The Dublin Theatre Festival illustrated that the auteur in today's theatre is the director, writes Fintan O'Toole
There was something bittersweet about the celebration of Harold Pinter at the Gate Theatre that formed the emotional heart of the 2005 Dublin Theatre Festival.
It was, of course, a festive occasion, marking both the writer's 75th birthday and his achievements over five decades. That statement about the importance of the writer in the theatre was, moreover, both echoed and amplified by the nicely-timed award to Pinter of the Nobel literature prize.
Yet it was a statement that was qualified and even contradicted by the circumstances in which it was made. Pinter's evident frailty and the poems about illness and death that were read in his presence at one of the Gate's events gave an elegiac tone to the celebrations.
And the rest of the festival seemed, in a broader sense, to be an elegy for the whole notion of the great playwright. It raised a profound question for Irish theatre culture: is the era of the playwright as the dominant figure in the theatre coming to a close?
This is a big issue for Irish theatre, especially in terms of its international standing. With the exception of the early years of the Abbey, no one would claim that Irish theatre companies have been at the leading edge of the form over the past century.
We have had many superb actors and a few great directors, but the contribution of our companies to the testing and redefinition of the form itself has been minimal. What we can claim, however, is an extraordinary contribution to the play as a literary form. Modern playwrighting simply wouldn't be the same without Yeats and Synge, Beckett and O'Casey, Murphy and Friel.
And the claim isn't merely historical: contemporary writers such as Frank McGuinness, Marina Carr, Sebastian Barry, Conor McPherson and Mark O'Rowe have a real international resonance. The very fact that England's greatest modern playwright, Pinter, was honoured in Dublin but not in London was itself a recognition of the abiding self-image of our theatrical culture as one in which the writer matters.
But does the writer - in the old sense of the solitary genius who labours in isolation on a text that is then interpreted by actors, directors and designers - really matter any more? In answering that question, the fact that this year's festival had no new Irish play in the old sense is less pertinent than the fact that it succeeded with relative ease in the absence of such a play.
The message of Don Shipley's first festival as artistic director was that the auteur in today's theatre is the director. Apart from the Pinter mini-festival, the adult programme had not a single contemporary literary play.
There were big Shakespeare productions (The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet) which emphasised the extent to which Shakespeare now functions as the international baccalaureate for directors, a kind of standardised test in which the emphasis is not on the play but on what has been done to it.
There was the writer/director as a seamless creator who invents the text and the production together: Lara Foot Newton (Tshepang), Polly Teale (Brontë), Michael Keegan-Dolan (The Story of the Bull). There was the director as co-ordinator of a collectively devised piece (Lies Pauwels with White Star). There was so-called verbatim theatre in which the writer is replaced by the editor of a pre-existing public text (Richard Norton-Taylor in relation to Bloody Sunday). There was the small team of writer-director-designer-performers who make a nonsense of the old division of labour between different specialists (Maksim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko in White Cabin).
Even the two shows that looked like the old kind of play turned out to be very far from literary theatre. Both were biographical texts about performers in which the burden of invention fell heavily on the actors. Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife is very well written but it is essentially "about" the dazzling ability of the solo actor Jefferson Mays to conjure not just the German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf but 34 other characters as well. It is striking, indeed, that Wright himself is one of those characters and that he both subverts the whole notion of the playwright as an external creator of the piece and reflects on the anxieties that now attach themselves to the dramatist's role.
Tom McGrath's Laurel and Hardy was less anxious, perhaps, but it too centred on the actor as inventor of the piece, with Steven McNicoll and Barnaby Power likewise calling forth a multitude of personae.
These intimations of the dethronement of the playwright are not, moreover, mere reflections of Don Shipley's personal taste. They accurately reflect the world of international theatre now. The other major European international festival that was running last week, at Wroclaw in Poland, had precisely the same emphasis.
There was lots of Shakespeare, very few conventional plays, and the big stars were the directors: Krystian Lupa, Simon McBurney, Luk Perceval, Arpad Schilling, Stefan Pucher.
Where a classic text was used, it was appropriated to the director's vision. Lupa presented a version of Chekhov's The Seagull but spliced it together with Yasmina Reza's A Spanish Play to create a seven-hour meditation on acting. The text of Perceval's (admittedly fabulous) Uncle Vanya was credited in the programme to "Jan Van Dyck and Luk Perceval (after Chekhov)".
What's happening in European theatre, in other words, is precisely what happened in European cinema 50 years ago: the director is coming to be understood as the author of a given piece of work and the playwright is becoming no more than the scriptwriter. This is not accidental. The declining prestige of the playwright is rooted in the breakdown in the distinctions, not just between different theatrical forms, but between theatre and other arts. The line between dance and theatre has been breached, as was obvious in, for example, White Star and The Bull.
Performance art, which draws its language ultimately from painting and sculpture, increasingly occupies a theatrical space, as White Cabin from the St Petersburg group Akhe did with such grace and wit. Multimedia technology is fusing the previously separate areas of lighting, performance and design in ways that were effectively explored by Conall Morrison and John Comiskey in the Abbey's version of Hamlet.
This fusion of forms and profusion of resources places the director even more firmly at the centre of the work, and makes the writer, if such a creature exists at all, merely one instrument in the director's orchestra.
There is no point in simply lamenting this shift. Much is gained by it, after all. In a directors' theatre, the emphasis is on the event and it has to keep its balance without the psychological safety net of a beautifully crafted text that is assumed to exist beyond the performance. Actors are required to be able to move between forms.
The ease with which the performers from the Victoria company in Belgium could shift their bodies and voices into such a variety of shapes in White Star, for example, was a reminder of how, for actors, the ante keeps rising.
The kind of seamless relationship between intention and execution that you get in Teale's writing and direction of Brontë or in Isaev and Semchenko's use of their own personae in White Cabin can create a gripping coherence.
But the shift does raise stark questions, for Irish theatre in particular. Does it stick with the textual strengths that have so far represented its major contribution to world theatre, and risk isolation from the rest of Europe? And if it decides to go with the flow, can it keep its head above water?
We are not, after all, notably rich in charismatic auteur-directors, and the conditions in which they emerge - long rehearsal periods, among others - scarcely exist within the economicsof the Irish theatre.
Conall Morrison, for example, would be a prime candidate, and his Hamlet showed much of his dramatic intelligence and restless resourcefulness. But it also had the underdeveloped feel of a piece that needed another month in the rehearsal room in order to fulfil its admirable ambitions.
This is why Keegan-Dolan's The Bull was so important. It stepped confidently beyond a text so rudimentary that it would scarcely be worth reading for its own sake. It fused dance and drama so well that some people could complain that it had too little dance and some that it had too much.
It placed a heavy emphasis on the multiple skills of its actors and on the integration of design and action. Like much of the new theatre, it managed to move its audience to love or hatred but left few indifferent. It used vulgarity to attack what Keegan-Dolan obvious sees as a vulgar Irish society.
It was thus both part of an international trend and so clearly local in its resonance that one suspects that it may not make as much impact beyond these shores. It may not present the only answer to the current dilemma of Irish theatre, but at least it asked the question with skill and eloquence.
