OUTDOOR THEATRE: Theatre troupe Macnas is almost a household name in Ireland but, 15 years after its foundation, Ian Kilroy asks whether it is still a vital force, and looks at plans for a 'landmark' production this summer
To Irish people who know nothing of opera, Pavarotti is opera. To Irish people who know nothing of outdoor theatre, Macnas is it. In its 15 years of existence, the Galway-based company has managed to secure a prominent place in the hearts and minds of Irish people. Through its annual street extravaganzas, whether on the festive streets of St Patrick's Day in Dublin or on the narrow medieval walkways of summertime Galway, Macnas has secured a place of importance in national cultural life. For the vitality of an arts organisation, however, security can be a dangerous thing.
When the company was founded in 1986 by Páraic Breathnach, Ollie Jennings, Tom Conroy and Pete Sammon, Macnas was far from secure. Not only did the principal movers in the fledgling company have more ideas than money, they also had no precedent in Ireland for the kind of theatre they wanted to create. Dancing at the crossroads had been ordeal enough for Ireland in the past. Now this new company wanted to introduce an element of the Rio carnival to Irish streets. The abandon of rhythm, the sexy sway of colourful dancers, pounding drums and medieval fire displays were new to the quiet streets of Ireland and the reserved people who populated them. Before this a parade had meant someone's uncle waving from a tractor on St Patrick's Day. Macnas was pushing the boat out.
But what was the philosophy behind it all? The closest thing to a statement of artistic policy was penned by the company's founding members in 1985. It would be a community-based arts and theatre company:
"We interpret the word community in the broad popular sense. We are interested in the pastimes, games and rituals of our community in the west. We wish to create dramatic, visual spectacles using and exploring these popular forms of communal entertainments. Our spectacles will be created in the community, in large outdoor familiar spaces. We hope to have fun and have fun on a grand scale and amongst ourselves."
The idea of having fun wasn't a bad starting point for the depressed 1980s. Macnas signalled a renewal in optimism. Society in the west of Ireland had been particularly haemorrhaged by emigration. Using a Gaelic name for the company and crediting the value of a native culture was an expression of self-confidence. Through an act of creative will, Macnas would try to reinvigorate a depressed culture. It would aim to be popular, choosing as its stage the town streets where people lived their lives. This wouldn't be a literary theatre, like the one envisaged by the lofty Yeats and pursued by his successors; this would be spectacle. It would cross the boundary between art and life, becoming part of daily life through communal celebrations.
Declan Gibbons, general manager of Macnas today, defines the identity and aims of the company 15 years later in much the same terms.
"We're a performance company," he says, "and we have a very strong visual sense. The visual impact of our productions is very important. The accessibility of our productions is very important. We believe that art should be non-elitist. A lot of our audience is a traditionally non-theatregoing audience."
Gibbons speaks to me in his office in Galway's Black Box theatre. He appears the consummate arts professional. In other rooms Macnas people are working at computers. There are files containing Arts Council applications and official correspondence. Down the hall, Macteo, the commercial arm of Macnas, is run by John Crumlish. He's busy overseeing lucrative tailor-made performances for corporate events. It's a far cry from the hectic and chaotic days when theatre director Rod Goodall and that energetic Connemara man Páraic Breathnach were at the helm and the company was run out of an abandoned warehouse. The company philosophy may be the same, but times have changed.
Gibbons says that, until he left in late 1995, "Páraic was the company. He was the artistic director, manager and writer. The title he had was irrelevant really. He was involved in every aspect of the company".
It's hard to believe, but today Páraic Breathnach is unemployed, his name not yet even touted as a replacement for Kathy McArdle as director at Project. And this the man that helped re-make indoor and outdoor theatre in Ireland.
Having served his time on the Arts Council, Breathnach is now critical of the way the arts are organised in Ireland, including the way they're organised at his old company, Macnas, which he left because of burn-out after 10 years of hard work.
"Arts organisations are pushing an administrative agenda," says Breathnach, "and Macnas, unfortunately, is being run like the rest of them. Macnas is being run by administrators and there's no artistic direction. I was in favour of professionalising the arts myself, but I didn't think that all the artists were going to get sacked, which is what happened throughout arts organisations in Ireland."
After Breathnach's departure, Macnas went through a period of self-examination. As Gibbons describes it, "it involved a very painful process of finding a new direction for the company. It involved redundancies." The number of full-time staff was halved and a new company structure was put in place. Instead of having an artistic director with a unified artistic vision, Gibbons, the general manager, John Crumlish, general manager of Macteo, and Dave Donovan, co-ordinator of community projects, would essentially share responsibility for the artistic direction of the company. Macnas placed itself in the unique position for an arts organisation of having collective artistic responsibility.
Responsibility for the three strands of the company's activities - indoor theatre, commercial gigs for the corporate world, and community arts, including parades - would be overseen by Gibbons, Crumlish and Donovan, respectively, while together with the core staff and the board of directors, the wider artistic policy is now determined by the three men.
Breathnach sees the result as lacking direction, and he accuses the company of concentrating more on commercial than on artistic activities in recent times.
"Like everyone else in Ireland," says Breathnach, "Macnas has gone to bed with the corporate world. They're entertainers, jugglers, a sideshow at corporate events now. They're hardly at the cutting edge of theatre any more. Even more than ever now we need to tackle the blandness of this country and corporate Ireland. We need to re-establish our identity. I'd like to see a central vision in Macnas again."
Gibbons argues that the company does still have vision. "I think the quality of our work proves that we know what we're doing," he says.
The fact that Macteo, which Breathnach helped to set up, has been so busy in recent months is an indication of the importance of corporate work for Macnas - not only as a source of income, but also as a source of employment for its people between other gigs.
Macteo clients include companies such as Guinness, Dell, Bailey's Original Irish Cream, Aer Rianta, the GAA and IBM. In contrast to the number of corporate gigs that the company has been engaged in recently, however, is the low level of activity on the theatrical front. Not since 2000 has the public been presented with a major indoor theatrical production by the company, and that show - The Lost Days of Ollie Deasy, which won the award for Best Irish Theatre Production at the 2000 Dublin Theatre Festival - didn't follow up on its potential popularity with a major Irish tour.
Gibbons, however, disagrees that Macnas has been concentrating its energies on the commercial arm, citing numerous other activities that the company has been involved in over the past year. These include a new production, A Tall Tale, directed by the company's new performance director, Judith Higgins, for the Babaró children's arts festival; last year's St Patrick's Day parade; last summer's Galway Arts Festival parade; a community project in Fatima Mansions; and events in the towns of Cliften and Newbridge. In any case, the scale of Macnas productions means "the time-frame and the lead-in period is quite long", says Gibbons.
That long lead-in period has already begun for the company's next big production - a work that Gibbons sees as a "landmark" in the company's history. It is a show that, he believes, will reinvigorate Macnas and will, in press release parlance, "challenge and redefine traditional expectations of theatre, both as street spectacle and indoor performance".
Galwegian and Lecoq-trained performer Judith Higgins, who was appointed as performance director last April, says the show will be based on the life and legend of Grace O'Malley, better known as Granuaile, the Pirate Queen. Due to be unveiled for the 25th Galway Arts Festival in July, the show will start as street theatre in the city centre, parade to the Fisheries Field green area near the city's university, where a medieval village will have been recreated, and end in an indoor performance presented in a big top. To be directed by Coventry-based Kathi Leahy and written by former Macnas associate (and ex Galway Arts Festival director) Trish Forde, Higgins's role is to prepare the core and community performers for the venture, a brief she is already engaged in.
"I was brought in to help up the level and training of the performers," says Higgins. "It was felt that a lot of the indoor theatre was very good, but that perhaps the performance could have been better. This basically came from the Arts Council. So Macnas felt that it would be a good idea to bring someone on board."
Higgins, who directed last summer's Galway Arts Festival parade, will be concentrating her training efforts on a core group of about 20. But the plan is to recruit up to 300 non-professional adult performers from the community to flesh out the cast of Granuaile. While the community participation element of the show is something that has always been central to the Macnas philosophy, Higgins feels it may have lost emphasis in recent years. She sees the Granuaile project as something of a return to origins.
"Originally, the artistic policy was that Macnas was open to everyone," says Higgins. "That was Páraic Breathnach's message when he was here. Perhaps Macnas has strayed away from that a little, but now I really feel that we're going back to the roots of it all."
Dave Donovan, co-ordinator of community projects and the third person in the Gibbons/Crumlish/Donovan trinity, agrees that the company is in a process of re-evaluation. "I think there's definitely a requestioning of what we're about," he says. "The initial vision carried us so far, then we spent the mid- to late-1990s questioning ourselves, developing a temporary vision that got us through to where we are now. It's time to take that apart."
Donovan adds that the community participation element has been made more explicit in recent times. It was Donovan who headed recent community arts projects such as those in Clifden and in Fatima Mansions. And despite his criticisms, Breathnach is prepared to give the community work its due: "The community element of Macnas is thriving," he says. "They do that very well."
As for the company's theatrical work, its reputation may rest on the success or failure of Granuaile in July. It is already a decade since Táin, the company's highly innovative staging of the eighth-century Ulster cycle story, which won it a UNESCO Award at EXPO 92. The intervening years have seen such gems as Buile Shuibhne/Sweeny and Balor, and the emergence of a more professional and administration-based way of organising the arts. Gone are the days of interchangeable job titles and chaotic and personal management styles. Macnas has grown up. And, as John Crumlish says, "the structures have adapted to suit the times".
Those structures encompass what is now a large, established company, with an annual turnover in excess of €1 million - almost €400,000 of which comes annually from the Arts Council.
It is a company going through a process of expansion.
Macnas plans to expand physically in terms of office and workshop space, out at the back of its Black Box theatre base - a plan for which Galway Corporation has granted permission, but that requires the raising of more than €1 million. It also plans to expand in terms of theatrical ambition and in the scale of its productions - Granuaile is, as Gibbons says, "the biggest thing we've ever tried in our 15-year history".
As Macnas finds itself in its teens, the question of whether or not it can stay true to its roots in the midst of all that expansion and change remains to be answered.
•Anyone interested in joining the community cast for Granuaile should go along to the Black Box theatre, Dyke Road, Galway, at 8 p.m. on Tuesday