Talking about a revolution

Ireland's first African theatre company had its first taste of success at last year's fringe. Now it's back for more, writes Katrina Goldstone

A small revolution occurred during last year's Dublin Fringe Festival. Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not To Blame, directed by Bisi Adigun and Jimmy Fay, was the first play to be performed by African actors living in Ireland. Ireland has welcomed African casts and productions before, of course - George Seremba has performed his play Come Good Rain here several times, and it was the appearance during the 2002 festival of the South African production The Mysteries that inspired Adigun to mount a production with an African company. But in its scale and ambition The Gods Are Not To Blame, a Nigerian interpretation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex that has opened for a second Dublin run, was a new departure.

In Nigeria Rotimi ranks alongside Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. For Adigun, who founded Àrà m Be theatre company to stage the work, the play has a special resonance, as it was the first piece of theatre he ever saw, the event that led him to be an actor. "There are lots of strands to the play, but for me it is a classical example of vibrant African theatre, very spectacular, colourful," he says. "The fact too is that the play is an example of interculturalism, in that it is a transplantation of a known theme to Nigerian soil. For me the play in a very subtle way deals with that idea of 'the other'."

In England the formation of theatre companies such as Temba and Talawa in the 1970s and 1980s was part of a bigger movement of black and other minority-group artists demanding recognition. Temba, whose name comes from the Zulu word for hope, was formed in 1972. It pioneered new black writing from Britain, South Africa, the US and the Caribbean. The policy of Talawa Theatre Company, founded by Yvonne Brewster, Mona Hammond, Carmen Munro and Inigo Espejel in 1985, has been "to provide high-quality theatre productions which reflect the significant role black theatre plays within the United Kingdom". Although the companies differed in style and approach, they provided a vehicle for black actors and writers, as well as opportunities to reinterpret classics.

Adigun would like to stage other African plays, but he believes the response to Àrà m Be means the fledgling group can fulfil a broader remit. "In the aftermath of the play I was approached by a number of interested parties, and that made me say maybe there's actually a gap there, that there's lots of budding designers, writers and directors within the African community specifically who have been looking for a way to express their ideas - that if I create a company at least they'll know where to go to."

Although there have been attempts to grapple with the notion that the arts should reflect the reality of a multicultural Ireland, cultural institutions have given relatively little recognition to the fact that people from new communities, who need an artscape that reflects their experience, now live and work here.

Create, an arts-enabling organisation formerly known as Creative Activity for Everyone, has been in the vanguard of providing arts practitioners with information about the debates around cultural programming and diversity.

Two years ago it commissioned preliminary research on the number of minority artists and arts practitioners living in Ireland. It has followed it up by inviting representative of different disciplines - and cultural commentators - to debate how best to ensure that the arts reflect a multicultural society. As Wes Wilkie, Create's executive director, sees it, Àrà m Be is a new departure. "We feel the timing of Àrà m Be's arrival on the arts scene is right and that they will eventually fill a niche that is currently vacant within the arts sector.

"Unlike in Hollywood, where there appears to be room for only one Will Smith, Halle Berry or Denzel Washington at a time, we believe that the arrival of Àrà m Be should be the start and not the end of a period in which we see the creation of a number of organisations and projects that begin to mirror the new cultural diversity of Ireland."

New ways of looking at both arts practices across cultures and issues of the State's support of the arts urgently need to be considered. Otherwise whatever policies and strategies are devised will simply restructure negative stereotypes and serve them up in another form.

City Arts Centre, in Dublin, was one of the first organisations to look at culturally diverse programming with World Voices, an event it held between 1999 and 2001. Sandy Fitzgerald, the centre's former director, believes its intervention was pioneering. "We had from the beginning a strong policy that multiculturalism was a very positive thing and could do nothing but good. We were very heartened by the responses of the community-arts community."

At a seminar the centre held in December 2002 on theatre and multiculturalism, Declan McGonagle, its current director, expressed the need for socially engaged arts to promote diversity. "It seems to me that there is a real role for culture and the arts to play in negotiating a whole new way of thinking about the place of refugees and immigrants within our society," he says.

The launch of Àrà m Be is a small measure of progress to underscore the fact that there is room for a chorus of diverse voices in the arts.

Àrà m Be's production of The Gods Are Not To Blame by Ola Rotimi is at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Dublin, until Saturday