Blue Raincoat Theatre Company and its Influences

Rhona Trench

Not everyone knows how I killed old Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade. [pause]. But first, it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney, for it was he who first knocked old Mathers down, by giving him a great blow on the neck with a special bicycle pump which he had manufactured himself out of a hollowed iron bar.⁸⁵

As the lights come up, the audience can see in shadow a man facing them, drawing them into a monologue of murder, betrayal, and intrigue.⁸⁶ The light rises and the protagonist, known as Man and played by Sandra O Malley, is shown standing at the centre of a giant open book, literally positioned within its narrative. For more than seven minutes Man charts his tale of entrapment. The sequence ends in darkness with the sounds of bicycle chains and pedals, the movement of wheels, an eerie whistling, the noise of ticking clocks, and the blowing of a wind, interrupted by a man calling out: ‘Who’s there? Who’s there? Who’s there?’⁸⁷ Then silence.

So begins Blue Raincoat Theatre Company’s production of The Third Policeman, an adaptation by Jocelyn Clarke of the novel by Flann O’Brien, which was first performed at the company’s home theatre The Factory, Sligo in October 2007. In the production, spoken narrative is important for the telling of the story, but the physical body – choreographed and energized – is central to the production. This essay examines the significance of the text in Blue Raincoat’s production of The Third Policeman, but also points out the importance of the visual features of the production, arguing that Blue Raincoat’s innovations stem from their long history of negotiation with the conventions of Irish theatre. Those negotiations involve a variety of issues: acting styles, dramaturgical influences, directorial lines, the representation of the west of Ireland, and something that Anthony Roche has described as ‘the principle of creative contradiction, of speaking against received narratives’, which ‘ensures the ongoing vitality of Irish drama.’⁸⁸

Blue Raincoat was founded in 1991 by Malcolm Hamilton, who became the company’s Writer-in-Residence, and Niall Henry, who became Artistic Director. Henry recalls how ‘Malcolm asked me to start the theatre. He specifically came to Paris … not to study what I was doing for five years at mime school in Paris, but to ask me to start the company and to come back with him’ to Ireland.⁸⁹ Without knowing Henry well, Hamilton believed that he would want to pursue (with no financial backing and against reason) the ideal of staging work in new ways, placing the body as central to the making of meaning. Furthermore, Hamilton believed that Henry might be attracted to the idea of founding the first professional theatre company in his hometown of Sligo.

In June 1993, the company moved into the refurbished Factory Space, which was officially opened by Marcel Marceau, with the then Minister for Arts Michael D. Higgins as guest of honour. As an artistic hub of Sligo’s community, the Factory provides a venue for workshops, exhibitions, music, and poetry recitals.

The Factory has a history of being associated with blood and death. Used as a slaughterhouse in the 1980s, it remains a place where things are dismembered and re-processed into something else. This notion of the performance space as abattoir represents figuratively Blue Raincoat’s rejection of the theatrical style that dominated Irish theatre in the 1980s and 1990s – plays which, in Eamonn Jordan’s words, represent, ‘a surrender to and sundering of … pastoral idylls’.⁹⁰ The rejection of that approach was based on the company’s dedication to physical theatre. That approach had local and international contexts.

The local context is worth emphasising. The activities of Blue Raincoat were based firmly on a number of theatrical forces particular to the northwest of Ireland: a fully-charged political environment, a diversity of approaches to theatrical practice, a vibrant tradition of community theatre. As was the national experience, emigration from the northwest was also a key feature in the day-to-day lives of its people. Eamonn Jordan reminds us that ‘at a time heavily dominated by the Catholic Church, Ireland was in part a world of suspicion and little compromise’⁹¹, while Christopher Murray writes of the 1980s that ‘The country was beset by changes of government, ever-rising unemployment, a new wave of emigration and a strong sense of entropy.’⁹² Blue Raincoat emerged from that environment, and its continued existence owes something to its founders’ determination to overcome some of the limitations mentioned by Jordan and Murray. Hence, the founding of Blue Raincoat began as a struggle against multiple challenges: the cultural construction of the west of Ireland, audience expectation, the dominance within Irish theatre of plays that employ linear and realistic representations of action and characterization, the dominance of text-based approach to Irish theatre, a resistance to European influences, and the difficult economic and social circumstances of the time.

Blue Raincoat’s early role models were other Irish companies with a strong local emphasis: Druid Theatre Company, founded in 1975 in Galway, and Red Kettle Theatre Company, founded in 1986 in Waterford. Druid has always placed great importance on the idea of ensemble, because it originally involved a core group of theatre-makers and actors, who trained together and developed their style over several years. Druid believes that individual artistic careers achieve meaning through long-term commitment to an evolving company of peers. Indeed, in 1991, Niall Henry phoned Garry Hynes to ask her advice on Druid’s pioneering work as an independent theatre company in the west of Ireland.

Red Kettle was originally founded on the idea of an ‘Arts for All Movement’, whereby community theatre would embrace all ages and all kinds of arts, including poetry, painting, sculpture, plays and writing.⁹³ Blue Raincoat was influenced by this idea, and now plays a key role in the development of community access to and participation in the arts in Sligo, providing a broad range of professional arts-related support for community and cultural programming within its immediate region.

Moving from the local to the international context, Blue Raincoat’s interest in corporeal mime offers a particularly useful example of the kinds of influences that the company has absorbed from overseas. Its practice is derived from the work of Jacques Copeau, Marcel Marceau, and Étienne Decroux. The central principles and philosophies of those men are observable in Blue Raincoat productions in many ways: physical agility, mask work, ensemble acting, mime, the ways in which thought shapes movement, and many other methods of thinking about the expressive possibilities of the human body.

The work of these practitioners is worth exploring in some detail. Jacques Copeau, founder of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 1913, was an influential French theatre director, critic, producer, actor, and dramatist, who despised what he saw as the crude commercialism of the stage of his day. His fascination with the actor inclined him towards the possibilities of actor-training, his approach to which was based on the hope that the actor could be encouraged to return to instinctive artistic creation. His approach demanded that actors commit to strict timetables of rigorous daily exercise including athletics, dance, games, movement, improvisation, and silence. Importantly, actors were challenged with exercising in slow movement. Copeau believed that this technique was more sincere, allowing actors to access a simplicity of movement where external action is matched by state of mind.

Decroux recalls the demands on the actor at Copeau’s school, ‘where students were stripped of costumes, props, of text, their faces veiled statements, allowing no doubt in the audience’s mind as to what the character was thinking or feeling.’⁹⁴ Thomas Leabhart notes: ‘From this central idea [of covering the actor’s face, and an awareness of] the importance of the core of the actor rather than his extremities, modern mime was born.’⁹⁵ This peeling back of all of the theatrical elements except those absolutely necessary to the performance allowed the actors to achieve a greater productivity and effectiveness.

Copeau’s repositioning of the actor to the instinctual core essential for acting was carried forward into the work of Decroux, whereby the actor is essential to the definition of theatre and vital to the stage. In moments of silence between words, it is the actor who develops the play’s meaning. For Decroux, mime was not a performing art form that serviced the spoken theatre, but an end in itself: ‘Theatre is the actor’s art’ [l’art d’ácteur], he stated, placing all other dramatic elements extraneous to it: ‘Music, dance and song are but occasional visitors [to the stage].’⁹⁶

But while Copeau abhorred stage scenery unless it was minimal and symbolic, Decroux believed that scenery, lighting and sound could be used, even if they were not essential to the theatre. In ‘My Definition of Theatre’ he reiterates the idea that the actor holds the power. All scenery and props were banned from Decroux’s first ten years of actor training because he felt that the actor could give the impression of (for example) staircases through using the body, creating the illusion of being on a different level from other actors ‘when in reality they are side by side.’⁹⁷

For Marceau, however, the illusion is seen in the object rather than in the actor. Marceau’s mime radically shifted away from Decroux’s teaching, tending more towards styles of pantomime, which he developed through his ‘Bip sketches’; he also dedicated more attention to performances rather than teaching or writing. These differences saw Decroux and Marceau go their separate ways.

While Marceau officially opened the Factory for Blue Raincoat in 1993, he is the least influential of these three practitioners in terms of the company’s movement style. Yet it must be acknowledged that Marceau’s fame raised the profile of mime on an international scale, making pathways for Decroux’s teaching to reach a worldwide audience, as well as raising the profile of codified movements of the body.

Drawing on these practitioners’ work, Blue Raincoat came to be known as a ‘physical theatre’ company from the mid-1990s. The ‘physical theatre’ Blue Raincoat was making in 1991 attempted to embrace movement and visual design, but was inspired and driven by Henry’s training: he trained at L’École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris Marcel Marceau from 1984 to 1987. Max Decroux, Étienne Decroux’s son, taught Henry for one of those years. There, he met another significant teacher, Corinne Soum, who had studied mime with Étienne Decroux, and who became Decroux’s assistant, sharing in his research, teaching, and creations. She was the professor of Corporeal Mime at the École de Mimodrame Marcel Marceau for seven years, travelling the world as an invited lecturer and writer on Decroux and corporeal mime. After Henry completed his training at the École de Mimodrame in 1987, he spent two years at Corinne Soum and Steve Wasson’s Theatre de l’Ange Fou and the International School of Corporeal Mime in Paris.

In the early 1990s, Blue Raincoat’s notion of ‘physical theatre’ involved a certain kind of political intervention. Henry states that ‘in Irish theatre, representations of the body have fallen short.’⁹⁸ His aim was to incorporate mime and movement into the shape of his productions – an aim that was directly related to his training in Paris. Blue Raincoat’s choice of plays in the company’s earliest days reveals Hamilton and Henry’s sense of the need to (re)present familiar theatre in new ways. Thomas Kilroy’s 1986 play Double Cross was their first production, being staged in 1991. That was followed in 1993 by Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark (1961), and Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979); Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907) was staged in 1994. The company’s productions of well-known plays deliberately flouted conventional approaches to such work, exploring those plays’ treatment of communal experience, and refusing to present them as representative of the ‘real world’. In general, however, the early productions remained heavily dependent on text, because the notion of mime and movement as central to making meaning was a one-person project – Niall Henry’s – which could not be fully realized. At that time, the company performers had not been trained, though all would do so at different stages and for different durations at the Theatre de l’Ange Fou and the International School of Corporeal Mime in London or Paris.⁹⁹

Blue Raincoat initially promoted a peculiar kind of anarchy in their approach to costume, sound, and lighting. Class and sexual politics as represented through the body became the primary modes of experience and presentation. There was a sense in the early productions of an urgency and impatience that bordered on the reckless. Double Cross, for instance, is a history play set during the Second World War, which concerns loyalty, treason, and deception, with a sense of theatricality interwoven into the text. The notion of ‘the double’ and of ‘doubling’ calls attention to the inherent performativity of the play. Henry’s objective with this production was to stage it as a form of resistance to typical representations of how the body communicates in Irish theatre. The betrayal in the work – the ‘double cross’ of the title – was presented as the body’s power to communicate betrayal before cognitive issues of psychology and language.

Political identity accentuated the importance of the body in Blue Raincoat productions. The ideas of conflicting expressions of betrayal, killing, and loyalty present in Double Cross were extended in the company’s subsequent work, in such productions as Westport Murders, written by Brendan Ellis and staged in 1995. The play was set against the background of rapid social changes wrought by the first phases of the Celtic Tiger period. The story was dramatized around issues of brutality, and was planned as a political and historical drama that aimed to have an impact on the conscience of the audience, who were asked to consider their sense of moral responsibility.

In 1996, the company staged a production of Hamlet, which dramatized the protagonist’s moral integrity by contrasting it with his struggle for vengeance. Blue Raincoat’s political approach to power and corruption involved the use of colour-coded fabric costumes to emphasize characterization, and the construction of a ten-foot high metal scaffolding grid around the stage. This increased the level of energy, anger, and conflict in their production.

Authenticity was and still is a key component of Blue Raincoat’s practice, based around the idea of identity. Bernadette Sweeney points out that ‘Irish authenticity has become an economic tool in creating a market for things Irish, a means of ironic self-reflection, and a seemingly limitless source of artistic inspiration, acted upon or reacted against but ever present.’¹⁰⁰ The authentic body allows for a freedom to express the multi-layered nature of human possibilities. For Charles Taylor, authenticity involves the individual’s own created or discovered (not by imposition) understanding of the self. Taylor believes that true authenticity also involves recognition of and openness to what he calls ‘horizons of significance’ — certain larger contexts within which humans exist.¹⁰¹ Paradoxically, the individual self can only be understood in relation to others who provide a sense of personal connection with a larger political, social, or religious source of meaning. Taylor’s exploration of ‘the politics of identity’ is bound up with ideas of dignity, recognition, and authenticity. With this in mind, Blue Raincoat’s geographical location on the northwestern edge of Connaught, Ireland, and Europe means that there is a certain kind of marginality intrinsic to the company’s identity. At a unique position in relation to the rest of the world, Blue Raincoat could perform new and well-known texts in different, innovative, and authentic ways.

The authentic body also had implications for the performance processes, which are based on the notion of ensemble. ‘Ensemble’ for Blue Raincoat has come to mean an attempt to rid themselves of the ancient division of labour between directors, actors, designers, technicians, and other practitioners. Although all company performers trained in the physical discipline of corporeal mime, they all have different levels of skill and talent (as would be true in any group of people). Henry allows ideas to unfold, and his decisions about which ideas will remain determine the overall shape of the production.

For Henry, then, the actor is central to the rehearsal process, in terms of how the body can tell the story. The company also executes a strict and self-disciplined daily routine, involving a physical and vocal warm up before rehearsal. Warm-ups typically depend on the choice of production being staged. In the case of The Third Policeman, that play is text-heavy and involves a range of movement, so there was a balance between the physical and the vocal for that production, with the warm-up lasting at least one hour before rehearsals began. The warm-up can be carried out individually or as a group, depending on which aspect of the production the performers are working on.

However, the company’s use of the actor is not its only method of creating meaning in performance. The mise en scène of Blue Raincoat productions demonstrates how important design is as an expressive element of the stage. Yet the actors must draw on their own resources first, in an attempt to reach the audience. In order to achieve this goal, few props or stage scenery are used in the early stages of rehearsal. Unlike Decroux, Henry then incorporates set, lights, sound, and music into the rehearsal process. Together with the production manager Peter Davey, the designers are also usually present for most of the rehearsals. They attend rehearsals at the beginning of the process when much of the discussions and workshops take place, but their design realizations (sound/ lighting/ projection) begin to emerge collaboratively with the performers’ work later in the process.

Improvisation, part of the training at the mime schools, is central to the rehearsal process of all Blue Raincoat productions. Performers respond to one another in the context of the visual tapestry of the performance, and do not specifically react to the story or the portrayal of characters themselves. The use of improvisation, based on small but significant parts of the text, frees the actors from being tied into specifics and allows them to work with a feeling or idea and not a literary aspect of the text.

Sometimes, the justification for a physical movement is not found straightaway; rather, it comes from a sense, a broad notion or a moment in the text that is improvised and work-shopped. From this process, Henry selects and challenges a physical movement or phrase that corresponds to the purpose inspired by the text. However, such direction is not always easy to communicate, because, as actor Kellie Hughes points out, ‘to articulate a system of direction in language loses a lot of how and what actually takes place in the rehearsal process.’¹⁰²

The ensemble company retains five productions in repertoire. These are performed and toured nationally and internationally while the group develops new works. All members work out of the Factory on an annual basis, making their living from the company. The actors’ formal training in corporeal mime means that they strive to express abstract and universal ideas and emotions through codified movements of the entire body, especially the trunk. The primary feature of Blue Raincoat’s performance ensemble means that, as a permanent group, their practice stems from a shared language and aesthetic. The group has performed together over a long period, using the same production crew for most of their shows.¹⁰³ As a regularly funded ensemble theatre company, their performance style is constantly evolving, shaped by the group from within – while from outside, external factors such as the economy, society, and technology significantly affect the operation and role of the ensemble.¹⁰⁴ Thus, Blue Raincoat’s education programme, which aims to teach, train, and influence others in the company’s corporeal style of acting, has also become a necessary part of its remit, especially in terms of generating an income, given that the Arts Council has significantly cut Blue Raincoat’s funding since 2002.¹⁰⁵

While Blue Raincoat is aware of what being an ensemble theatre company in Ireland means, it is also aware of what it is not. Critics, academics, practitioners and students have a tendency to refer to work as ‘physical theatre’ when it does not fit into a category of literary dramatic theatre or contemporary dance.¹⁰⁶ The difficulty in defining such work comes from the multiplicity of its origins, such as puppetry, clowning, mime, contemporary dance, corporeal mime, and commedia dell’arte. As Dympna Callery notes, ‘many current practitioners resent the way their work is categorized as physical theatre,’¹⁰⁷ placing very different kinds of physical work for performance into one category. Yet, what can be argued is that physical theatre pursues the realization of theatre primarily through the physical body; the actor is placed as a significant creator of meaning with his/her body as the text. What Marceau refers to as ‘body miming, gestures and attitudes’, was a way to give theatre its own art form which had previously been located in dance.¹⁰⁸ Practitioners and their companies might be classified as ‘mime’, ‘physical’, ‘physically based’, ‘movement-based’ or ‘visual theatre’ – all labels which cannot account for styles that blur or cross the lines between some or all of these forms of practice. Franc Chamberlain’s term ‘post-physical theatre’, as a way of catching the diversity of what is happening in the performance world in the wake of the physical theatre adventure, comes closer to describing the move away from the physical in the generic sense. As Chamberlain notes, post-physical theatre can ‘go beyond the binary of physical/non-physical’, yet it offers a way of escaping the confines of the physical.¹⁰⁹ He adds that there is ‘no fundamental rejection of the dramatic in either physical or post physical performance.’¹¹⁰

Blue Raincoat’s idea of mime and movement has multiple angles and directions – spillages and crossovers, connections which allow for theatre companies like them, branded as they have been for various reasons as ‘physical theatre’, to process new evolutions of their style. Certainly Decroux’s principles of training as developed by Corinne Soum have had long-term influences on Blue Raincoat’s orientation.

The Third Policeman

In the company’s 2007 production of The Third Policeman, Sandra O’ Malley’s act of donning a hat and pursuing the opening monologue as a ‘grotesque clown-like figure’ helped Henry and Clarke see that the protagonist was trapped in the narrative.¹¹¹ This, they felt, was the primary tangible action that emerged from the company’s visit to Annaghmakerrig, the artists’ retreat in Co. Monaghan, where four members of the cast went with Henry and Clarke for one week to work on The Third Policeman. Following this insight, the improvisation of bicycle movements helped in the exploration of rhythm, sound, and visuals within the text, pushing the performers to work with each other and to align their idiosyncratic movement choices to the overall pattern of the performance. If aspects of characters emerged, they were filed away or put aside initially in favour of the shape of the performance.

Using the bicycle movement, Henry presented Decroux’s three elements at the actor’s disposal, as the means of dramatic expression – the design, the intensity, and the rhythm of a movement or movements in bringing shape to the ideas of the visual form. The design of the movement allows the actor to create an image in space and to position his or her body into what Anne Dennis calls a ‘stage picture’, communicating specific ideas to the audience.¹¹² The intensity of movement seeks to focus the audience on what is important, while the rhythm controls the level at which the audience will take in the action.

As adapted for the stage by Jocelyn Clarke, The Third Policeman tells the story of Man, the narrator, who charts his tale of entrapment in a never-ending ‘hell’ caused by his part in the murder of Phillip Mathers. John Divney, Man’s accomplice, inveigles his way into Man’s home after Man’s parents disappear. Divney prolongs his stay by promising that he will reveal the whereabouts of Mathers’ cash box. Established at the start as a somewhat ‘normal’ world, the environment of the play soon becomes remote. An unusual village police force is entangled in the story, with depictions of bicycles as half-humans and humans as half-bicycles being added. This hellish world has no rules or laws; linear order is abandoned and language is destabilized as the tale unfolds.

In a scene in which Man calls to the police station in search of his American gold watch (a watch he pretends to own because he thinks it will help him find out when he will find the Black Box) he meets Policeman Pluck (Ciarán McCauley) who is in conversation with Gilaney (Fiona McGeown) about finding Gilaney’s missing bicycle. Man is asked to partake in the search and dutifully assists. All three either ‘cycle’ on their bicycles or walk on a ‘journey’ round the ‘village’ where clues of the missing bicycle are found. The oversized book centre-stage offers the actors a route around and over which to travel. One of Pluck’s conversations on this journey informs Man of the ‘Atomic Theory’, reminding the audience of the half-human half-bicycle hypothesis.

PLUCK. Did you ever study Atomics when you were a lad?

MAN. No.

PLUCK. That is a very serious defalcation but all the same I will tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical figures too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again all the time on the go. These diminutive gentlemen are called atoms. Do you follow me intelligently?¹¹³

The movement of atoms described by Pluck is used as a metaphor for the actors’ movements on stage. Following Decroux’s intensity of movement, the cyclical nature of the world of The Third Policeman and the sometimes haphazard movement of atoms, reflected by the bicycle movements, are repeatedly experienced through different levels of tension, directing the audience’s attention to the nightmarish world of entrapment. The rhythm of the bicycle movements alternates between a slow and fast pace, presented at times fleetingly and at other times in a long and focussed way, controlling the level at which the audience will take in the action.

The production’s set designer Jamie Varten matched the verbal extravagance and movement with a visual opulence. Varten’s vision of the surreal, which he associated with the original novel, was supported by Michael Cummins’s lighting design: tiny streams of light poured through the many holes in the back wall, creating a starry effect and shining towards the audience. The back wall also contained a moon-dial, a window high up on the right, a barred door somewhat like a jail door, and high up on the left of the back wall, hung a bicycle. Joe Hunt created an original musical score for the production, using various noises of bicycle chains and pedals, the movement of wheels, eerie whistling, ticking clocks, and the blowing of a wind as the machine-age and technology pronounced the onslaught of communal identity and raised issues of alienation and estrangement. The overall design took on the qualities and manner of the unstable universe of the play, showing the audience that humankind does not know its world, and revealing the ways in which science competes with the imagination in order to explore the mysteries of existence. The black box space in the Factory allowed the designers to emphasize the actor in the environment of the play, highlighting the tentative reality of the world alongside questions about fiction in the narrative. The large book underscores this notion and allowed for many different compositional arrangements to be presented on the stage. Henry directed the action in different planes, staging action in front of the book, behind it, beside it, and on top of it.

Man’s opening monologue beside the book sets the story of how Mathers was killed and the narrative follows the convoluted search for Mathers’ wealth, hidden in a black box under his house. Ironically, the monologue emphasizes the importance of the words on stage and introduces the significance of Man as the storyteller throughout. The content of the spoken word is literally reflected in the positioning of the book centre stage. It also represents Man’s unfinished ‘de Selby’ book, the philosophies of which O’Brien painstakingly inserted in footnotes throughout the novel. Man’s stand-up narrative in particular is without the physical virtuosity that is typically associated with movement theatre. Henry, in dialogue with Clarke, did not cut the length of sentences (despite opposition from O Malley due to the length of her lines) nor did he shy away from the soaring images in the work, embracing the long sentences, tirades, and words.

Decroux’s corporeal language, often misunderstood as seeing movement as a replacement for speech, dealt with the pre-verbal, post-verbal and non-verbal, but also the verbal. Henry became absorbed in the non-real world, placing the language of the visual beside the language of the word throughout the production. Mime and movement in The Third Policeman demonstrate Leabhart’s statement:

they are not some precious and separate disciplines outside of mainstream theatre, but, rather … they are again, as they used to be, multifaceted forms of expression which is at the heart of theatre – a theatre of the creative actor who determines the synthesis of movement, text, music, lighting and décor. Mime and movement are the cradle of theatre.¹¹⁴

The relationship of Blue Raincoat with European practitioners involves complex cultural transitions that are never linear. Today, the company continues to blend the Irish with the international, perpetuating and resisting, disrupting and reworking familiar, non-naturalistic, and new works. Yet their work contributes to strategies for physical/ movement/visual performance in and of Ireland, calling on the ensemble to create work using text, audience, space, performers, designers, and cultural context. Their work continues to develop strategies for performance and new ways of practice in Irish theatre.

Extract From: For the Sake of Sanity: Doing things with humour in Irish performance, edited by Eric Weitz (2014)

Cross Reference: Production companies like Fishamble and Rough Magic

See Also: Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, by Rhona Trench and Synge and the Making of Modern Irish Drama by Anthony Roche in which the author writes about a production of The Playboy of the Western World directed by Blue Raincoat’s Niall Henry