Ancient troubles in modern Ireland

Having lived in Germany, director Rachel West gained a perspective on Ireland’s boom which enriched her interpretation of ‘Off Plan’, a new, property-based version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia

IN 2002, WHEN theatre director Rachel West returned to Ireland from Germany, she became deeply concerned about her grandmother.

Having been in and out of nursing homes, but still compos mentis, her grandmother would look at the country around her and feel displaced. Lanes she once navigated had been subsumed into housing complexes. Fields had been layered with concrete and transformed into gated communities. The pace of change was bewildering.

West, who had spent the previous eight years learning her trade as a theatre director in Berlin, shared her disorientation. “I realised that it was happening to me too,” West recalls, on a break from rehearsals. “I thought ‘it’s just gone too far’.”

The distant view home from another country can afford someone a wider perspective. Making occasional trips back to Ireland, West witnessed the development of a country in abrupt leaps, like watching its progress through time-lapse photography. “I tended to come into Dublin and bus up to Donegal , yearning for the countryside, the homeland and the sea air I remembered from childhood. To say it was unchanged would be a complete lie.”

Instead, the landscape was now dotted with luxurious and largely vacant holiday homes. In the meantime, Dublin had become a bizarre souk of convenience and consumption – a place of property bubbles, an inadequate health service, banking scandals, overpriced pints, ready-washed lettuces and a Grafton Street so thronged with shoppers it seemed to exist in a perpetual Christmas Eve.

“They were little things that were part of a bigger picture,” says West. “Coming from Berlin, I hadn’t quite understood what the legacy of social democracy actually means. There are a lot of things in place in Germany that are for the general benefit of everybody. I always assumed that we would be doing that. That’s the kind of people we are. Or were.”

HER THOUGHTS TURNED to another exile who returns home to find a radically different land, compromised and corrupted by the pursuit of property. This figure was Orestes, the banished son of the murdered king Agamemnon, who conspires with his sister Electra to kill his mother, Clytemnestra, and her paramour, Aegithus, in revenge. It may seem like a frantic leap, turning a social critique into a full-blown tragedy. But in taking the three plays of the Oresteia – Agamemnon, The Libation Bearersand Eumenides– and redeveloping their dilemmas with a modern blueprint, Simon Doyle's new adaptation, Off Plan, renders classic adaptation an act of playful refurbishment.

“In matters of renovation it is vital to be sympathetic to the immediate context,” his Aegithus begins, with arch self-reference, before concluding in the same spirit: “It is our task to address the present rather than to cosset the past. /We use the materials of today to evoke the spirit of yesterday /in the service of tomorrow. /And thus do we transcend our forebears, /and thus do we control history.”

If that kiss-off sounds as though Doyle is tempting fate, it may be quite intentional. Although he previously updated Sophocles for Pan Pan Theatre Company's boldly irreverent Oedipus Loves You, Doyle originally baulked at the idea of taking on the Oresteia.

“No way – this is crazy,” he remembers thinking. “It would be fatal hubris. But then I thought, well if I don’t do it, somebody else will and I’ll be kicking myself.”

Working from Aeschylus's plays, but consulting different versions of Electrafrom Euripides and Sophocles, Doyle found freedom in the strikingly different variations by the great tragedians. "In the beginning, our Agamemnon was much more faithful to the original. But as we went on, especially as you get into the second part, The Libation Bearers, it asks you to bring it into the contemporary without trying to belittle the source material."

The Oresteia addresses the Trojan war, for instance, but Aeschylus includes pointed reference to his contemporary Athens. “So even in the originals there’s that anachronism, where the past and present are simultaneous,” says Doyle. “It’s an interesting way to blend things.”

And blend things he has. Doyle, who once gave us an Oedipus manning a family barbecue with his eyes gouged out, as though all families might spot themselves in his complicated domestic scuffles, has some experience in adapting classics while also playing on our familiarity with their meaning. In Off Plan, the slain Agamemnon has been buried in the back garden of his palace, where Electra now pitches a tent to mourn him. Her recognition scene, when reunited with Orestes, becomes a detailed and nostalgic rumination about ice pops, a paean to disposable pop culture that somehow still warps into the pain of exile and dispossession. The effect is to render the epic as something domestic, to update its archetypes and to give pop culture a lick of the mythic.

EARLY LAST WEEK in the rehearsal room, West appeared to be returning a psychology to the characters that Doyle’s version, stark and rhythmic, could often live without. (“If you look back on the source material,” he told me, “they’re not psychologically realistic characters. They’re fairly functional.”)

As West teased out the power dynamic between Electra and Clytemnestra with her performers, Mary Murray and Emma McIvor, the director traced any vulnerabilities (“you’ve shown a sign of weakness there”) or unspoken motivations (“the conventional road is closed to her”), while reciting Electra’s more aggressive lines with some added abuse of her own: “You never answer for this s**t!” The scene ends with a defiant Electra refusing to re-enter the palace in words that might befit a child in a huff or a stranger resolved to exile: “I am not coming back inside. I’m going to stay outside. I am not coming back, ever.”

There’s an echo of the line when West considers her professional future in Ireland. “It feels like my last serenade here,” she says frankly. “I have no idea where I’m going from here.”

West returned to Berlin in 2007, feeling there was a dearth of opportunities for her freelance career in Ireland, despite a modest series of very well received productions. Her company, RAW, is best known for bringing under-explored contemporary European plays to the Irish stage, such as Jon Fosse's Winter, Falk Richter's The System Parts IIIand Abi Morgan's Splendour, which, like Open Plan, have all been co-productions with the Project Arts Centre.

Most of those productions have been stripped-back affairs, bearing a clear political charge, yet the name RAW was never intended as a statement of aesthetic: those letters are her initials. Nor was it her desire to found a company in the first place – rather, it was considered a prerequisite for funding. “I’ve spent more of my professional life in Germany than I have here. I found it very difficult to come back here and set up a company, write a manifesto and burrow into a little niche for myself that I never come out of again. I love loads of different plays. I resented having to obey one style.”

The company model, though, long encouraged by the Arts Council in order to manage and account for its investment, now seems to be collapsing. This year, 11 theatre companies were removed from revenue funding, while more public subsidy has been diverted towards funding individual projects. (RAW got a Project Grant for Off Plan.)

“I have no interest in becoming a better producer, but I have become a better producer,” West says. “I’m better at doing budgets, knowing what’s needed, keeping an eye on PR and marketing.

"And I loathe that. I wouldn't mind doing it if that's what my job was, but I don't like doing the spagat– that's the position I'm put in." Spagatis German for "the splits". "It doesn't make you a better artist, and as a company your work doesn't move on because you're fighting the same battles again and again."

WITH ITS HEAVY emphasis on property, where Trojan Falls becomes the name of a collapsing residential development and the curse of the house of Atreus now seeps deep to the foundations of Irish society, Off Planseems a searing critique of the country and institutions that West has partly left behind.

Doyle, however, knows the play must stand on its own terms without descending into hollering condemnation: “I was trying not to overload the script with metaphorical ballast that might topple it.”

For her part, West recognises that ancient Greek theatre was funded by, and staged for, the polis. And just as Aeschylus was more observer than agitator, any message in her production remains loose. “Theatre isn’t there to answer everything or explain it,” she says; rather it should seek to frame the question. “It should provoke discussion.”

So, does she think that a curse can be lifted, a tragic cycle broken and a nation rejuvenated? “I think so. I don’t mean that in a trite way.” She notes that the cast and crew are spending more time together, bringing packed lunches to rehearsal, spending less, talking more. “That’s the positive side,” she says, “there might be a little more space now. I think we’ve kind of lost touch with our identity a bit and the crash will cause more soul searching.” Truth will out and the gloom will lift, the Oresteia teaches us, after much horror and heartache, if everything goes according to plan.

Off Planopens tonight at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and runs until Feb 27