It's said that, indoors, the Cork theatre audience can't be relied on. Which is one reason the city is perfect for the site-specific shows at the Midsummer Festival, writes Brian O'Connell.
On any given day, the Cork-to-Cobh commuter train rattles bleary-eyed from city to port, shedding passengers to industrial enclaves such as Little Island and Ringaskiddy. The closest it gets to dramatic action is the odd fallen branch as it nears Fota Island, and a routine breakdown or two from time to time. Yet all that is about to change.
Theatre in Cork is going on location, colonising everything from railway lines to church steeples, hairdressing salons to sitting rooms. This month's Midsummer Festival is proof beyond doubt that Cork is fast becoming the off-site theatre capital of Ireland, with 26 companies at this year's festival going in search of an audience in the most unlikely places. Commuters on the Cobh train would have been unaware that a cast of actors mingled with them for most of their journey last week, casing the carriage, as it were, for their upcoming production. Similar situations are occurring all over the city as troupes of actors, dancers, artists and production teams look set to transform the city into a veritable stage for much of June.
Over the past decade, Cork companies, led by Corcadorca, have been steadily building an audience for off-site theatre. The success of last year's Relocation Project, which attracted more than 40,000 punters on to the streets, proved not only that Cork can accommodate ambitious outdoor public art performances, but also that a large audience exists within the city for such events. This year then, planned productions include a dance piece on a church steeple, a one-to-one performance in a city hair salon, and a theatre company who will perform a production in the comfort of your own sitting room. It doesn't get much more off-site than that really.
In the Cork Docklands area, Jo Mangan, of the Performance Corporation, is planning a "drive-by", in which audience members will pull up in their cars and tune into the action on their stereo systems. The company is becoming somewhat adept at performing in the unlikeliest of spaces: later this summer it heads to Edinburgh to inhabit an 18th-century anatomy room where the audience listens to the dialogue through earphones.
"The type of theatre we perform appeals to a broad spectrum of people", explains Mangan. "People who don't normally come to the theatre turn up at our shows, and don't feel like they need to dress a certain way or whatever. The drive-by show deals with the issue of 'boy racers', and it felt right to stage the piece in a wasteland area on the docks late at night. You can either drive here yourself, or we can provide a car. Through the use of infra-red technology we can then transmit the dialogue into people's car radio, making the experience feel like an actual drive-in and compelling you to interact with the piece."
Given their past experiences, the current show seems a walk in the park for the company, having previously staged productions in disused courthouses, abandoned office blocks and, in one instance, a 40ft deep hole in the ground.
"Our intention is to create a new audience for theatre," says Mangan, "and we see off-site work as a great opportunity for us to attract people in and not let them go. What's great about doing work like this in Cork is that there is a history of off-site performance, so when you say to someone we want to do a performance in such and such a space, they don't look at you like you're crazy."
THE REASONS FOR such preoccupation with public performance in Cork are partly economic (why rent a venue when the street is free?), partly aesthetic and partly historical. Ask any touring company manager in the country where they most dread playing, and invariably the answer will be Cork.
Bluntly, the audience can't be relied upon, especially not indoors. Last week, for example, Cork's newest theatre group, Mercury, played to dismal audiences at the Cork Opera House. Admittedly, the production needed work, yet 50 people on a Thursday night in the city's largest venue suggests an underlying scepticism towards traditional performance spaces.
Dr Ger Fitzgibbon, chair of the Board of Drama and Theatre Studies at University College Cork, agrees that Cork audiences have something of an uneasy relationship with the city's traditional performance spaces.
"I think certainly part of the reason has to do with the fact that audiences are harder to come by in traditional spaces, so there is a sense of having to go out and get an audience," he says. "There is also a novelty value, too - for instance, seeing Beckett in a masonic hall, as we did with the Gare St Lazare Players last year. Companies are creating a different type of experience in a part of the city where we may not normally spend two or three hours. For instance, a very familiar part of the city such as the Grand Parade became utterly unfamiliar during the large-scale Frankenstein production last year."
One of the facilitating factors in Cork's growing appetite for outdoor work has been the attitude of the city council, which has consistently supported outdoor art initiatives.
"The council have been extremely helpful in this regard," says Fitzgibbon, "There is an openness there that may not have been present 10 or 15 years ago. They are prepared to close down streets for events, which is not an insignificant action."
It's worth pointing out that Cork is not unique - off-site performances have been ongoing in other parts of Ireland for generations. In Bunratty, for instance, medieval banquets, which incorporate food, music and theatre, are still going strong, while Charlesfort in Kinsale is an example of using site-specific performances to re-animate history for the tourist market. As far back as 1966, Phoenix Park was the site for a large-scale off-site Abbey production based on the 1916 Rising.
"The move to site-specific work is all part of a general postmodern way of shaking things up," says Fitzgibbon, "Much the same way that the visual arts have broken out of the frame of paintings, so too theatre has broken out of the frame of traditional spaces."
The Midsummer Festival has been quick to identify this trend, and once artistic director Ali Robertson took over the reins in 2001, he made a point of commissioning and encouraging off-site productions. At that time, the festival existed mainly as a means of keeping tourists in the city for a longer time, when many of them were simply passing through on their way to West Cork or Co Kerry.
Robertson sought to introduce a more international and experimental edge to the festival, which had been very homespun in its programming up to that point.
Site-specific theatre was just coming into vogue in the UK, with Deborah Warner, for example, championing performances on the London Underground. The Midsummer Festival was ideally placed to absorb these new approaches into its outdated artistic remit, and reinterpret the relationship between the city and its art.
"It became clear to many companies that the relationship between stage and audience was changing," says Robertson, "Forward-thinking companies are no longer happy with just the fourth wall. I think the notion of standard realism in theatre is in bit of a sticky state at the moment and people are looking for new ways of telling stories. One of the most obvious ways is to take the story somewhere else, into unfamiliar surroundings, and it is clearly working."
IT'S NOT ALL plain sailing though. Site-specific work brings with it many logistical problems not shared by indoor venues, yet the lack of such indoor facilities in Cork has left many companies with little choice but to go outside.
"I think it's become a cliché to say in Cork that we love our site-specific stuff, and I think Corcadorca have become leaders in this field, there's no doubt about that," Robertson says. "One of the other reasons is that Cork is lacking a mid-sized venue at present. You leap from 100 seats straight to 600 seats and upwards, which is not viable for many new companies looking to establish their audience. Also, I think we have a city infrastructure that is keen on things happening and, although we are becoming a grown-up European city, there is still this legacy here of 'ah sure give it a lash'."
In spite of these easy-going attitudes, difficulties exist, but Robertson and his team have become adept at overcoming bureaucratic restrictions.
"As with anything of this nature in Ireland, major problems such as insurance and health and safety exist," he says. "Insurance, in particular, has become a real bogeyman for public performance. People who don't understand insurance - and, let's face it, none of us do, it's such a minefield - will say when a production is in the planning stages, 'you'll never get insurance for that'. I think hysteria about insurance is the real problem . . . The licensing laws here are also very restrictive for outdoor events. Yet with a little perseverance and a lot of patience, everything is possible."
Back on the Cobh train, director Tom Creed is having a logistical nightmare. Not only is working on the train itself a tough task, but transporting actors between stops is proving his biggest challenge. With a cast of up to 60 people, and masses of people getting on and off at every stop, the show is his most ambitious undertaking to date. But he is confident that everything will fall into place by opening day.
"Cork has interesting places, so why not use them," he says, as the 12.42pm from Fota Island pulls up, signalling the end of Act One.
