Stage: End Of A Century

Annie Ryan sure as hell has learned that timing and casting can be fortuitous. Last weekend The Corn Exchange production of Dublin By Lamplight opened complete with Mark O’ Halloran, who chose to be there rather than at the glitzy Irish Film and Television Awards ceremony, where he was nominated for various awards for Adam and Paul.

But Ryan obviously doesn’t take a hierarchical view of actors in terms of their new-found celebrity, and is fulsome in her praise of all the actors in this production. But first, as winners of Best Production 2003 for Mud at the Irish Times ESB Irish Theatre Awards, and after similar success for their Commedia dell’Arte production of Lolita, what compelled Ryan to go for this tale of ‘the filth and fury of Dublin in 1904’?
“We devised it ourselves, with the six actors and the starting point was that we wanted to do a piece in our Commedia style but with a bigger ensemble than last time which was three!” she says. “And we wanted loads of locations and loads of characters and to use the idea of transformation so that characters change before your eyes.
“It’s very stylised, using extreme character images, white face masks, extravagant make-up. Because we are trying to engage people, and for me, theatre shouldn’t look like it should be on TV instead. So with all that in mind we played around for about a month in the Spring with the actors and tried a whole bunch of story lines and eventually this story emerged and we eventually gravitated from working with various things like Dubliners and The Master and Marguerite to this theatrical crowd in 2004.”
That process of emergence probably was influenced, says Ryan, by “all the centenary celebrations earlier this year” such as those for the Abbey Theatre and Ulysses.
“So our idea is to focus on this bunch of people who are trying to start the National Theatre,” she continues. “Before Yeats! So there is a little bit of rewriting of history here. But it is quite light in the beginning and then slowly it changes into something darker.”
Here Ryan clearly can’t refrain from praising her fellow collaborators in this production.
“Louis Lovett, who’d done a lot of work with Barrabas, plays our main guy, a director and he is an extraordinary performer, an all rounder, a beautiful singer and very gifted physical performer,” she says. “And Mark plays a has-been actor called Martin Wallace, along with other characters. This is Janet Moran’s first time with us but she’d done loads of work for the Abbey and other companies.
“Then Karen Egan has her own cabaret work which is probably what’s she’s well known for. And Fergal McElherron is a very gifted character actor and we also have Mike Carberry who is quite beautiful in terms of movement and so on. So it really is a great cast to work with.”
What about the director, Annie Ryan herself? If I was to ask any of the actors what they thought of her what does Annie imagine they might say to that question?
“I honestly don’t know what they would say,” she says, laughing. ‘But I do have a reputation for being tougher than I am. Yet I don’t think they are finding me too tough! But I think that’s the effect motherhood has had on me. It’s made me softer.”
But does Annie still get her gun when actors aren’t delivering!
“I don’t know if I do!” she responds. “But whatever they would say about me, they really have been an amazingly supportive, creative cast. And the truth is that we have made Dublin By Lamplight together. It’s different from the cliched autocratic director thing. It really is more ensemble work and that’s part of what makes it so great for me.”

Dublin by Lamplight is running in the Project, Space Upstairs 39 East Essex Street Dublin 2. www.project.ie