An eye for the big picture

We hear a lot, in the theatre world, about the problems of playwrights "thinking small": because budgets limit most theatre companies to small-cast, small-stage plays, these are the kind of scripts that most writers are turning out, and given the opportunity to write something more ambitious in size, many writers simply can't rise to the challenge - hence the dearth of new Irish writing on the Abbey's main stage.

A related, but much less discussed, problem involves directors: with mostly modestly-scaled plays being produced, very few directors, other than that small cadre who work on the Abbey and Gate stages, get the chance to "direct big". Michael Caven stands as a notable exception. With his own independent company, Theatreworks, he has directed a string of large-scale plays in which he has displayed, and continued to hone, his skills in controlling a large group of actors and a stage picture that's far bigger than a snapshot. The latest Theatreworks undertaking is typically ambitious: Caven is staging Shakespeare's Richard III with a 17-member cast from September 5th-22nd at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College.

Caven also has a burgeoning relationship with the Gate Theatre: in February he made his mainstage Gate directing debut with Zola's ThΘrΦse Raquin. Over the past months he's been writing a talent development plan for the theatre, and is in discussions with the Gate's director Michael Colgan about future directing projects.

Caven, who is 39, traces the roots of his interest in large-scale theatre back to his childhood home in Suffolk, England, where his father, a leading classics scholar (and a Cork man) banned television. "I hated my father at the time for that, but now I feel I owe him hugely," says Caven. "Our house was filled with thousands of books, and it was always the big novels, not short stories, I loved. I also listened to radio drama and that was a big influence - it gave me a particular relationship to language and the imagination." Radio drama also gave him an early passion for Shakespeare, which he cultivated in his years at Warwick University near Stratford-upon-Avon: "I spent lots of time at the RSC staring in disbelief at fabulous productions of Shakespeare." He went to drama school in London after university, and after a few years working as an actor, started to realise that his real interest was directing: "It was the bigger story I was interested in." He did some directors' training and assistant directing work, then took a few years off to "work in the real world". It was during that time that he met his partner, Sharon, who is Irish, and in 1992 he moved to Dublin to pursue the relationship.

The child of an Irish father and an English mother, Caven says he grew up very aware of his Irish roots. "My grandmother was a fierce De Valera type; I used to go round for boiled cabbage and bacon and she'd scream to me about Oliver Cromwell - I was convinced he was her neighbour until I was seven." More seriously, Caven says, "I always had an awareness of the tension between the two worlds; I have that kind of mongrel consciousness." In 1995 he set up Theatreworks to fill what he saw as a gap in the Irish independent theatre scene. "Our remit is to do work that's never been seen, or very rarely been seen, in Ireland - that's always where we start from. What we look for are epic stories that engage with the human condition on all levels and have some kind of mythic, spiritual dimension to them." The company's past productions include two little-known Shakespeares - Troilus and Cressida and the long poem Venus and Adonis; Anna Karenina, for which Caven was nominated as best director in the Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards in 1998; and the Irish premiere of Frank McGuinness's Mutabilitie last year, for which Sinead Cuthbert won the Irish Times/ESB Award for Best Costume Design (she's also designing Richard III).

This production of Richard III is, to the company's knowledge, the first professional staging of the play since the formation of the Republic. "It's a play I've been thinking about doing for a while," says Caven, "but it's one where you have to find the right actor first, which now I have in Denis Conway. I think Denis is one of the most exciting actors working in Ireland and one of the few that has the maturity and the weight and the technique to play this part." The fabulously loathsome title character is, of course, the best-known aspect of this early history play, which charts his merciless rise and eventual fall, and that of the Plantaganet family to the Tudor dynasty, during the late 15th century.

"As well as just being a rollicking great story about political intrigue, and murder," says Caven, "we're finding that the play is all about the notion of the soul. There are more than 60 mentions of the word 'soul' in the text - and of course the point is that Richard has no soul. But he doesn't exist in a vacuum - he is a like a force that emerges out from underneath the play, from underneath society." To bring home the notion that Richard is the result of the corruption of his world, Caven has created his own version of the play, which draws in material from Shakespeare's Henry VI plays, which chart the history immediately preceding Richard III: "I don't want to give away our opening, but I will say that it doesn't start with 'Now is the winter of our discontent'," says Caven. He has also cut down the text to a two-and-a-half hour running time instead of the as-written four hours. "The intent was to clarify the play and to make it more accessible to audiences; I don't want the audience to feel like they're reading volumes of history."

Theatreworks has been funded by the Arts Council for three years, and this year for the first time has been able to employ a full-time company manager, Keith Troughton. But like many small-to-mid-scale theatre groups, it can still only afford to stage one production a year, which Caven says is "very frustrating . . . but you need serious funding to do more than that, especially for the scale of productions that we do."

Caven supports himself the rest of the year teaching and directing, and has a close association with Trinity's Beckett Centre. And now there's this Gate connection. Caven says he was brought in by the theatre to come up with a plan to keep young theatre talent from "seeping away from Ireland . . . How does a young director go from directing for his or her own company to directing at the Abbey and the Gate? How do actors get consistent work? There is no career path out there. People are going through years of training and then coming out to an industry that can't employ them. So the Gate very wisely has recognised there's a need to nurture talent long-term".

The Gate itself has been criticised by the Arts Council for its record on employing and developing young talent. Did the controversy swirling around the Gate, or the fact that the theatre's previous development director, Judith Roberts, left in early 2000 after only a year in the job, give him pause? Caven laughs wryly. "People are saying to me, 'you're working with the Gate, so you've sold out.' Well, only I can sell myself out. I have enormous respect and liking for the Gate and the people who run it. When I first came to Dublin it was one of the first theatres I went to and I've had great experiences seeing productions there. I've been talking to the Gate about working there for over three years now - it's a relationship both sides have put a lot of energy into. It's an opportunity to work with the best in the business; how could I not want to do that?"

For this jobbing director, the future is looking pretty bright at the moment; what's his long-term plan? "I've always tried to live by that line in The Importance of Being Earnest where Lady Bracknell says 'I believe a man should either know everything or nothing' and Jack replies, 'Well, I know nothing.' I keep saying to myself that I might know a lot of nothing, but it's still nothing. I always want to get better and I always want to learn; that's why I want to be challenged by working in different theatres. And the day I get bored with myself is the day I give it up."

Theatreworks's production of Richard III opens at the Samuel Beckett Theatre on September 6th