A social conscience runs in The Family
FORMED in 2008, THEATREclub has rapidly become one of the most regarded companies in Irish theatre.
Founding members Grace Dyas, Doireann Coady and Shane Byrne — all in their early 20s — are graduates of Dublin Youth Theatre and share the devising and directing of new material. They have delivered provocative, socially-conscious shows marked by a coherent artistic identity. Buoyed by a madcap style and unsettling energy, their work is also disarmingly sincere. Among their most-feted pieces are Rough, Heroin, and THEATREclub Stole Your Clock Radio What the Fuck You Gonna Do About It?
THEATREclub have impressed not just the Dublin theatre circle, but have also sought out broader audiences. Revitalising theatre for audiences other than just the ‘knowing’ middle class is a central part of the young company’s agenda. The subject matter of their work — sexuality, drug use, youth, family — is deeply responsive to its immediate political and cultural environment.
“We like to say we’re ‘socially-engaged’,” says Dyas. “It’s work about us and the people and things around us. It is politically-engaged, but I would rather emphasise the social, because it’s more about the people who come to see it, and those people affecting change, than about our work trying to change the political structure.”
At the nub, what THEATREclub are interested in exploring, she says, is “how people feel about what they see.”
Certainly, their best work has been marked by an aesthetic invested in feeling and affect.
Intriguingly, Dyas describes the company’s latest endeavour, The Family, as furthering the creative breakthrough of one of THEATREclub’s most complex and idiomatic works, Heroin, which won the Spirit of the Fringe award at Absolut Fringe 2010 and was revived recently for the Dublin Theatre Festival.
Visceral and unnerving, yet also curiously abstract, the piece is a potent meditation on four decades of heroin use in the capital’s inner city. Dyas and her colleagues developed it following intensive research with a men’s group at Rialto Community Drug Team.
“I was really excited by a particular style that we started to develop with Heroin and by the fact that the play seemed to have a visible social impact throughout the run, and by the diversity of people that we managed to attract to the theatre.
“So, with The Family we wanted to build on that and try to expand on it,” says Dyas. “The thing that struck me during the research we did for Heroin was the struggles and frustrations that were coming up when people spoke about their families.
“The more I looked into it, the more I became really interested in Irish family dynamics and the different situations that these have bred over the years, be it the ‘Irish mother’, or the Catholic household where no-one can say anything, or the fact that it’s completely socially acceptable for a man to drink eight pints, then go home and look after his children.
“There’s an idea of what a family should be like,” says Dyas, and this archetype of family can make “very malevolent things” happen under the strain of societal or class pressures.
“So that was what I was really interested in, formally. What happens to people when they can’t play their roles within that family? What happens to their family and to their children?”
THEATREclub is a ‘family’ in its own right. The new production features a loose ensemble of actors that the company has been bringing together over the past year and a half, among them Barry O’Connor, Lauren Larkin and Gerard Kelly, the stars of Heroin. Dyas says the development of a familiar ensemble is conscious, as is the company’s decision to work with the same creative design and production personnel.
“Because we have a common language, everything happens more quickly and more efficiently,” she says.
“But, also, people have the freedom to go wherever they want to go because we all know each other so well, so there’s no shyness.”
In addition to The Family, THEATREclub are working on History — a public arts project based around the regeneration of St Michael’s estate in Inchicore — and are also hoping to bring Heroin to Cork this summer.
“We’re seeing the heroin situation spreading around Ireland and we want to be at the heart of those conversations,” says Dyas. “We know first-hand the comfort that some people who have had those experiences have found in the show.”
* The Family runs in the Project Arts Centre, January, 13-28
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