Off the Charabanc and into the Gate

Eleanor Methven is as impressive on the stage as her erstwhile theatrecompany, Charabanc, writes Bernice Harrison.

It's midway through rehearsals for Jane Eyre and Eleanor Methven is looking remarkably rested and calm. "Oh, this is like a holiday, it's fantastic," she says of the four roles she plays in the Gate Theatre's Christmas production. It's her Gate début. "I play everything except Jane and Rochester," she laughs, before going on to say that her parts are fairly minor, from Grace Poole, who keeps Jane in the attic, to a posh aunt. "They are pen-and-ink sketches really and I'm having great fun switching from one to the other," she says, "and as long as I don't confuse my four accents, it'll be grand."

By her own admission she has had a very good year, and as a founder of Belfast's influential Charabanc theatre company, she clearly has had plenty of challenges in her 25 years as an actor.

Earlier this year, Methven picked up the Irish Times/ESB Best Actress Award for her role in An Grianán's production of Dancing at Lughnasa; she spent most of the summer in the Peacock in Laslo Marton's production of The Wild Duck; and for the Dublin Theatre Festival she was back in the Abbey on the main stage for Thomas Kilroy's The Shape of Metal.

Methven has a strong handsome face, with the kind of angular bone structure that means she will probably look much the same in 10 years time as she does now. Reviewers have often commented on her stage presence and it's true that even off-stage she has an energy that radiates a measured balance of seriousness and fun.

Good actors live in the moment, going from production to production, immersing themselves in their current role, so it hardly seems fair to spend a large part of the interview talking to Methven about Charabanc, a company she co-founded in 1983 and then co-folded in 1995. Although it ended nearly 10 years ago, and her life has clearly moved on, she is happy to talk about the company and acknowledges the training and confidence it gave her as an actor. More than that, she has increasingly been encouraged to look at the broader role of Charabanc in the context of the history of modern Irish theatre.

"We all have been forced to look at its legacy because in practically every publication that has come out about Irish theatre, we're there; we're a significant footnote," she says. "Certainly from a woman's point of view, no one else has really done it the way we did it by giving a voice to women in the theatre and also concentrating quite heavily on Northern politics and the interpretation of the society that was going on around it."

How the five founders of Charabanc - Methven, Carol Scanlan, Maire Jones, Brenda Winter and Maureen Macauley - devised their plays is well-documented. They were encouraged by playwright Martin Lynch to write, and they rooted their work in the community by going straight to the primary source, by talking to people and writing plays such as Lay Up Your Ends and Now You're Talkin', based on the stories they were told.

For 12 years they built a reputation in Belfast, as well as further afield, particularly in Dublin and London. Before any production was seen outside the North, their policy was to tour around local communities. "In one area you would know the audience was all Catholic, in another it would be all Protestant, and when we brought it into Belfast city centre, Catholics and Protestants would sit side by side. I think it was a great contribution, it stimulated a lot of discussion," she says.

Acting was her first career choice but securing a grant to go to university saw her studying English in Reading. She only lasted one term. "I wanted to be an actress, but how in the name of God coming from south Derry do you become an actress, it was just the most fantastical thing," she says. "I mean Sophia Loren was an actress, it just seemed impossible for a dumpy 18-year-old."

To prevent her moping around the house, her father suggested she go to the new Riverside Theatre in Coleraine. It turned out they had two Equity cards up for grabs; she auditioned and got one.

Before Charabanc, she worked regularly for five years in the North and in Scotland. "Carol Scanlan and I just got fed up with the kinds of parts that were going; you were never somebody, you were somebody's wife, somebody's sister or mother and we just wanted to redress that balance."

But by 1995 Methven felt that the pressures of running a successful company had turned her from a creative storyteller into an arts administrator. Given Charabanc's politically driven work, what would the company be doing if it was still in business in a radically changed Northern Irish political landscape?

"I've never thought of that one," she says. "We had started bringing in plays from other cultures, such as an American play, Stickwife, which was directed by Peter Sheridan about the Ku Klux Klan. It had such resonance for women in Northern Ireland who were dealing with husbands in the paramilitaries. Maybe we would have done more of that type of thing. Bringing a light from another culture can be revealing."

On a professional level the decision to close the company was relatively painless. Director Lynne Parker, whom Methven calls a very intelligent director and "one of my favourite people to work with", approached her to come to Dublin for a Rough Magic production of Stewart Parker's play, Pentecost. Then Jim Sheridan cast her in The Boxer. There followed a period of commuting between Belfast and Dublin as the work dictated, before she took the plunge, bought a house in Dublin in Kilmainham and settled down to the life of a jobbing actor. But wasn't moving from a power position of having your own company where you decided when you'll work and what you'll do, to the powerlessness of waiting for the phone to ring, more than a bit difficult?

"It took a long time for people to see that I was a freelance actor but there's a lot of fine acting and fine directing here and when I moved to Dublin I felt that there were a lot opportunities." Being here, she says, allows her to work with different companies and actors; a freedom that compensates for not having the security of being part of a theatre company.

For an actor who describes herself as political and who has in her career put so much creative energy into making plays with a sharp political edge, how does a jobbing actor find outlets for that consciousness?

"Politics doesn't have to be about Northern Ireland, I'm not that narrow and let's face it, you have to pay the mortgage," she laughs. "I'm clearly interested in feminist politics as well and if you look at something like The Shape of Metal, which I think is an important Irish play, it's political in that it explores in an empirical way the value of art and culture and it does it through a woman's experience."

Methven was involved with the actors' union in the North and is encouraged by what she sees as the resurgence of Irish Actor's Equity under the leadership of actor Vinnie McCabe. "It's a very divisive profession, so it is terribly important that you have a collective voice somewhere," she says. "Once you get on in the business, it's very important to look after the people who are coming up behind you and I certainly had a lot of support particularly from older women when I was coming up through the business and I would like to be able to pass that on."

The first four months of this year were spent not on stage but alone in her house, writing the second draft of a screenplay. She describes it as a coming-of-age comedy set in 1975 in the North. When she told Jim Sheridan about it, he cautioned that "people are sick of the North", but a Belfast-based production company showed interest in the first draft (which she started in 1999) and commissioned a second draft. "I wanted to write something but every time I tried to think of an idea, it would come filmically." Her business background running a theatre comes to the fore when she says that while she'd like to writeplays, she wanted to write something unashamedly commercial, something she could sell.

However, as touching and funny as a rite-of-passage story can be, setting it in the dreary 1970s, and against the background of of the North at that time, doesn't sound like the most savvy commercial scenario.

"I think it's time we started telling our own stories in film," she says. "Like Charabanc, you tell your own story first and if it is good enough it will reach out beyond and be universal."

After four months solitary writing confinement, she was glad to get back to the group endeavour of the theatre.

"I'm not trained for anything else, what else would I do?" she says. "I know that sounds negative but it's genuinely not meant to be. It's a positive decision for me to act, it's what makes me happy."

Jane Eyre, directed by Alan Stanford, opens at the Gate Theatre tomorrow.