Monday 27th); Garage Theatre, Monaghan (from Tuesday, April 4th); Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford (from Friday 7th) and City Arts Centre, Dublin (from Tuesday 11th). Information from: Catherine Laffey: 01-677 0643.