Despite the thriving Irish theatre scene, it is still a challenge to secure the funding to get a new company up and running in the first place, and the exposure necessary to stay up. Quare Hawks, mid-way through its second year, is trying to push the boundaries that bit further by creating work that Are they mad?
That's perhaps an indelicate question in regard to Cracked, its devised piece of physical theatre that finally arrives in Dublin after an extensive countrywide tour. Directed by Liam Halligan, the company's artistic director, the production brings a highly taboo subject into the open, and frankly characterises, exposes and investigates life in a mental hospital.
While unafraid of taking on such a complex subject, Halligan is refreshingly straightforward, and has no illusions that the show is a walk in the park. "The subject matter is quite depressing, so I wanted something terribly vibrant - a different way of presenting things."
At first glance, there seems to be a paradox at work: physicalising mental illness? Using the body to tell the story of the damaged mind?
Robbed of language, the mentally ill can sometimes be reduced to physical twitches, uncontrollable rage, physical violence or withdrawal. The dramatic use of the body - through gesture, or repetition, or even, and perhaps especially, extreme stillness - gives voice to that which cannot be expressed through conventional text.
In devised theatre, there is no "text".. There is no "play", no beginning, middle or end on paper to be navigated like a map.
Physical theatre has yet to get a firm foothold in Ireland. One can point to Barabbasand Sligo's Blue Raincoats, but very few young companies have followed their lead into investigating such alternative forms of theatre.
With 25 years of acting and six years of directing under his belt, Halligan has always sought more information, more tools, to add to his approach. In this case, he called on the expertise of Paul Allain of the Gardzienice Theatre Association of Poland and Finola Cronin, dance officer at UCD, and veteran performer with German choreographer Pina Bausch. Workshops allowed director and actors - Diane O'Keeffe, Dawn Fleming and Liz Keller - to find a common body language to bring order to the disorder of a damaged and trapped mind.
Their Ur text was Hanna Greally's Bird's Nest Soup, a ground-breaking autobiography-reminiscence. She spent 20 years in Saint Loman's Mental Hospital in Mullingar. The provenance has resonance for Halligan. "My father's sister spent her whole life in Saint Loman's as a patient, and my mother's brother died in there as a patient as well. And my mother's three sisters were all nurses there. I grew up with this mysterious thing in the background that never was talked about. I've always been fascinated by that."
Much of the country was fascinated by Greally's book, and her appearance on the Late Late Show with Gay Byrne in the early 1970s. "It was an extraordinary moment when everybody in Ireland seemed to talk about her," says Halligan. "And it brought up the whole area of people living in mental institutions for the first time."
While the company used Greally's book as a touchstone, it expanded its research to include those who knew her first-hand, and interviewed staff and patients currently at Saint Loman's. The group uncovered some disturbing facts, such as that many women had been dumped there "because they had gotten pregnant or gotten raped, and they didn't have the money to go to England or Canada or Australia", and were, in fact, entirely sane.
Conversely, Halligan and the group came to realise that the word asylum can also be invested with ideas of respite, peace, and dignity.
"They [the patients] had a 600-acre farm, a lot of them knew each other - they all would have been from the midlands, or they'd know the nurses or be related to the nurses. We came away from it with a very strong sense of it being a medieval society, really. It was self contained - and it was a real kind of asylum from the Catholic Ireland of the time. We came away with a very different opinion of the place than we had initially.
After watching the show, the audience may come away with a very different opinion of physical theatre, which is often perceived as too avant-garde or "arty".
In Halligan's own words: "All theatre is physical - I look at it in that way. Word and language are the result of thought, which is the result of the need to express something. I would approach regular text in that way - going from the thought to the need to express it implies some kind on physicality. I think the thought process of the character should be understandable no matter what language you're speaking - what the character wants should be implicit in the way they move and the way they behave."
While Cracked is by no means a conventional staging, it is neither an intimidating nor alienating piece of theatre. The amazing range of the three actresses, from characterisation to movement, from movement to musicianship, is impressive, and Halligan's innovative and precise direction and his blending of the efforts of his collaborators - from Dennis Clohessy's original score to Marcus Costello's spare yet brilliant set to the use of multi-media that actually adds something valuable to the piece - creates an example of what well-researched, rigorous, and challenging theatre can do, not only for a subject, but also for a group of people who only for a subject, but also for a group of people who are keen to invigorate a scene that, like any other art form, gets dangerously close to resting on its laurels.
The company's next project - a commissioned piece from a playwright - will address young male suicide.
So Halligan is truly sticking to his guns. "I think that there's an increasingly youth dominated population in Ireland," he says.
"And I think that it's imperative that they're given access to provocative and audacious theatre."
Cracked by Quare Hawkes theatre company will be staged at three Dublin venues: Draiocht, Blanchardstown (June 19th-21st); Civic Theatre, Tallaght (June 22nd-23 rd); and Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin (June 25th-30th).