'I'm hoping to wake people up with a slap in the face'

After resisting his Irishness at an early age, Wayne Jordan now finds himself directing one of the country’s most important plays in the national theatre – but the 30-year-old dynamo is taking it all in his stride

WAYNE JORDAN is a bundle of energy, full of ideas and sentences that trip over each other to probe, tease out meaning, examine, elucidate. It’s just as well: at just 30 years of age, he’s directing his second show in the national theatre in less than a year, and this time around he’ll be working on the nearest thing the country has to a national play.

No wonder he was momentarily "alarmed" when he was initially approached with an invitation to direct O'Casey's The Plough and the Starsat the Abbey. "I had never really felt particularly drawn to make plays about Ireland in a sociological way or a political way," he says. "I had very much resisted being Irish when I was younger, because as a young gay child in the 1980s or as someone who felt outside of things, I always felt it was . . . a tradition and burden that I just wasn't particularly interested in." Yet earlier this year he directed Tom Kilroy's Christ Deliver Us! a new version of Wedekind's Spring Awakening in a specifically Irish context.

“That brought me into talking about being Irish at a time when everybody was losing their jobs and with the Ryan report and the economic crash and the fact that the project of the republic had perhaps failed, or the hundred years [since] had not really succeeded in a way, was becoming very clear.”

With The Plough and the Stars, Jordan is going back even further in time, to one of the most definitive dates of Irish history. "1916 is so confusing in a way because so much of it is mythology and not reality," he says. "It's often made into a project that then feeds into a narrative of a kind of Fianna Fáil republicanism, and that wasn't true."

Sitting in an empty rehearsal space at the top of the Abbey theatre while 21st century Dublin shudders by outside the big windows, Wayne Jordan seems very much a man of this time. Yet he sees parallels in the Ireland of O’Casey and the contemporary cacophony outside on Marlborough Street, as he attempts to break apart the mythologies that have become sealed in the years since 1916. “It’s very much about looking at rupture, fragmentation, fracture and I guess trying to compound in some way now and then. Then, as a time when people with nothing but the remnants of colonialism could imagine a new future and way of being, to now, when we . . . have nothing but the remnants of the capitalist project we’ve been involved in for the last 100 years and are having to begin to imagine a new way of being.”

For, Jordan The Plough and the Starsis an angry play, with O'Casey "very actively writing into his moment, trying to wake people up with a slap in the face". Is that part of his own plan with this production? "I would hope to," he admits. "You don't want to be slapping the play around either." He laughs. "Actually I would probably quite enjoy if somebody did that, but my project was not to do that." His project as a director changes each time he approaches a play, he says.

In this instance, his first job was to work with the set designer to develop the concept for the production. “I like to create sets that are instruments for the actors to perform the play on as opposed to necessarily invoking the age and time, or the reality of it.” Once the set was decided upon, his thoughts turned to casting. “Putting together a company is obviously incredibly huge in terms of deciding who you want to meet and who’s going to be in it, and how they’re going to work together, and what they’re going to look like.”

With the actors assembled, read-throughs and rehearsals could begin. “I think I’m quite a playful director in a way, in that I like to have quite a lot of fun in the rehearsal room. I like the theatre because I had such fun when I found the theatre at the beginning,” he says. “Its energy opened up a lot of doors that for me personally, many, many years ago, so I guess I would hope that the work that I would make would do that for other people.” There is a joy in this process for Jordan, despite its drawbacks. “One of the most difficult things as a director I think is the violence of making a decision,” he says, adding that as he shapes the production, he doesn’t worry too much about putting “a unique stamp on it”.

It’s not in his head then, that each production be recognisably a Wayne Jordan play? He pauses, then grins: “Ah go on, it is a bit in my head. But I think probably not right at the front of my head! I guess you’re trying to deliver something with integrity.”

For Jordan, who admits he always knew he wanted to be an artist of some sort and decided on directing during his studies at Trinity College, analysing his chosen profession is a difficult task. “It’s kind of hard to talk about why and what you do. It’s so much a part of my life now that it feels like bearing witness to who I am as opposed to what it is that I do.”

THEATRE HAS BEEN A PARTof Jordan's life since he left university, his company, Randolf SD helping to establish him as a new force on the Irish stage. This year alone he is directing four separate shows, including a forthcoming musical, Elemenope Jones, which he also penned.

All that energy seems to bode well for theatre in this country, and although Jordan is not one to dwell on the negative, he is painfully aware of the obstacles young practitioners have to face when it comes to making theatre here. “I think the way funding is going is a bit dangerous. We get money from project to project. And although it’s very hard to sustain a career as an artist with any kind of individuality in those kinds of circumstances, I also understand that there’s very little money to go around.” Though he admits that a lot can be done on a shoe string with a creative approach, “as your ambitions get bigger, and you want to do things that are more difficult or take a long time, then that’s going to be very hard here.”

None of this has stopped this 30-year-old dynamo, however, his energy infecting the very space around him as he talks about the busy time ahead. “Doing four shows this year is very exciting, and I was working on a number of them for a very long time, so it means there’s a lot of work already behind them,” he says. “But really it would be great to spend a whole year working on one show, one sublime, beautiful, gorgeous show that could run forever and ever. How beautiful would that be?”

The Plough and the Stars

runs at the Abbey theatre until September 25