Playing god? It's just one more role for a director

Gavin Quinn, artistic head of Pan Pan theatre company, must have enough on his plate organising three shows. So why is he in two of them as well?

GAVIN QUINN has had a busy few months. Since October 1st he has opened The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, at Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, directed an acclaimed production of a new play, Fight the Landlord,at Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, and launched a national tour of Oedipus Loves You, the most commercially successful production that Pan Pan Theatre Company, of which he is artistic director, has staged (the play has been on the road since its premiere, in 2006).

As if Quinn did not have enough on his plate, he has also been involved in performing with the company in two of these three productions. In The Rehearsalhe played the Director, appearing on stage with the actors every night for the show's 10-night run. In Oedipus Loves You he sits at the side of the stage, directing the actors through headphones and moving doll-sized figures around a glass box that is made up to represent the stage world. So is there something of the frustrated actor about this director? Not at all, Quinn says. His roles in The Rehearsaland Oedipus Loves Youcame about by necessity rather than design; he is there to serve the production rather than the other way around. "As a director I am always interested in acting and the role the director has in mediating that process," he says. "In The Rehearsaland Oedipus Loves Youthe relationship between [me] and the actors was at the forefront of how the show was made, and the type of work that we make is about bringing that process into performance in a very honest and real way."

In both shows Quinn plays himself, or a version of himself, an on-stage director controlling the action. It happens in a very obvious way in Oedipus Loves You, in which he communicates with the actors as they perform, and more subtly in The Rehearsal, in which he guides them through their enactments of Hamletfrom a distance.

In Oedipus Loves Youthe onstage intervention of the director is a device that Quinn uses to mimic the presence of the gods in Greek drama. The play is a radical reinterpretation of the Greek myth dramatised by Sophocles, which has spawned a century of psychoanalytic interpretation thanks to Freud. (A quick summary in case you don't know the original story: all men want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers.) As the characters in the original Greek drama were puppets of the gods, so the actors in Oedipus Loves You are controlled by the off-stage but visible presence of the director.

For Quinn, however, the idea is driven less by the idea of the director as god than by the way feeding lines to the actors every night helps them “to experience the performance differently every night; so that every time they perform it is fresh, new, real; every night they are totally present.”

In The RehearsalQuinn plays more of a passive role, despite both playing the Director and directing the performance. He didn't suffer from stage fright, he says, but "the actors were always taking the p*** out of me beforehand about 'my performance'. But the thing is you are not really acting. There was also a real academic and casting director in the show, and we were presenting our real roles to the audience."

And yet “there is an element of performance in that, but the paradox is that you can’t really ‘perform’, because what you’d end up doing is just bad acting. The great thing was that Aedín Cosgrove [co-founder of Pan Pan and the designer of the show] would be in the audience taking notes, ready to pull you up on it.” To give him his review, I suppose you could say. “Yes,” Quinn says. “Things like, ‘Sorry, Gavin, we just can’t hear you.’ ”

For a director so used to being in control, he admits, it is a humbling experience.

Oedipus Loves Youis at Town Hall Theatre, Galway