Ditching the diva

The Project Art Centre’s recently appointed artistic director Cian O’Brien could hardly be more different than Mangina Jones, the character he created for the Alternative Miss Ireland contest

ON A BRIGHT evening last summer, the jam-packed bar of Dublin's Project Arts Centre rang out with Celine Dion's torch song, Think Twice, as the reigning Alternative Miss Ireland, Mangina Jones – resplendent in a diaphanous white blouse, vintage blue turban and ruby red lipstick – bid the Project's outgoing director, Willie White, a tempestuous adieu. "Baby, this is serious," she lip-synced, ostentatiously. White, freshly appointed as artistic director of the Dublin Theatre Festival, seemed as amused and enthralled as everybody else – particularly those who already suspected that Mangina's creator, Cian O'Brien, was the person most likely to replace him. Two months later, O'Brien had the job.

Sitting today in the Project artistic director's office, to which he has made only modest adjustments, O'Brien remembers the subtext of his performance. "The job hadn't been advertised then. But I knew I was going to be applying for it." Mangina is a strictly separate entity to O'Brien (he is not hosting The Irish TimesIrish Theatre Awards, he corrects me, "Mangina is") but on this occasion, at least, they seemed to share a private joke.

Uncommonly approachable, unfailingly composed and quietly ambitious, O’Brien could not be more different to the character he created, more or less on a whim, for last year’s Alternative Miss Ireland contest. Since graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 2003, where he spent his final year as chairman of Dublin University Players, O’Brien has established himself as an unflappable producer and a model of efficiency. After his degree, in geography and sociology, he studied for an MA in arts management in UCD, then worked with Classic Stage Ireland, the Focus Theatre, Bedrock and Making Strange before being accepted on to Rough Magic’s Seeds programme, which arranged a placement for him in Sam Mendes’s Neal Street Productions.

When Seeds finished, Rough Magic offered him a job and he remained there for four years as a producer with responsibility for managing its artist-development programmes.

In conversation, O’Brien can see two sides to almost everything. Asked if these are healthy times for contemporary arts or if the trend for site-specific work challenges a venue-based arts centre, he will typically begin, “Yes and no,” before elaborating. A blunt transcription would look self-contradictory: “I’m not a shy person, but I feel like I’m a shy person,” he says at one point. “They’re not similar,” he says of the works of a handful of young companies, “but they are similar.” In person, though, it comes across as a mark of deeper consideration, the kind of ethos that befits a contemporary arts centre: there’s always an alternative.

Project Arts Centre has long been a nerve-centre for alternative art and experimental performance, but since the redevelopment of its Temple Bar premises in 2000, it has encountered pressure from two sides. On the one hand, there is the imperative to feature and encourage experimental work – which was the reason for its creation in 1966. On the other, it is one of few well-located, well-resourced and multidisciplinary venues in the city centre, and demand for its spaces is huge. (It has two performance spaces, the 200-seat Space Upstairs and 90-seat Cube, and a gallery space.) Such pressures are not easily reconciled, but they account for the wide variety of Project’s programme, in which the solid craft of Rough Magic, Fishamble or Landmark is as likely to appear as the fun experimentation of Forced Entertainment, Brokentalkers or Theatreclub.

How does O’Brien characterise the alternative? “If you look at Project’s programme, the breadth of work we present and the type of companies we work with, it’s difficult to define what that is,” he admits. “Partially, our relationship is with people who couldn’t present their work anywhere else.Because they couldn’t sustain an audience for the work in another venue.”

He points to the difference between contemporary dance, for instance, which few other venues are well equipped to facilitate or promote, and the “audience-driven” work of Rough Magic or Landmark. “That work also has a place here because it creates a dialogue.” Attentive to the visual-arts programme, curated by Tessa Giblin, and keen to connect the work of the gallery to the performance spaces with a massive installation this summer, O’Brien tends to diminish his own artistic sensibilities when discussing his plans for Project. “I don’t think it’s about me or my tastes,” he says. “It’s about facilitating artists. Ultimately I’m a guardian for the organisation and the programme, but actually I’m led by the artists who I’m in dialogue with.”

He does, however, bring a producer's sensibility to the job of artistic director, the dual desire to facilitate and stimulate the art. One of his first innovations, for instance, is the introduction of a short programme called Turn Aroundthis April, in which five productions from last year's Absolut Fringe, co-selected with the Fringe's Róise Goan, will be performed in repertory at the Cube. It's inspired, partly, by O'Brien's fascination with the European repertory system in Berlin, Paris or Budapest, and he knows the challenges this may present to an audience unfamiliar with such systems. Will the rotating schedule confuse them? And how easily can Project accommodate five alternating productions over three and a half weeks? "I'm interested in changing the way the Cube space runs," he says, and a long-term goal is to introduce a repertory system into the Cube year-round. "One of the concerns I have is the regularity with which artists get to present work – and the regularity with which they get paid to present work. This is the beginning of an experiment."

A good producer is an all-rounder, says O’Brien’s former colleague at Rough Magic, Diego Fasciati. “You need to see all aspects of the company,” he says – how directors, designers, production managers and actors work, for instance, and how to talk to them. He likens the relationship between the producer and the artist as that of the editor to the author. “You have to have an artistic sense without wanting to be an artist.”

Three months into his job at the Project, O’Brien says, he has had to learn to talk to artists in a new way: “to train myself to not think like a producer is brilliant, but being able to bring that experience is actually beneficial”. Despite his performances for tough crowds, however, he bats away any suggestion that he is also an artist. “I don’t think of the work that I’ve done with Mangina Jones as art. It’s like a hobby. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe that’s insulting to other drag queens. But I don’t think of myself as an artist.” He considers. “A diva, maybe.”

O’Brien’s great skills as a producer, as Fasciati described them, were his business acumen, his organisation, his ability to work under great pressure without showing it, and a natural friendliness to everybody, from funders to corporate sponsors or artists. Producers are not ordinarily allowed to become divas.

Sadly, after Mangina hosts the Irish Theatre Awards and makes her final appearance at the last ever Alternative Miss Ireland, O'Brien has no further plans for her regular appearances. "I feel like I've done it." He understands her allure, though. "There's something about the artistic director of the Project Arts Centre playing an alternative character on six-inch heels at The Irish TimesIrish Theatre Awards. I think that's a wonderful statement to make."

Some may consider Mangina’s retirement an intriguing retreat – if you’re going to maintain an alternative character, to do so while running an alternative arts centre seems like the time and the place. But there’s a certain parallel in how O’Brien sees the shape of contemporary performance. Where the example of more recent companies such as Brokentalkers, The Company and Theatreclub has leant towards devised work and gleefully exposed methods, O’Brien now detects “another groundswell that’s happening with artists who want to put on plays”.

He is similarly interested in reconnecting audiences with the Irish and international canon: "How you can engage an audience for contemporary work with a classical text?" Pan Pan, Randolf SD, Loose Canon and Text | Messages, the recent bite-sized presentation of Shakespeare, have done this without reverting to fourth-wall naturalism. But I wonder if O'Brien was inclined to remove the false eyelashes of the alternative, to sand down the rougher edges of contemporary performance?

"No. I don't want to do that," he counters. "Theatre is messy and the mess is important. I like that idea of things like [Rough Magic's] The Importance of Being Earnestand [Brokentalker's] The Blue Boyclashing together, or Pan Pan doing A Doll's House. That is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about."

He refers to the Focus Theatre, and how its once radical work of the 1960s has become familiar over time. "It's all about moments," he explains. "Now, it feels like there's a shift, where artists are beginning to look a bit more introspectively at Ireland. With work like [Anu Productions's] Laundry, The Blue Boy, or Pan Pan's All That Fall, or even Daat The Gate, people are looking back and looking in on Ireland. What has happened to us that has made us the way we are now? That's what interests me. And that's what artists are talking to me about."

Contemporary art, as O’Brien describes it, is an ongoing project; contradictory and hard to define, but we know it when we see it.

The theatre people have spoken

Cillian Murphy is named best actor, Amy Conroy wins best actress and Louise Lowe takes the director award – at least according to an online Theatre Forum Ireland poll on the nominees for this year’s Irish Theatre Awards.

The poll asked readers on the site to vote for who they thought should win, and also sought feedback on any productions or performances that the Theatre Awards judges missed out on and what categories should be added.

You can read these results in full at theatreforumireland.comand at irishtimes.com/blogs/ pursuedbyabear. But you will have to wait until Sunday to see how Theatre Forum's results stack up against the real thing.

Theatre Awards

The Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards winners will be announced at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham on Sunday. For a shortlist of all the candidates, see The Irish Times arts blog at irishtimes.com/blogs/pursuedbyabear. Laurence Mackin will be tweeting live from the awards on Sunday night. Follow @laurencemackin or search for #ITtheatreawards