`Something's happening at the Project'

I was walking down Dame Street in the spring of 1976 when a young fellow stood in front of me and blocked my path. He was streetwise, he had that aura about him. He was just out of St Patrick's Institution and wanted to become an actor. He heard there was something happening in Project.

I was conducting auditions for a play Jim [Sheridan] was writing called Mobile Homes. We didn't have a script but we were strong on ideas. We had cast Tom Irwin in the role of the would-be landlord. He was the embodiment of the old school, always sported a clean shirt, dickie bow and sports jacket. The budding actor turned up and I asked him to take the stage and just be threatening. He walked over to Tom Irwin, whispered in his ear and then threw a fake head-butt. I don't know to this day how Tom Irwin didn't have a cardiac arrest.

The actor, of course, was Mannix Flynn. He got the part and the pair of us immediately started working on a script that ended up as The Liberty Suit, Project's contribution to the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1977, in which Mannix played a character based on himself. The line between reality and art was blurred, indeed.

"There's something happening at the Project" was the feeling that was prevalent at that time. The whole Project thing had begun as an idea 10 years earlier when an evening was staged at the Gate Theatre celebrating the work of all the Irish authors banned at the time. The experiment had begun in the belief that art had a social responsibility and that fuelled the early development. By definition, it was antiestablishment, so to get their work seen, the painters took on the gallery system. Those of us on the theatre side attempted to create an audience for politically-motivated drama.

The fact that we shared an ideology suggested we should share a space. We did and there was war. Our home (a divided one), was in the basement of a building opposite the Peacock Theatre in Lower Abbey Street. Doing plays meant we had to move the paintings and sculpture and there was constant fighting about who and what had priority. Not eager to show a warring face to the outside world, we decided to continue the experiment in a premises that gave us separate exhibition and performance spaces. From such contentious origins was the notion of the arts centre born.

Our first such home was in South King Street and after eviction we moved to a disused factory in East Essex Street. It was the first time the four disciplines of film, theatre, art and music coexisted side by side. And the fights continued, but they were good fights because the word went out that something was happening at the Project. John Cooper Clarke was reading poetry, and Nigel Rolfe was covering himself in flour, and U2 were doing the late night gig and Gay Sweatshop were performing a show about coming out of the closet.

Something started to happen in the outside world when the word got out. The city fathers got scared and withdrew our grant. There was no ratepayers' money being spent on funny bunnies from across the water. Councillor Ned Brennan denied that it was censorship. How could you censor something you hadn't seen? He knew, like many more, that something was happening in the Project and it shouldn't be happening. He didn't have to see it, the dogs in the street knew what it was.

After a sustained campaign, we had our grant restored. It seemed that the Project idea was working. At last, we could read Ulysses and The Gingerbread Man without having to import them from England. Gay men and women could stand on an Irish stage with a reasonable prospect of not being arrested. The changes in the law on homosexuality would follow a decade later but what happened in the Project was certainly a watershed in that debate.

Twenty-five years on from the founding of the Project in Essex Street, it's not for me to pass judgement on what we did. What I can say is that something happened. There was an energy, born of an idea, and it attracted the young talent of the day. There are too many people to list here but we were all profoundly influenced by our time there.

For me, I continue to believe that art has a social responsibility. I look back to the Project and I feel very lucky that it was there for me, for all those who made it happen and for those who supported it. It was simply an idea that we could change things through art, and we could do it collectively. It wasn't such a bad idea, was it?

The paperback version of Peter Sheridan's 44: A Dublin Memoir was published last week by McMillan