A voyeuristic invasion of living space

UNDER CONSTRUCTION:In her occasional series on how theatre is created, Michelle Readdescribes how her own company's site-specific 'You Are Here', set in a Dublin apartment, evolved from theatrical experiments

THIS SERIES HAS been a great excuse for me to poke my nose into other theatre-makers' work and see how new theatre is being made. In this article I'm shifting the focus to the work of my own company, currently rehearsing two site-specific plays for the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival.

You Are HereDay Show (performed in the afternoon) and Night Show (in the evening) are two distinct performances about the same four characters. They happen in a real apartment in central Dublin and have been conceived as close-up, intimate pieces of theatre, which offer elements of choice to the audience. I'm producing, so I'm in a good position to discuss the making of the work, which has fascinated (and terrified) me since our earliest conversations about it in 2000.

Director Tara Derringtonand I run Living Space Theatre (formerly READCO) as a creative partnership. We work as often as funding allows and develop and produce new theatre. You Are Hereis the culmination of a process of development that started in 2001 with an experimental play, Living Space(also the progenitor of our new name). Living Spacewas performed in a house on Gardiner Street and was mainly an investigation into audience placement and interaction. The scenes happened in several rooms at the same time, and it was mostly improvised. Our major concern was to look at how you split an audience up and move them around a real space. We also wanted to know how much choice an audience was comfortable with and whether it would be happy to dispense with the "fourth wall".

The show ran for three nights, was quite mad, and some people still remember it fondly. The audience enjoyed exploring the house and knowing that other things were happening in other rooms at the same time, but they wanted to be invisible. They felt self-conscious about interaction with performers at such close proximity and felt they would be more emboldened to explore if they didn't exist for the characters.

This became a catalyst for our next show, The Other Side, at Project Arts Centre in 2003, and also influenced the staging of my autobiographical show, Play About My Dad, also in Project in 2006. However, both of these shows were in a traditional venue and Tara kept coming back to the idea of using a real place with different rooms. She describes wanting the experience to be "like a computer game", where there is structure and narrative but also elements of choice and interactivity.

Eventually, in 2006, we were able to start developing just such a site-specific project and commissioned playwright Ioanna Anderson, whose work we both admired, to write the script. The first thing was to find the site - somewhere that inspired both Ioanna and Tara and had enough space to move an audience around and show them different things.

Various spaces were considered, but in the end apartments interested us most. "We were all aware of the changes in Dublin and that it had not been an apartment city," Ioanna recalls, "so this felt interesting, particularly as some apartments felt old already. We all thought this was interesting territory." Tara felt the Georgian house was historical, while the apartments were "very now" and seemed to open up "lots of possible paths".

It's one thing working with a site-specific venue, but what we also knew, from my experience of writing The Other Side, is that it's tough beginning with a structural concept. A play often starts from a story, an event or a character, but this project started with a space and a spatial idea. Ioanna remembers thinking that the space would dictate the terms of the piece, "not the characters so much - because you can still have a wide spectrum of people in any one place - but their concerns and issues. The place effectively chooses the play." So if the real place offered a specific identity, at the same time it also gave us the opportunity to work with Tara's ideas around perspective.

These ideas involved using concurrent or parallel action, which meant the spectator's understanding of characters would depend on which room they went into and what they saw at any one time. As action is not repeated, this understanding (or perspective) would necessarily be different from that of other audience members who had not seen the same thing.

Working in this way would involve taking a small audience, divided into smaller groups. It would also mean limited audience capacity, and we realised from the outset that we would need multiple performances. Ioanna noted that day and evening have completely different atmospheres in a real place and suggested having two distinct shows to reflect this. It made sense to connect the characters to a specific time-frame, but we felt the separate plays should stand alone (so people didn't have to buy two tickets), and this was the evolution of the discrete daytime and night-time plays.

THIS WAS A large undertaking, and Tara recalls when working on the script that "we needed coloured pens and maps of the apartment just to get our heads around who was where and which audience was seeing what. There was a lot of making story maps on the kitchen floor and being different characters."

She remembers having a breakthrough once she and Ioanna started using "my children's coloured bricks" to stand-in for the characters. "It was the realisation that the shows had to be mapped out visually, because they were 3D. Once we did this we were able to imagine it from the different points of view."

Meanwhile Ioanna was also caught up in creating the world of the apartment. For her the "sexiest thing" at the outset was "not having things join up - I would have liked to push that further so that there was no arc and just these layers of the apartment, with no linear narrative, less writing. But I think we would have needed more actors for that." She is "not so interested in plot, or in things that are hidden and then revealed. I can never think of enough of that kind of thing." It became evident that creating lots of plot didn't help the fragmented nature of the piece but that the show needed strong characters and stories.

When looking for these, the city centre and all the new apartments made Ioanna think about both the loneliness and the glamour of city living. Tara agreed there was something shiny and new about apartment living, but it could also be depressing. Initially, Ioanna was inclined to "work against the glamour idea". She recalls that in 2006, when we found the original workshop apartment, Dublin was still booming and property was an obsession. "Everything looked good to people, even that apartment, which was actually quite crappy; it was on street level and men peed against the bedroom windows; there was a rat on the patio."

Workshopping the developing script served to highlight what was working and what wasn't, as well as making us all familiar with the technical needs of the space. Tara was always interested to know how the space was impacting on the characters. As Ioanna notes, "the first workshop was about seeing if the characters fitted and whether they had enough action in their stories".

As the script developed, Ioanna explored concepts of home versus property, living versus existing, and the sometimes overwhelming nature of a consumer society. A philosophical through-line also began to develop, and the idea that how we live may be defined by where we live became a key theme. This was initially characterised by a real person but eventually became a voice emanating from the space itself.

THE USE OF voiceover has also allowed Ioanna to include the thoughts of the characters. The shows are fantastically intimate at times, and this technique adds to the feeling of being the ultimate voyeur. In fact, other voices and sounds are another big part of the plays and according to sound designer Jack Cawley they are "a kind of character all of their own". Also involved from early in the process, Jack has helped to add a further layer of "memory" to the apartment with sound, using sensors and triggers in some of the furniture. He describes the soundscape as "embedded" in the script and feels it needed to be "embedded in the apartment" also.

So the finished plays are intimate, fragmented, voyeuristic and something of a theatrical conundrum. They are a sound designer's "decathlon" according to Jack, and Tara likens a rehearsal day to "an eight-hour maths exam". Ioanna has counted 16 "paths" through each show and I, for one (less terrified now they're actually real) cannot wait to see them.

• You Are Hereruns until Oct 12 (excl Mon) at a site-specific venue in central Dublin, as part of part of te Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. Daytime shows: 1pm 3pm, night-time shows: 8pm 10pm. www.livingspacetheatre.com www.dublintheatrefestival.com