Sculptor Daphne Wright and theatre director Johnny Hanrahan have finallyreached an understanding, they tell Belinda McKeon.
As an old-fashioned singer wallows in ballads and airs, the sound of a choir struggles out of a vast wooden vat; a small puppet echoes and mimics their hidden hum. Elsewhere, guarded by a garrulous janitor, an abandoned factory space, which churns out strange tools, useless engines, twisted implements, is elusive in its purpose and form. At a third site, a labyrinth of towering pillars is negotiated by a figure on stilts; below him, a second figure lies slumped on the floor, reluctant to rise.
This dreamlike landscape will soon become part of the waking life of Cork, with the opening on Tuesday of Croon, a co-production from two of the city's major cultural players, the Meridian Theatre Company and the National Sculpture Factory which exhibits an intriguing fusion of artistic forms. For the past two years, playwright and director Johnny Hanrahan (also the artistic director of Meridian) and Bristol-based sculptor Daphne Wright have been immersed in a collaboration of ideas and practice, exploring themes of language, location, identity and authenticity. From initial meetings held in Dublin and London emerged a series of insistent images which became the raw ingredients of a long, involved process, and which find their final form in the three-part trail around Cork city on which audiences will be brought in the week ahead.
It's not the first time theatre-goers in that city have been taken outside the conventional space - both the National Sculpture Factory and Corcadorca Theatre Company have staged site-specific and outdoor installation work in recent years. But Croon, says Hanrahan, represents a different effort to connect.
"In the shows that other companies have done, the energy of the event is built around the energy of a massive group of people," he says. "So there is a sense of something very large-scale. And my intent, from the beginning, was to have very intimate experiences. There is only one performer in two of the spaces. They are very close to you."
While the tighter physical constraints of the sculptural form fired Hanrahan's imagination, however, it was the sociability and the diversity of the theatrical experience which excited Wright.
"What appeals to me about the project is the journey of the audience, their being ushered from one space to another, the chat going on from space to space," she says. "That idea of a dialogue from your audience that's kept herded together."
The relationship between Hanrahan and Wright is by no means founded on neat, mutual agreement. It is clear that for every idea they pursued together with enthusiasm, there has been another over which they wrangled for weeks. Though Hanrahan has in the past collaborated with other artists, the process of translation involved in working with Wright forced him to rethink the idiom of his own art form.
"If you don't have a shorthand with somebody, it takes more time to make the decisions; you think you know what the person means, but it is only when you see the result that you fully know," he explains. "What's different is not having the inside track on what is meant by a given terminology. I know a good bit about sculpture, having been married to a sculptor [Vivienne Roche] for 20 years, and having been involved in setting up the National Sculpture Factory. But this is the first time I have had to really engage with it, as something affecting my own work."
For Wright, the challenge was the use of narrative. "Johnny always talked about the narrative having a beginning, a middle and an end," she says. "And I have been much more interested in the circular form, in bringing an audience back to where they started from, to the point where that, perhaps, became difficult for them. And quite frustrating for me."
Yet Hanrahan was also frustrated, as they devised the piece, by the emergence of that sort of literary narrative. "All the time, what I found in the back of my mind was the question 'what's this about, conventionally speaking'," he says. "It was a question that I resisted trying to answer, because I think it's limiting, and reductive, and problematic in a sense. I wanted to do this project because I have collaborated with a lot of people from within the performing arts, all of whom have a common language, and a familiar set of established procedures. And that works well, but there is also a danger of becoming formulaic and of your imagination becoming set into particular channels. And to resist that was the challenge. You know the way people say about a play that the drama is in the language? Well, in this case, there's a huge amount of drama, a tension, in the objects and materials, and you don't have to do a huge amount, because if you do, you will actually unbalance that drama."
Just as Hanrahan has found his writing drained of some of its literalness, so has Wright's contribution been much less object-centred than in her previous sculptural work. The huge vat in which the choir is incarcerated, the industrial wasteland of the factory, the mocking puppets beneath the stilt-walker - all of these are sculptures, but of sound and atmosphere rather than wood, clay or bronze. Both artists have worked together towards the creation of resonances, and it has been from the sacrifices, as much as from the gains, that Croon has ultimately emerged.
"If you just say, well, this is my area, and that's yours, you can get things done a lot faster," says Wright. "But what comes out, in terms of layers of meaning, is very surface, very impoverished. And I think that was one of the things that we both stuck in our heels about, even if it meant putting things off, and cancelling, and postponing. But it definitely leads to a deeper, more saturated end result."
Croon runs from February 3rd to 7th, starting from the Everyman Palace Theatre, MacCurtain Street, Cork, with two performances nightly, at 8 p.m. and 8.45 p.m. The audience will be guided from location to location. Booking: 021- 450 1673.