At home in an alpha-male world

Starting out as a theatre director, Rachel O'Riordan worried her ballet background might work against her, but in fact it makes her style distinctive, writes JANE COYLE

‘I LIKE MEN. I’m completely unfazed by them. I sometimes think they get a bad name simply for being men and it’s not their fault. I had three brothers, so I know something about it.” Just as well she does, as director Rachel O’Riordan is currently knee-deep in two male-dominated plays – one a world premiere for the Lyric Theatre, the other a new adaptation of a controversial 1950s classic by two of the North’s most fearless and outspoken male writers.

First up is Owen McCafferty's The Absence of Women, which opens tomorrow. Its focus is on two unmarried Irish labourers, played by Ian McElhinney and Karl Johnson, both recovering alcoholics, who have lived for many years in hostels and homeless shelters in London.

Absenceis followed on March 18th by Martin Lynch's adaptation of Sam Thompson's Over the Bridge, whose revival marks the 50th anniversary of its stormy birth.

Thompson’s examination of a bitter sectarian dispute in the Belfast shipyards was taken up in 1958 by actor James Ellis, then director of the Ulster Group Theatre. However, its content outraged the theatre’s board of directors, who turned it down. It eventually emerged two years later, played to capacity audiences on both sides of the Irish Sea and was adapted for radio and television. The writer Sam Hanna Bell later observed that “at last the unclean spirit of sectarianism had been dragged before the floodlights and examined with passion, pity and corrosive laughter”.

The play is an absolute gift to Lynch, whose own working-class background and politics have constantly shaped and informed his plays. And the production by his Green Shoot company has attracted a cast of fine actors, including Lalor Roddy, Tony Flynn, Frankie McCafferty, Michael Liebmann and Walter McMonagle.

“I know, I know, all these alpha males! Of the 14 actors in the two plays, 12 are men,” laughs O’Riordan. “Martin has done something very interesting in handing over this muscular play, whose characters are mostly Belfast Protestant shipyard workers, to a female Irish director. Stylistically, his adaptation is very different from the original. It’s stripped right back and will be performed on a minimal set.”

O'RIORDAN WAS BORNin Cork 38 years ago. Her unusual hybrid accent comes from having grown up in Leeds, where her father, Prof Robert Welch, lectured at the university. When she was 13, he was appointed Head of the School of English, Media and Theatre Studies at the University of Ulster and the family moved to Coleraine. But she stayed on, having just been awarded a coveted place at the Royal Ballet School's White Lodge. She now looks back philosophically on those heady years.

"I was never going to be Darcey Bussell and I don't like being just okay at things," she says. "The prospect of being forever in the corps de balletwas not for me. I started working with a movement director and choreographer and suddenly the prospect of working in theatre opened up." She moved back permanently in 2000 and in 2002 she and her husband, actor-writer Richard Dormer, set up Ransom Productions, with a single purpose in mind – to produce Hurricane, Dormer's one-man show about the volatile Belfast snooker player Alex "Hurricane" Higgins.

“We went into rehearsals four days after our honeymoon and opened in Belfast at the Old Museum,” she recalls. “We never thought beyond that. But the British Council took it up and invited us to Edinburgh, where it had phenomenal reviews. It then went into the Soho Theatre in London to still more amazing reviews and transferred to the Arts Theatre in the West End, where it continued to do great business.

“It was –­ and remains – a great calling card for someone who had come relatively late to directing. It was the first show on which I was credited as director. Without it, it would have taken me a hell of lot longer to become established. As it was, I never assisted and went on to do more and more shows, for Ransom and beyond.” That “beyond” bit includes the celebrated Peter Hall Company, for which both she and Dormer have done a raft of highly acclaimed productions. Her love and knowledge of Shakespeare were deeply entrenched, however, long before she crossed the path of the iconic first boss of the Royal Shakespeare Company, indeed the subject of her PhD thesis was Shakespeare’s physical text.

It remains a source of puzzlement that, to date, she has directed only one Shakespearean play here, her all-male Much Ado About Nothingin for the Lyric. It's a production she looks back on with mixed emotions.

“It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, but its memory provokes all kinds of feelings,” she reflects. “My brother died in January 2007 and the press night was on what would have been his 27th birthday. It’s a play about the dangers of being a young man, about young men making the wrong steps in life. Yes, a tough call.” You’d guess from her bearing and mannerisms that O’Riordan has a dance background, but in the early days of her directing career, she tended to bridle when references were made to her talent for choreography. Now she acknowledges that, far from diminishing her credibility, her ballet training is precisely what makes her directing style so distinctive.

“So many women directors feel they are going to be marginalised, intellectually or creatively, in the industry,” she says. “I wondered if people would take me seriously if they knew I had been a dancer – would I ever be asked to direct a straight play? Now I realise that it is that very thing that determines how I see a play.

“For instance, Owen’s play is physically very static, but you have to be able to hear and convey the rhythms of the writing, which is very precise. If you don’t get it, you are not getting it right. My aim is to make it so that the audience doesn’t miss it, so that, for all the bleakness of its subject matter and its black, black humour, it’s like a big piece of musical theatre. I spend ages with the actors, pulling apart a phrase until the stresses and the pauses are just right. I’m the first woman to direct one of his plays. We kind of tiptoed around each other at first, but now I think we like each other. I like him anyway. We are both very direct and not big into bullshit. When he gave me notes after the first readings, they were almost identical to my own.

"It could be called The Absence of Familyor The Absence of Home. It looks at what can happen to men who live in a world that is entirely male. The central characters have no home, no pensions, no family life; they've been in and out of hostels and haven't been back to Ireland for years. It has always struck me as a harsh irony that men like them have contributed so much to the construction of a country in which they cannot afford homes for themselves.

“Owen articulates their situation brilliantly and with real passion and ferocity. His writing is utterly unsentimental. It is steely and unflinching, a real down-the-barrel look at life, delivered with incredible beauty.”

O'Riordan divides her time between bringing on new work for Ransom and working across the water. In spring 2009, she directed a much-praised production of Frank McGuinness's Gates of Goldfor the Manchester Library Theatre, which subsequently booked her for both their 2009 and 2010 Christmas shows. But she nurses one major ambition, closer to home.

“I am dying to direct King Lear in Ireland, if someone would only give me a big enough stage,” she says. “At its core is the thorny question of the division of land, interlocked with issues of loyalty and family. The spectre of war hovers over everything. Lear is an old soldier, who is not ready to give up the fight and, as we know, off-duty soldiers are dangerous. If that’s not a play for Ireland, I don’t know what is.”

Ransom Notes

Ransom writer-in-residence Richard Dormer (below) has been nominated in The Irish Times Theatre Awards for Best New Play for The Gentlemen’s Tea Drinking Society. He also played the lead role, while O’Riordan directed. The script is currently in development as a television series.

Alongside the professional cast of Over the Bridgewill be an ensemble of 20 actors from community arts groups across Belfast, portraying the seething human activity inside the shipyard gates.

Hurricane has recently been performed off-Broadway, and Leo Butler’s The Early Bird, which was commissioned by Ransom, is currently on stage in London.

As well producing new plays, Ransom also manages Write on the Edge, a programme that mentors new Northern female writers.

The Lyric Theatre's Absence of Womenruns from Feb 8th to Feb 27th (not Sundays) at the Elmwood Hall in Belfast and then tours. lyrictheatre.co.uk

Over the Bridgeis at the Belfast

Waterfront Hall from March 18th to April 3rd, with community performances at St Kevin’s Hall, Belfast, on March 12th and 13th