Going against the tide

'Doldrum Bay' brings about an unusual collaboration between twowomen who are both actresses and playwrights, writes Susan Conley.

As settings go, the place where the land meets the sea is a literal place of transformation; when applied to fiction, such terrain is the very essence of liminality, with the transition from earth to water, the clash of elements, yielding a wealth of symbolism.

It's a "both/and" kind of landscape, in which the sand is not more important than the water that washes upon it, a place in which both elements exist because of, not in spite of, each other. In co-existing, they create a dialogue of opposites that have a harmony that may not be apparent at first glance.

In The Peacock's production of Doldrum Bay, actress and writer Hilary Fannin and actress and writer Ali White meet, bringing a wealth of experience and experiences to the creation and interpretation of Fannin's new play, not only through the role of Magda, played by White, but in their dual roles as creators and interpreters of meaning.

Being an actress carries with it the worst sort of cliché of powerlessness, in the hackneyed image of "the casting couch" and all it implies. How far must a girl go to ensure her rise to the top? How low must she go to ensure that that rise continues? How often must she give voice to creations that, in Fannin's words, are often "no more than paper dolls. Crude paper dolls"?

"I think it's an empowerment thing for a lot of us," says White. "You're basically passive when you're waiting for your jobs, and to be able to create something out of nothing, without having to wait for a production team to choose you - that's what propelled me into it."

"In all honesty, the single biggest motivator for me was unemployment," says Fannin. "I had probably 10 very good years as an actor - I was young enough to be somebody's daughter, or somebody's lover. Then I got to be about 30, and work stopped. Totally."

So both chose not to wait for somebody else to do something for them, and instead chose to do it for themselves. Fannin, isolated from the world of theatre that she loved, moved from her native Dublin to London, donned a waitress's apron, and searched for a way back. She found it through playwriting. "I think that my first impulse was to write," muses Fannin, "And then it felt easier to be an actor - although, anybody who tells you it's easy to be an actor is mad. I think I wanted to be a writer all the time."

Her first play, Mackerel Sky, was produced by the Bush Theatre London, and is the first instalment in what Fannin is considering a trilogy, with Doldrum Bay the second. The third and final piece, with the working title Horse Latitudes, is in the planning stages.

White also professes to "scribbling away at stuff", and also points to a lull in acting jobs as spurring her towards authorship. A regular in the Abbey and Peacock, with roles in Translations, The Trojan Women, The House and Closer, she used her down-time to storyline (with Cathy Downs and Deirdre O'Kane) the RTÉ/BBC Northern Ireland co-production of Anytime Now.

The six-part series, which was scripted by White, and starred Angeline Ball, Susan Lynch, and Zara Turner, was a thirtysomething slice of Dublin life that, as the work of a first-time writer, achieved the kind of exposure and high-production values some screenwriters only dream of.

In Fannin's play, directed by Mark Lambert, sex, death, suicide, religion, infidelity, and madness meet on the shores of Doldrum Bay - well, it is a comedy.

Youth meets middle age, new life meets death, memories ebb and flow, relationships flourish or die: Fannin has woven a web of big themes and quotidian experiences that form a slice of life, too, a slice of life that has brutally sharp edges hidden beneath the humour.

The work of the show is equally divided among the six characters, but it is Magda who is closest to Fannin's own biography, and she's an interesting character in light of this discussion of self-determination: the daughter of an artist, Magda is an art dealer, a representative of art rather than an artist herself. Her role as agent for the creativity of others is something that aligns with the actor's job of expressing the writer's meaning, and it had resonance for both women in the creation and expression of this character.

Magda is White's first role in three years. "I think that Hilary has created some amazing characters in this piece. She's created a very rich world, and it's fantastic for a first play back onstage to be able to walk into something so intricately thought out." Did White's writer persona kick up at all during the rehearsal process? She comes back with an adamant No.

"[The play is\] so well-written - it would be different if I was doing something and going, 'Oh, I could do much better than that!' It's great to come into something that well presented."

The common ground the women tread was something that Fannin felt to be particularly constructive. "I found Ali's contribution during the rehearsal process great, and if she felt something was difficult, then I just knew that her experience both as an actor and a writer was telling her that. And when she said to me, 'I like the play', it meant a lot to me. Because she knows. She knows."

It seems that more and more women working in Irish theatre will "know" too, as the meeting place between acting and writing becomes more populated: Morna Regan's Midden gained a Fringe First in the Edinburgh Festival 2001, and Fishamble's current production, Shorts, features work by Stella Feehily and Dawn Bradfield. It's a route that requires some sacrifices, but to White, they're well worth making.

"While I was writing, I wasn't really available for work - people start thinking that you've given up. You don't 'do' both," White says. "I very much want to continue doing both. I hope people like myself and Hilary will be able to be the vanguard of that."

For Fannin, the acting jobs still come in now and then, but it is her writing that takes priority. She acknowledges that the impulse that sprung out of the need to be back around her mates in the theatre has taken on a larger scope, one that demands she be "more dogged and disciplined than I ever have been . . . I want a body of work", she says passionately.

"When I go downstairs and see that line of men on the wall [in the Abbey\] . . . and then, there's Marina \, and that's it . . . you look around and you say, 'Well, where are the women playwrights, and what are they writing about, and why isn't their work being shown?' "

It adds to the pressure, but one feels that Fannin is not only equal to it, but thrives on it. "My work cannot be shoddy, I cannot fall back on clichés, I have got to avoid writing in a lazy way. I insist on pushing it to the point so I'm absolutely . . . I just feel it more than if I was a man. I feel that I cannot go out there with something that isn't as good as I can get it."

Doldrum Bay opens tomorrow at The Peacock and runs to June 21st. Booking on tel: 01- 8787222.