All together now

Michael Harding couldn’t be more fulsome in his praise for the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company. Partly because – although he’s had years of having prestigious, provocative plays like The Misogynist and Amazing Grace grace the stages of theatres such as the Abbey – Harding finally feels he’s found his theatrical home. The Blue Raincoat Theatre Company are currently touring Ireland with his latest play, Birdie Birdie, and it would not be stretching a metaphor to suggest that the playwright himself is flying high – almost irrespective of the commercial success of his current work, or otherwise. But what’s so great about Blue Raincoat?

“They are a phenomenal ensemble company, and it is so important that this message get out there for other writers like me,” he enthuses. “One thing that’s really important is that they have their own theatre. That means, for example, when we rehearsed this play we rehearsed for eight weeks, not the usual four weeks, as it can be with other theatres. Better still, we rehearsed in the space where the play was to be staged. Whereas in the Abbey, even, you’re up in Marlborough Street rehearsing, trying to imagine what the theatre will be like. You get into the theatre three days before the show! Also, when you rehearse with Blue Raincoat, their lighting guy is there, the sound guy is there, everything adds to that feeling that we are all an ensemble, putting a play together. It really is totally inspiring.”
Even more of a blessing, according to Harding, is the fact that Blue Raincoat are in tune with his own ever-developing aesthetic. Feeling he has gone as far as he could on “the story” – namely linear, narrative plays – he wants to explore more impressionistic and surreal work, and the theatre company are “more than willing” to go there with him.
“When people say they are bored with conservative theatre, they are right,” he suggests. “We need to stretch things. Too often, people are still doing plays as if they were psychological stories from the ’60s. It’s terrible! Whereas, now, I want to write a play as if it were more like a song: let it roll out, let it happen and see where that takes us. Now when I do that in other cases I have been told ‘Tone that down a little there, Michael – pull back a little there, Michael, don’t be quite so wild’, whereas Blue Raincoat will be as wild as you want them to be, if they feel it works! It’s wonderful. When I started writing Birdie Birdie it was just bits of ideas, like poems, and they’d take it in workshops and turn it into something so I felt, ‘This is beautiful. I’ve fallen in love with these people!’”
Harding also heaps praise on Niall Henry, the director of Birdie Birdie.
“No other director has given me as much, as a writer,” he says. “Because he has skill, craft and one key thing – imagination. So I found in those four weeks workshopping that I could really stretch myself imaginatively, and the more you did the better they were able to perform it. So I can’t believe my luck in finding Blue Raincoat. I think they are a major force to be reckoned with.”
Harding’s most recent theatrical endeavour was Talkin’ Through His Hat – which he still performs – a one man show about Jonathan Swift. However, Birdie Birdie “has no single point of view,” he claims. So what is it about?
“It’s trying to write music for four voices,” he replies. “The four actors are beautiful performers, in terms of their bodies and voices, so I’ve written a ‘score’ for them which reflects something of where I am, psychologically, at the moment. At the moment we all seem to be caught in some kind of claustrophobia. So addressing that claustrophobia is the subject of my play. There definitely is a feeling that we are all in hell now. But what we must realise is that when we go to make a new mythology it has to be about simply minding, or taking care of each other. And that, as I say, is what this play is all about.”

Blue Raincoat Theatre Company are currently on a nationwide tour with Birdie Birdie