Culture That Made Me: Cork theatre director Tom Creed
Tom Creed will direct Giulio Cesare at Lismore Castle as part of Blackwater Valley Opera Festival. Picture: Ste Murray
Born in 1980, Tom Creed grew up on the Mardyke in Cork City. He’s a renowned theatre and opera director, with a particular focus on new work. His productions have performed in over 30 cities around the world. He was festival director of Cork Midsummer Festival from 2011 to 2013.
He directs G.F. Händel’s Giulio Cesare in the grounds of Lismore Castle, Co Waterford, as part of this year’s Blackwater Valley Opera Festival, 27 May – 3 June. See: www.blackwatervalleyopera.ie.
When I was 17, I was brought by school to see the original production of Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh with Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh acting in the Half Moon Club.
I grew up in Cork, went to school and university in Cork, and was involved in youth theatre in Cork, so Corcadorca wasn’t so distant to us, but seeing Disco Pigs was like a lightning bolt – the fact it was possible for theatre to be like this and for it to be possible for people from Cork to make theatre like this. It was hugely instrumental.
Around the same time in the late-1990s, Druid came to Cork’s Everyman with the original production of Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy. My parents brought me to see it. My father worked in Galway in the 1970s when Druid was founded, so he saw Druid’s original productions – the first Playboy of the Western World that Garry Hynes directed; and Marie Mullen aged about 20 playing an old woman in Brian Friel’s The Loves of Cass McGuire. The Leenane trilogy was something that recognisably looked like Irish theatre, with people in cottages and shawls, but it was wild. It came from the same place as contemporary comedy on TV. It was irreverent and it was terrifying.
I saw the Abbey Theatre premiere a Spanish play translated by Frank McGuinness called Barbaric Comedies in 2000 at the Edinburgh International Festival. It was scandalous. People wrote hate mail to the Abbey and rang up Liveline on RTÉ radio about it. It was directed by a radical director from Barcelona, Calixto Bieito. It was full of sex and violence. It was four or five hours long. People walked out. It opened in Edinburgh so I saw it before it came to Dublin and became a scandal. I was blown away at seeing this edgy international work done by Irish people abroad.
I remember going to the Abbey to see Fiona Shaw playing Medea in a production directed by Deborah Warner in 2000. It was electrifying, both Fiona Shaw’s acting, which was almost unimaginable, but also seeing this ancient play done as if it was contemporary drama. It had country music playing on the radio, loud noises, and flashing lights. Fiona Shaw was made a foreigner by having these great Abbey actresses in the chorus speaking Irish. That production was the beginning of me seeing how classical theatre could be contemporary theatre.
The last thing I really enjoyed on television was The Bear, which is set in a struggling restaurant in Chicago. It's great TV. The writing is great. The cast is fantastic. It's short.
There's a couple of episodes among the most stressful things I've ever watched on television in a really good way.
When I started out, a lot of theatre directors I admired – Deborah Warner, Katie Mitchell, Richard Jones and Calixto Bieito – worked at English National Opera. Typically, you go to Covent Garden to hear the most famous singers singing beautifully, whereas English National Opera aspires more to opera being theatre so directors are more experimental or contemporary in their approach work there. I discovered it was a place where I could see the work of theatre directors that inspired me.
I remember a production of Rodelinda, a Händel opera, directed by Richard Jones. Something I took away from that show was how to make sense of baroque opera – where the text is very repetitive. There's something, for example, called a da capo aria where they sing something over and over again. Actually, we repeat ourselves all the time in life. We say the same things over and over again. I learned from watching that production of Rodelinda how to make psychological and dramatic sense out of this repetition, and to find humour and to be playful with it. The production had characters doing chase sequences on treadmills and countertenors doing handstands on the treadmills. It took this historical/political story that's kind of a comedy and made it work as a contemporary drama.
Something I listen to consistently is called Bad Gays, which is a great queer history podcast about evil and complicated queer people in history – people who were pirates and serial killers and dodgy politicians and lovers of medieval kings. It's enjoyable and extremely well researched.
For me it all comes back to Tom Murphy. Conversations on a Homecoming is the best Irish play. It’s a play that's humble in terms of form, based around a group of contemporaries in a pub, in County Galway, but it has almost everything of the Irish experience in it – of home, of immigration. It’s a play about community, about dreams. Every generation of Irish actors needs a chance to do that play.
The courage, the fearlessness of Murphy, the extraordinary musicality of his language. His plays are harder, more uncompromising than other contemporary Irish playwrights.
Right now one of the most interesting international playwrights is Annie Baker, an American playwright whose work is celebrated in New York. Her plays are very quiet. They're full of silence. They're often about the quiet lives of quiet people on the edges of things. She's doing something in theatre that's uncompromising and extraordinary. People will have an opportunity to see her work in Ireland for the first time when a production of her play, Circle Mirror Transformation, at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, opens this week.
A writer I keep coming back to – who I have the privilege of working with – is Mark O’Halloran. I’ve directed Mark's last two plays, Trade and Conversations After Sex, and hopefully we'll have other projects together. Mark has an extraordinary eye for stories from the fringes and he’s able to create characters and situations that resonate with me. Working on Mark’s plays always makes me better as a director.
This sounds extremely pretentious, but it all comes back to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Everything is in Ulysses. The whole of life is in it, all the art forms. I read Ulysses at college. When you read it at that age, you read it from the point of view of Stephen. I read it again about five years ago. I realised in the intervening years I had turned into Bloom. The book has so many ways of entering into it. The immensity of it, the complexity, the humanity, the playfulness, and the way it’s simple and also difficult at the same time is something that resonates with me.
