Patrick Mason: A Director’s Festival Golden Fish

Cathy Leeney

In There Are No Secrets, Peter Brook explains his idea of fishing and theatre:

Think of a fisherman making a net. … He draws his thread, he ties the knots, enclosing emptiness with forms whose exact shapes correspond to exact functions. Then the net is thrown into the water, it is dragged to and fro, with the tide, against the tide, in many complex patterns. A fish is caught, an inedible fish, or a common fish good for stewing, maybe a fish of many colours, or a rare fish, or a poisonous fish, or at moments of grace a golden fish. … In the theatre, those who tie the knots are also responsible for the quality of the moment that is ultimately caught in their net… the fisherman by his action of tying knots influences the quality of the fish that land in his net.⁴²²

Patrick Mason is one of the major architects of Irish theatre performance over the past thirty years. As a director, and as Artistic Director over two terms at the Abbey Theatre, he is and has been an inspirational collaborator with the foremost playwrights, actors, and designers, who have together created the canon of Irish performance in that period.

To speak of a director as an architect associates performance with space, the literal space of the theatre, the imagined space inhabited by the play, the imaginative space in the minds of audiences, and the space of memory, where one reflects on and re-imagines the impact of theatre. I have tried to centre this paper on some of the spaces, and moments created in those spaces, that Mason has been responsible for over thirty years in the Dublin Theatre Festival, moments whose validation is documentation and memory, and whose vitality in recollection is enduring. His creative skills have sustained a pre-eminent contribution to the Festival’s reputation for new Irish writing.

How does one write a history of a director’s work, particularly a director who does not set out self-consciously to promote a singular vision with an ensemble of actors? Patrick Mason has undoubtedly been highly influential through his work, but he has also been catholic in his theatrical ambitions and achievements. He has worked internationally, although his key productions are deeply embedded in Irish theatre. Unlike an architect, Mason has no buildings standing to substantiate his concepts and creativity. Perhaps then he is more shape-changer than architect, more a Prospero than a Solness.

Peggy Phelan proposes that ‘[p]erformance is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance’.⁴²³ She goes on to point out that as soon as you try to capture performance, to document it and tie it down, it becomes something else: a DVD, an analysis, a memory, a review, an archive. These are signposts to the work. Here I am looking to documentary images and to memory as signposts. The image in performance strikes in the moment. It roots itself, and with the benefit of distance and reflection can grow to reveal connections that were obscured at closer quarters. Thus, a director’s individual projects and ventures, considered over time, coalesce into a shape, a network of spaces and images, collaboratively created, that energize not only theatrical culture and tradition, but also the imaginary of audiences. In Mason’s case, this shaping has to do with theatrical style and the stream in his work of reflexivity or reflection on the process of representation itself. Mason has also worked to broaden the context of Irish theatre, its connections across cultures and histories in Europe and internationally, its collaborative sophistication and professionalism.

A director’s collaborative skills have been a key element for Mason, who himself prefers the word ‘producing’ because, as he has said: ‘you are leading something out or bringing through a group of very disparate talents from writer to actor to designer to lighting designer’.⁴²⁴ Besides his modesty, this comment reflects Mason’s understanding of the meshed contributions of a creative team. His collaborations have been with leading practitioners in all roles. He is renowned for his work with actors, and design collaborators include the most eminent names in the field, while his record with the work of living playwrights attests to his skills in diplomacy, perhaps, as well as his linguistic, dramaturgical, and performance insights. The directing/design teamwork of Mason and Vaněk predominates here and constitutes a key Festival achievement.

Given the issues of a reflexive theatrical style and collaboration, how then might one consider the role of the director over time? Peter Brook offers the idea of ‘form’. He re-defines the word to be something mutable, linked with life and thus subject to life’s laws: ‘[t]here is no form, beginning with ourselves, that is not subject to the fundamental law of the universe, that of disappearance’ (50). Brook makes the link with the Hindu concept of ‘sphota’; ‘between the unmanifest and the manifest,’ he writes, ‘there is a flow of formless energies, and at certain moments there are kinds of explosions which correspond to this term’ (50). This idea of putting into form can be called a birth, an ‘incarnation’. It is the director who leads this collaborative process, the putting into form. Brook explains that:

When one puts on a play, inevitably at the beginning, it has no form, it is just words on paper or ideas. The event is the shaping of the form. What one calls the work is the search for the right form (51).

The Dublin Theatre Festival productions that Patrick Mason has directed are almost all of new writing (whether original play texts or new translations), although he also is known for accomplished revivals of classic plays, where he has capitalized on his deep understanding of theatre history and stagecraft, and his sensitivity to dramatic language. For the Festival, Mason’s credits for new writing are gasp-inducing. In conversation with Colm O’Briain, Mason describes a germinal period of working with playwright Tom Mac Intyre; he directed six of Mac Intyre’s plays at the Peacock Theatre, including The Great Hunger (1983) and Rise Up Lovely Sweeney (for the Festival in 1985). He notes how ‘the intensity and energy of that contact … jolted me out of a more literal, realist kind of reading of text into a far more emblematic, symbolic reading of text and action’ (320).

From the beginning, Mason’s work was theatrically complex and reflexive. The year of his first Mac Intyre production, 1977, also saw his Festival production of Thomas Kilroy’s Talbot’s Box at the Peacock, a case in point. The ‘box’ of Kilroy’s title, in the stage directions ‘a primitive, enclosed space, part prison, part sanctuary, part acting space’ was brilliantly realized in Wendy Shea’s design.⁴²⁵ In Mason’s staging there was a layered awareness of Matt Talbot’s spiritual journey as metonymic of the audience’s aesthetic and imaginative experience of the play. Talbot’s room is the room of theatre; there, alone, Matt Talbot denies the world, but the world is returned to him re-born. Kilroy dramatizes the invasion of this space by the demands of social justice and history. The resilience of Talbot’s spiritual via negativa was embodied in Mason’s production by actor John Molloy when Matt Talbot explains:

The way to God was by giving up them that’s nearest to me […] But then I discovered something strange […] having given all up, it was all given back to me, but different, y’know what I mean. All the world and the people in the world came back to me in my own room. But everything in place. Nothing twisted and broken as it is in this world. Everything straight as a piece of good timber, without warp (23).

This moment in performance, which still resonates in my memory, opened the idea of ‘the onset of the image’, in the phenomenological sense. Gaston Bachelard, in his classic book The Poetics of Space, proposes that ‘consideration of the onset of the image in an individual consciousness can help us to restore the subjectivity of images and to measure their fullness, their strength and their transubjectivity’.⁴²⁶ In his fascination with spaces and their role in materializing images, Bachelard was ‘conscious of doing pioneering work in turning to the “images of matter”’.⁴²⁷ Theatrical images are perhaps the apotheosis of materialization. They occur within the house of the theatre, and lead us back to Bachelard’s idea of the house as ‘a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining’.⁴²⁸ In performance, the starting point of the image is absolutely material, made up of space, the stuff of costume and setting, the fabric of design shapes, yet paradoxically these materials may initiate an explosion of energy, such as Kilroy’s idea of Matt Talbot’s room as a site of imagined renewal, repair, and recovery of the world, no less. Amidst the flow of the action, Mason and Shea created in the production a collaborative image of Talbot’s vision through belief (to which Talbot returns, incidentally, at the end of the play), while also materializing powerfully for the audience, the stage and auditorium as ‘a nest for dreaming and a shelter for imagining’ (Bachelard, p. viii).

The memory of this began the process I am suggesting: a tracking of the director’s work through images in performance spaces, and through materialized forms that Mason has collaboratively made, where something was both captured and also released: an inward movement towards refuge and intensification, and at the same time, an outward energy of nexus, change, and possibility. The ‘to and fro’ aspect of this emerges as key, reflecting Brook’s description of small explosions: energy flows into the performance space, through action, physicality, language. At certain moments in the language, or through patterns of action, energy explodes outwards, connecting the audience into the performance.

Transformability of the space enables this movement, so that scenography is a channel here. Stage spaces that accommodate transformation in their mutable limits, their provisionality, their self-conscious theatricality and porousness, seem to characterize or be associated with the phenomenon, where an encounter occurs between the fiction on stage, and the imagination of the audience. As Mason himself describes the phenomenological impact: ‘I am … for the specificity and intensity of theatre … I want works of power … movements of power, gestures of power, I want presence’ (325).

In 1988 Mason directed Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Gate Theatre, in a new translation by Frank McGuinness. This production presented the action through the idea of Peer’s room as the imaginative ground, a space that transforms to reflect his mythic/epic adventure towards his vocation as an artist. In the design of Joe Vaněk (and with a cast numbering twenty-four, including the director Joe Dowling playing the name character) we saw a claustrophobic attic space, over which loured a curved wood slatted ceiling, painted with clouds, as if Peer Gynt were trapped under the roll-top desk of Ibsen, and determined to escape. Under this buckling cloudscape, snow gave way to a scarlet Moroccan heat, which in turn became the psychic crucible of a lunatic asylum and, finally, Peer’s Shadow forces his confrontation with self. Mason and Vaněk’s concept for this cradled platform was to transform it through texture and colour into the mind landscape of the artist, from whitened canvas, to green cotton sward, to red silk, and finally the reflective obsessional black of plastic sheeting. The production won a Harvey’s award, and marks Mason’s collaborations with Vaněk and with playwright Frank McGuinness dating back to The Factory Girls (1982) and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985).

But in Dublin Theatre Festival terms, Ibsen’s quest play was preceded by Innocence in 1986, again at the Gate Theatre. McGuinness dedicated that treatment of the life of artist Caravaggio to Patrick Mason. Set in 1606, in a wrecked Vatican palace and in the back streets of Rome, the play twists time and space around a day of murder, hauntings, betrayal, and the violent energy and longing of Caravaggio, to see the world fully, to live in the image in paint. Joe Vaněk designed, and the stage became a moving canvas of references to Caravaggio’s paintings, his compositions, emotional uses of colour, an animal sense of physicality and chiaroscuro. The stage was lit by Mick Hughes, predominantly using cross-lighting from the left side, thus creating an extraordinary depth of field, contrasting glowing flesh with shadow. The life of the artist was a blazing and painful flare soon to be swallowed by darkness.⁴²⁹

Garrett Keogh played Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio in one of his best performances yet. The image of his pale hands, flickering in the light, aiming paint brush or dagger to immortalize or to kill, was staged by Mason with rough, chaotic, and bewildering vitality.⁴³⁰ Innocence is a flawed masterpiece. Reading it now, it shows, perhaps, too much of its author. Mason confronted how McGuinness ambitiously pursues the dramatization of the passion of seeing: the violence of embodiment, its spirit greedy for life and death, recklessly desiring regardless of its incarnated vulnerability. The performance began with the fall of a black curtain, revealing the ruined palace behind, as if a veil had been torn from our eyes, and we would have to see, to see as if life depended on it. Through Joe Vaněk’s anachronistic design choices in costume and stage objects, history was broken open, inviting the audience to think beyond the museum past, and into the present moment.

At this point, and arising out of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and McGuinness’s Innocence, a further theme in Mason’s work begins to emerge – a challenge to the limits of Ireland’s isolation, and a creation of theatrical forms resistant to the parochial, the materialistic, and the narrowly national. In his Festival production record this is wholly evident, as Mason has produced Orton and Ibsen, Murphy and Barry, Chekhov, Kilroy and Carr, Mac Intyre, McGuinness, Farrell, Leonard, and Friel.

Having begun the 1990s caught up in the wild success of Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, Mason brought Sebastian Barry’s The Only True History of Lizzie Finn to the Abbey main stage for the 1995 Festival. The play is an extraordinary one, and I will mention only one aspect of it here: how its scenic environment, with huge ambition, allows insight into landscape, the natural world, and the human love affair with all that that means, while homesickness, loss and isolation underlie a tenuous proposal: to carry home on your back, and to look for it in the faces you love. Joe Vaněk again designed, presenting a self-consciously theatrical space where the various performances of Lizzie and Jellie Jane’s lives played out. The big house was represented in miniature in this theatrical landscape, a charming model, lit from within, and as appealing as any miniature. It allowed the audience to consider reflexively how theatre has romanticized the Big House, and to distance themselves from the scenes enacted within its putative walls. The image is nostalgic, yet suggests how its burdensome mortality may be overcome, when we see it nested within the frame of the ancient midden, the seashore, and the hills beyond. The narrowness of its confinements, of class, of history, of loss, are laid gently aside in the play, in favour of Lizzie’s impulse towards the dance, the open road, and a way through beyond the old categories. As in other plays by Barry, Lizzie Finn complicates ideas of Irishness until it is only something that hurt and that will be left behind; and the play did this through and with a metaphor of performance as identity, of theatre as a space where the present wins a victory over a punishing past.

Vaněk’s use of horizontal timber fencing in Lizzie Finn creates a provisional border within which a number of frames are placed. Images from late nineteenth-century advertising created the music hall setting within the onstage proscenium arch in the first part of the play, while iconic objects such as the military uniforms of Robert’s dead brothers, sculptural on tailor’s dummies, hovered above the men’s desolate family house. Later, a linked image of timber slats, but now resembling a fragile stockade, surrounded the kitchen in McGuinness’s Dolly West’s Kitchen, at the Abbey Theatre in 1999. In both Barry’s and McGuinness’s plays the movement from indoors to outdoors is central to the action. Set in Donegal in the Emergency, Dolly West places Ireland amidst a larger catastrophe. The overwhelming events of World War II, represented in the form of smoke, gunfire, and explosions just offstage, infiltrated the nurturing kitchen and the dream-space of the garden and shore. Thus, neutral Ireland and Donegal were implicated in the wider concerns of Europe and the world. The stage energy dissolved this separation, and the distance between fiction and imagination. The movement outwards is made explicit in Dolly’s speech at the end of Act I. The stage directions specify ‘the evening light turns blue and gold’, and Donna Dent, playing Dolly, described her visit to Ravenna to see the sixth century mosaics in the churches there:

A procession of men and women. They were white and blue and gold, walking towards their God, and it was the walking that was their glory, for that made them human still in this life, this life that I believe in. I believe in Ravenna. I remember it. I came home to Ireland, so I could remember it … I think it’s my life’s purpose to say I saw it.⁴³¹

The image of potentiality, of spaciousness shattered the archetypal trope of Irish theatre, the kitchen.

The quality of daring in Mason’s productions of new writing was matched textually with Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats in 1998. As the title implies, place is at the heart of the play, and Hester’s attachment to the Bog is clear from the opening when she enters the wintry expanse of the stage hauling the dead body of a black swan. Olwen Fouéré has written eloquently about her role as Hester, and of her immediate and intense identification with the character. Fouéré describes how Mason supported the huge emotional investment she made in each performance, and offers a rare insight into the skills of the director in the creative process of drawing out a performance of genius.⁴³²

The setting for this Abbey staging was created by Monica Frawley. An epic, painterly, and exposed quality characterized the scene; and all of the action, even including the wedding scene in Act II, took place on the stepped levels of the bog, against a sky-scape from Tintoretto or Jack Yeats.⁴³³ Enrica Cerquoni has written in detail about the staging of this play and its spatial implications. Here I only wish to mark the almost agoraphobic openness of this blasted heath, where anything may happen, and extreme things do. Yet Hester’s love for and knowledge of the Bog of Cats is deeply tied to her longing for her mother, and to her fierce love for her young daughter – these are the piercing moments in her inevitable journey towards death. Mason and Frawley created a powerful image in the production of a stage space belonging to a woman, expressive of her passion, her reality, and her desire. This would be remarkable on any stage, but on the Abbey stage it was and remains a revelation.

Almost finally, and to make the circle, Mason in 1997 returned to the work of Thomas Kilroy, with The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, which he directed at the Abbey Theatre for that Festival. The visual impact of this production is a watershed and arose out of Kilroy’s text, Vaněk’s design, Nick Chelton’s lighting, and Mason’s direction. Its abstraction, its borrowing of conventions from ritualized theatre, and from the architectural spaces, and shadow and light of Edward Gordon Craig freight it as a performance that asserted and celebrated every anti-realist impulse of the Abbey Theatre.

As a leader and collaborator, as a maker of images, materialized in performance, and in bringing into form a vast range of new writing, Patrick Mason has made a history. In his Dublin Theatre Festival work, he has found and offered audiences new relationships between language, image, and action that work. The Mason productions I have not had space even to mention include Kilroy’s The Seagull in 1981 and Leonard’s Kill in 1982; in 1983, Tom Murphy’s The Gigli Concert; Rise Up Lovely Sweeney by Mac Intyre and Baglady/Ladybag by McGuinness in 1985; Stewart Parker’s Pentecost in 1986; Murphy’s 1989 play Too Late for Logic; and Friel’s Performances in 2003.

In this (re)collection of some of the forms, or as Brook would have it, ‘explosions’ created by Mason in collaboration with theatre artists, where the onset of images was conjured out of the materiality of the stage, and now recalled to mind, perhaps it is possible to glimpse some few of Mason’s Festival golden fish: ‘the fisherman works, care and meaning are present in every flick of the finger’ (84). Through his collaborations with playwrights, designers, and performers, he has succeeded in producing for Festival audiences ‘from very concrete elements, a relationship that works’ (63).

Extract From: Interactions: Dublin Theatre Festival 1957-2007, edited by Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan with Lilian Chambers (2008)

Cross Reference: McGuiness, Carr, Friel, Mac Intyre Vaněk, Abbey Theatre

See Also: Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, edited by Lilian Chambers, Ger Fitzgibbon and Eamonn Jordan