AT this time of year, theatre companies throughout the State are anxiously awaiting news of their 1997 Arts Council allocations.
The Blue Raincoat Theatre in Sligo is no exception, but its actors, directors and technical team could be forgiven for a greater degree of nervousness than most.
They are seeking a big increase in their grant, from £30,000 to £94,000, and have correspondingly big ideas about what to do with the money.
The company was set up five years ago by Niall Henry and Malcom Hamilton, who used a £5,000 development grant to convert a former abattoir into a 100 seat theatre called the Factory Performance Space.
Built around a core group of about 12 people, it has grown by leaps and bounds since its modest beginnings. Last year it won extensive critical acclaim with productions such as Shakespeare's Hamlet and Once Time by Mr Hamilton, the company's writer in residence.
If all goes well this year will see the company undertake its most ambitious bound yet: a new and very physical interpretation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. After it opens in Sligo, the plan is to take it on Blue Raincoat's first nationwide tour and to London's Riverside Studios.
The company owes much to the kind of accentuated movement pioneered by the Theatre de Complicite in Britain. But it is developing its own style out of the tension between traditional theatre here, with its emphasis on the spoken word, and a range of vocal and physical techniques imported from the Continent.
The company is also examining the relevance of its productions, both to audiences in the Sligo area and to the wider national audience it hopes to cultivate. Indeed, its submission to the Arts Council is called Towards Relevance in Theatre.
"Perhaps we take our audiences more seriously than most of our contemporaries in that we seek to generate a very high quality debate on the relevance of our work," it says.
"That is the sole reason why it is now time to extend and develop our audience base. Our artistic debate has for the most part concerned a few thousand people in the Sligo region. As such it has been highly specific and highly defined."
Mr Hamilton says its experimental focus has not prevented it from developing a strong relationship with the local community.
"It's a little bit different from having a theatre company in your midst that fulfils that social function. `We've got a good theatre company and it's good for town, good for tourism'."
Blue Raincoat is not the only western company experimenting with Shakespeare. Macnas in Galway has just undertaken a rare foray into conventional theatre with a programme based on snippets of the Bard's work.
The company is bringing it to schools in and around the city between now and the end of February. With love as its theme, complete with extravagant hand gestures and the obligatory sword fight, it hopes to cause a few flutters in adolescent hearts in the run up to St Valentine's Day.
They played to a rapt audience from the "Jes" in Galway on Friday, complete with pizzicato on the violin to symbolise the plucking of heart strings, and a rich torrent of language from the normally mute Macnas players.