Spotlight on a local treasure

Livin Dred Theatre Company is bringing new life to an old church building in Cavan, writes Belinda McKeon

When the old Catholic church in Virginia, Co Cavan, was deconsecrated in 1989, the three stained-glass windows which had fronted it for almost a century-and-a-half were taken away. They found a home in the new church; in their place came panes of stained glass with a suitably secular touch, depicting the course of the river Erne in winding ribbons of blue and green.

After its closure, the church lay idle, the windows unappreciated, until the mid-1990s brought a boom in regional theatres and arts centres; eager for Virginia to have a slice of the pie, Cavan's County Manager drafted a proposal around the modest building, and the idea of the Ramor Theatre was born. Within five years, it had become an actuality, managed by Mary Hanley and offering the varied programme of events typical to most regional venues: amateur and touring drama, concerts, musicals, dance and variety shows.

But between the necessary darkness of the auditorium and the blank canvas required for set design, the windows, and the light playing through their colours, were blocked away - banished from notice, almost, as the Marquis of Headfort, in 1845, had intended the church to be when he stipulated it could only be built on the condition that its altar would face away from the activity of the town. Up among the artificial lights of the stage, their minimal beauty seemed forgotten.

But this month that beauty will be released once more, when the windows become an integral feature of the Ramor's staging of Billy Roche's Belfry, the third play of his acclaimed Wexford trilogy from the early 1990s, which explores the tentative love affair between a church sacristan and a married woman - an affair conducted mainly within the sacristy walls. Up in the belfry, meanwhile, the sacristan tries to help a young altar boy through a terrified adolescence, while, at all times, the swishing robes of the parish priest are never far away.

The production has given Ramor, and the professional company which has grown out of the theatre, Livin Dred, licence to inhabit their physical surroundings like never before; above the existing stage, a second tier will bring the action up to the level of the three tall windows, and the ecclesiastical paintings which have also remained hidden at that height.

"The more we thought about doing Belfry, the more it seemed to fit in," says Hanley as she looks over the stage now. "We thought about the whole setting, and it just seemed right."

Pushing the possibilities of a performance venue to the limit, however, has become second nature to this group of people. 2004 was a year in which, according to the judges in this year's Irish Times ESB Theatre Awards, more than 70 per cent of productions originated within Dublin, despite the impressive network of venues which continues to develop across the country; while the theatres exist, they are receiving houses for talent from elsewhere, rather than serving as the birthplace of such talent themselves.

But 2004 was also the year in which Ramor became one venue to pit itself firmly against this grain. The in-house company which Hanley had long discussed with two Cavan natives, actor Aaron Monaghan and actor-director Padraic McIntyre, finally came to fruition, making its début with a production of Martin McDonagh's Beauty Queen of Leenane, which ran to large houses for 14 nights and went on to feature in the shortlist for the aforementioned awards, with Sheila Flitton picking up a best actress nomination for her performance as McDonagh's spiteful septuagenarian, Mags.

Monaghan himself won a best actor nomination for his performance in the Abbey Theatre's production of The Shaughraun, and McIntyre spent the latter half of last year touring - as an actor - with the popular Upstate production of Patrick Kavanagh's The Green Fool. With Frank Laverty and Eamon Owens having starred in the Beauty Queen alongside Flitton and Ann Marie Horan, the company has a pedigree which has gained it recognition at what seems a very early stage.

Plenty of smaller companies deserve such recognition, but few secure it. So what's the secret? Between a break in rehearsals for Belfry at the East Wall Community Centre, in Dublin - the cast will include Frank Laverty, Brendan Conroy, Deirdre Monaghan, Anthony Morris and Malcolm Adams - McIntyre is frank about the differing degrees of success a regional company can enjoy.

While the buzz with which Livin Dred's first work has been greeted is a source of great excitement, he admits, it's now time to face up to the challenge of bringing the company beyond its first steps and into an existence as an active, growing entity with a regular output.

Like most arts organisations at an embryonic stage of development, Livin Dred received a negative response to its first application for Arts Council funding this year, with the result that the intended tour of Belfry in March will include far fewer venues than McIntyre had hoped.

"We would have liked to have brought it to more of the regional venues," he says. "We're going to Roscommon and Dundalk, but I wanted that to be a two- or three-week thing. But without the funding, it's not possible. I would love to know what we'd be fit to do if we had a few pound. You can't expect them to throw money at everything, but you see companies with exorbitant amounts, and you think, if we got just a tiny percentage of that, what we could do with it . . ."

Does he accept that the Arts Council might prefer to see companies prove themselves before it moves to back them with funding? He laughs. "Yeah, but I think you're nearly around and have gone under before they realise that you should have been funded!"

McIntyre's background is as an actor; born in nearby Baileborough, he studied in the Welsh College of Music and Drama and worked in London for some years before a family emergency called him home to Cavan. And there he stayed, and fell into the conversations with Monaghan and Hanley from which Livin Dred arose.

"These things grow out of people in a time and a place," he says. "There were just a few of us around at the time with the same sort of idea. And I think as actors as well, you have to create your own sort of work, or you could be waiting for the phone to ring."

Though there are several amateur dramatic groups in the area - the group from McIntyre's native Bailieborough have been successful in both the one-act and three-act competitions of the All-Ireland Drama League - the growth of a professional group took an extra push. McIntyre puts it down to the support provided by the Ramor building and its staff.

"Even though they were probably being employed to run the theatre as a building," he says almost in a whisper, "the office staff really were the back-up for us. I don't know if we would have got it off the ground as two actors without Mary's administrative skills."

And careful administration was certainly needed; to stage a professional show at the Ramor, Hanley estimates, costs around €35,000. Without Arts Council support, the funding which was received - from the local authority, Cavan County Council, and from Ramor's own pot, as well as from local sponsorship - had to be carefully managed, and the more elaborate staging, not to mention the touring, of Belfry will require another such juggling act.

But they're managing; as a commuter town, Virginia has a ready-made audience of people willing to look locally, rather than to the long drive cityward, for entertainment, and the Ramor's catchment area extends to Monaghan and Meath. McIntyre thinks that the real problem lies in the venues around the country for which home-grown product is a far-off dream. It's a problem for audiences, too, he feels.

"I think as theatre practitioners we might be remembered as the generation that did only one-man shows, with one chair, quite minimal work because that's all venues can afford, and that that's all we did. And I still thinkthe audience wants to see the relatively full set and full lighting and every actor playing just one character. I think it's slightly unfortunate that the majority of what goes on in regional theatres is probably tributes to Abba and that, stuff that could happen in nightclubs. At weekends, these things have to compensate for the work that's more risky. But they've been hammered out a bit by now."

Is a return, in regional venues, to a fuller programme of professional drama a realistic possibility? Hanley, along with Mary Cullivan who handles publicity for Livin Dred, tie such a return very firmly to the advantages which come from having a professional company attached to the venue. Having worked with the local amateur drama society for a number of years before coming to Livin Dred, Cullivan has a keen sense of what local audiences want to see onstage, and of how far they are willing to have their boundaries challenged.

"We always encourage groups involved in drama, at any level, to come along and see it at a different level," agrees Hanley. "It gives quality to their own work then, because you go back with different ideas, you go back with a higher quality of work. A lot of people say that you should only have professional shows in the venue, but I really don't go along with that. Because you can show them what they can try to achieve."

Belfry opens on Friday at Ramor Theatre, Virginia, Co Cavan, and runs until March 5th, then is at Roscommon Arts Centre on March 8th and 9th and Táin Theatre, Dundalk, on 11th and 12th