A Director’s Perspective on Mutabilitie
Michael Barker Caven in conversation with Helen Lojek

[Michael Barker Caven is the former Artistic Director of The Theatreworks Company (Dublin). He was nominated for an Irish Times/ESB Best Director Award in 1999 (for Anna Karenina) and in 2001 (for Richard III). In 2000 he directed the Irish premiere of Mutabilitie at the Samuel Beckett Theatre (Trinity College, Dublin). Sinéad Cuthbert won an Irish Times/ESB Award for Best Costume Design for the production, and Paul Keogan was nominated for a Best Lighting Design award. Barker Caven spoke by telephone with Helen Lojek in May 2002.]

HL: What led to your production of Mutabilitie?

MC: Nine months or a year before the Royal National Theatre production [directed by Trevor Nunn at London’s Cottesloe Theatre in 1997] I was lucky enough to read a copy of the script. On Frank’s original draft the first few words were something like ‘A forest. A heath. A castle. A river. Earth. Air. Water. Fire’; there followed an extraordinarily short scene in which figures run through a forest as the drums roll as other dark figures of menace drop from the trees. Then the words ‘God save us! Jesus save us! William save us!’ A shiver went up my spine. Those words completely stopped me in my tracks. ‘William save us!’ Shakespeare comes to Ireland – and he can save us! The power of that first scene and those that tumbled by after it sparked off something that utterly fascinates me – Renaissance metaphysics and theatre of memory. As I got fuller and fuller into this extraordinarily dense world that Frank had produced I realized I was in the presence of what I now regard as a truly great play.

It is so monumental that in many ways the age we live in is not ready for it. Like all great works it harks back to something and yet also looks forward to a refreshing revival of a theatre that springs fully from the imagination. The intellect at work in it is there to produce an imaginative, poetic, inner explosion in the watcher rather than a psychological, logical progression through a recognizable Freudian world. It’s a great sweeping masque of a play reminding me of The Tempest and of plays such as Life is a Dream by [seventeenth century Spanish playwright] Calderon and even Camino Real by Tennessee Williams. A totally brave, ambitious play that breaks every contemporary rule of what a play is supposed to be about. Although it took a lot of reading and re-reading to sift all the layers from its dense depths, I found it easily digestible as the language and subject matter were very close to my heart, particularly its politics, its historical mischief making and its theatrical spirituality. I desperately wanted to do it.

At that stage it was quite clearly out of the question, because it was going into rehearsal at the RNT as a joint production between the two national theatres of England and Ireland, and was then due to come back to Dublin after its opening in London. In these circumstances a production in Ireland directed by me was just not going to happen. I then went along to a rehearsed reading, directed by Patrick Mason and performed by members of the Abbey Company, interestingly enough, during a Shakespeare conference in Trinity College. Listening to it had another overwhelming impact on me and the desire to stage it burned ever stronger. Still, I wished Frank and the production great success in England, knowing that the chances of me directing it were minute unless it was at some time in the distant future. And yet something in me told me this was not to be the end of the story. I didn’t anticipate what was to take place. The London production met with mixed reviews, and the decision was taken not to bring the production back to Ireland. The play from an Irish point of view went dead.

Time went by, but the desire to do the play didn’t go away. I contacted Frank about six months after the London production closed. He said he appreciated my interest, but that at that juncture he wasn’t ready to see the piece produced again. He wanted time for the dust to settle. I felt strongly that an Irish production was vital, that this great work should not sit neglected on the shelf. So, a year later I again wrote to him. One day soon after, I came home to find a message on my answering machine, brief and to the point: ‘This is Frank. You can do it.’ Having been given permission it was then a question of trying to mount a production that would do the piece justice with the limited resources at the disposal of such a small independent company. I knew I wanted to do the piece at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity; when Trevor Nunn wrote to say he couldn’t come to see our production, he said he was delighted to see it was going on in the Samuel Beckett, because that’s where he’d intended doing it [if the RNT production had come to Dublin]. My company, Theatreworks, produces all its work there, and we have a passionate relationship to that space. I knew that the correct use of space was key to releasing the play’s potential. This extraordinary story takes place in a non-realistic, very poetic, magical landscape. The Beckett Theatre is not the biggest theatre in the world in terms of capacity (circa 250), but does have a tremendously powerful stage (It’s about 50 or 60 feet high, 50 or so feet wide and about the same deep – a great cathedral of a place) and a great relationship to an audience. I knew I was going to use that whole stage so that this vast story could have a vast theatrical landscape. So the decision was taken to go ahead and I began to put the production together.

HL: From the start what you see as the imaginative, non-realistic world of the play determined the staging?

MC: I find it hard to describe, but I start from a visceral feeling, an imaginative vision in space. Words make me see images, movements, groupings, and sounds, in space. I’m hugely influenced by classic, Renaissance spatial imagination. I call myself a radical classicist, and I work in terms of the landscape of that world at all times. I see words in three-dimensional pictures–very deep and broad and full of colour. I’ve been heavily influenced by all the great high Renaissance painters and architects, particularly the religious images and spaces they produced. Cathedrals. Large civic buildings. Temples. Squares. Groupings of bodies within these spaces. They somehow all seem to have got into my blood ever since I was a child, and whenever I think of a piece of theatre I tend to see it in a very architectural scale, in a heightened scale, not in a realistic or every day scale. I’m also heavily influenced by the great Renaissance hermetic thinkers such as Robert Fludd and of course Shakespeare himself, who saw the theatre as a place where the imagination of tribe, of memory, of the soul could be brought to transubstantive life through movements based on geometric patterns. They believed that the theatre used in this manner affects people powerfully, gets under the skin, gets into that place in the imagination that cannot be quantified and qualified. Theatre that teaches us to understand by fully apprehending rather than merely comprehending. This too is my faith.

HL: Your vision of theatre is also, it seems to me, the vision in Mutabilitie, which is more large scale than many other McGuinness works, but also more large scale than many other Irish plays. Do you have a preference for large-scale productions?

MC: Yes. My reputation is based on large-scale productions. People think of me as the maker of the ‘big play.’ My most recent production was Richard III. I am fascinated by big stories of sweep and scale that pass through time and space. My guru is Shakespeare. I grew up obsessed by his works, and that obsession has never left me. Any Shakespeare play breaks all the great rules of time and space. You go through time; you go through space; you journey from environment to environment. Time is something that gallops or trots or races. The only thing that stops you is the boundaries of your own imagination. I think that theatre at the moment is suffering from an over-propensity to intellectualize in a truly rational sense, rather than to remember that its greatest power is as a visceral, imaginative force. A force that is not like the rest of the world. It’s about finding a way of showing the unseen. I think you’re right. Irish theatre tends to be quite domestic, and to be oriented towards the small scale. The family and the personal are at the heart of a lot of Irish writing. But Frank wants to write about ‘Otherness’. All his plays are centred on something or someone that propels the story out of narrow boundaries, out of the boundaries of Ireland, off into other horizons, both of nationality, of time, space, and of imagination. His work is constantly transcendent, even something like Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me that appears to be an intimate piece about men trapped in a small room. Yet there are moments when it flies. And flying is a hugely important part of great theatre. A leap of faith. A leap of vision. All of Frank’s plays at some point, and some at many points, are constantly trying to take off, into a different dimension of experience that we just do not find on the surface. Mutabilitie is like that from beginning to end. It never for one second tries to pretend to be anything other than a huge theatrical experience, a Mass in a sense. Every scene is trying to use Frank’s belief in the transformative, transcendent power of theatre to make people shift internally, to experience a thought or a feeling about themselves as individuals, about their imaginations, about their sense of Irishness or Englishness or whatever, that is not out of a pamphlet or out of a dogma or out of a textbook, but something that comes at them from out of the mist or out of the wind in the trees or out of the roughness of the earth.

HL: Given the emphasis on the mystical power of this play, as well as the tendency of audiences to go for a rational, naturalistic explanation, what knowledge of history do you think an audience needs to understand this play?

MC: That’s a very important question. It’s a hard one. We obviously came up against it in rehearsal. I confess we did a lot of work in the early days of rehearsal to assimilate the historical background. Not a lot of people are up to speed on sixteenth century imperial English power in Ireland or the relationship of Edmund Spenser to his poetry and to his role as a civil servant – or what was going on in sixteenth century Ireland and England. Yet the actors needed to digest this information or they couldn’t begin to play it. However, what an actor needs to know to perform and what an audience needs to watch are not the same thing. All actors of worth recognize that research is vital to setting off the creative juices; that in some senses they must end up knowing more about the character and his/her environment/history than the character does. But you can kill an audience dead in their seats if you start producing theatre as academic lecture. So we had to decide, do we need to put great big notes in the program for the audience about the politics of the time; do we need to put stuff in the foyer with pictures and diagrams and all of that? We decided to avoid this as much as possible, because I felt that we had to trust our audience and not lead them down any cul-de-sac. Those who got most out of the play said that they knew they could have got lost if they’d let themselves become obsessed in the moment of watching with trying to work it out. What they chose to do instead was to immerse themselves in the production and go with it, bask in its fullness, come out afterwards and feel what they felt and find from it what they found. Bits would evade everybody, but it was extraordinary how many understood it even though they did not know the facts, figures, and dates that the play alludes to.

Those who completely resisted the play were obsessed with the superficial reality of a historical world or pedantic issues of literary structuring: ‘There was no way William Shakespeare came to Ireland…and after all Edmund Spenser blah, blah, blah…and how can you put him side by side with mythical figures such as King Sweney and Maeve, bla, bla, bla!’ They rationalized themselves into a dead end. Several critics were vicious about the structure of the play, claiming that it was no play at all; that it tried to do too much and failed to deliver any form of clarity. For me the play overwhelmed the limits of their theatrical imagination and it was easier for them to try and bury it than deal with its fullness. By keeping historical notes out of the program, I wanted to free people to simply encounter the play in performance. I believe passionately in audiences. I know there’s a huge debate going on about the dumbing-down of culture, of which there is much truth. Yet, as a creative force the theatre fails too often to truly engage an audience in a manner that allows them to be a good audience. I believe that if you reach out, if you put integrity and creative force into something and reach out to the audience, saying ‘Share this with us’, rather than saying ‘Keep away’, people will come and experience it. That great phrase, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ Yes, we had people walk out at the interval of every performance, but not because they were bored, not because they didn’t care, but because the play had such a powerful impact on them that they had to resist it, they had to hate it, or they had to be angry about it, or they had to flee it, particularly after say the great choral scene that closes the first half. It didn’t bother me. We were doing our job when we got that reaction. If a piece of theatre does not explode upon an audience, does not shake our complacency, does not stir us, I do not see the point of it. Mutabilitie is a play that should come at you like a multi-coloured roller coaster and wash over you and throw you out the other end of the theatre, breathless and not quite sure what happened – like a great piece of music – but absolutely stirred by it, and desperate to hear that sound again and again.

HL: Some critics have described Mutabilitie as a play that is ‘too focused on language.’ Your production included wonderful spectacle as well. What sort of balance were you seeking?

MC: I don’t agree for one moment that the play is focused on language – it is focused on using powerful language to create powerful, visual drama. I believe, as Hamlet says, you should ‘suit the action to the word …’ Every word is energy in movement. Every line delivered is in some kind of motion. When I read a text, consider language, I’m always thinking of movement through the actors’ bodies, movement through sound, movement through lighting and through space.

In terms of what you call spectacle, I knew the first time I read the play that it must not be done naturalistically. I didn’t see the London production and don’t want to say too much about it, but I believe that one of the problems was probably the decision to create a very physically realistic world that was built out of objects that were tangible and said very loudly, ‘Look I am a river and me, I’m a castle!’ I believe you have to think carefully about the visual language by which you choose to communicate with an audience. If you visually suggest that this is a real place, i.e. a place of surface, they will then expect a play that takes place on or close to that surface. If you put a play that’s so essentially about the unseen into a concrete world, the contradictions can cause huge cracks to appear in an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief. What I wanted to do was to manipulate the total flexibility of space offered by the Beckett Theatre, creating (primarily through height and depth) different places and shifts in time and place that would enable the drama to continually evolve but not lock it into a surface dimension. From this came the decision to build a neutrally defined and yet dynamically shaped structure that represented the castle. The same went for the forest and the river, both of which were principally created by light defining open space. This meant the audience were told to use their imaginations. This I have found is something audiences love you for. If you show them everything they say ‘I don’t have to work, so I’ll fall asleep. It’s a building, and there it is, yes there’re bricks on the front of it.’ But if you say ‘This could be a building but could also turn into a tree’, they suddenly say ‘Ah, thank you. I’m a child again. I am here to play.’

Using height was very important. Within Frank’s play there is the sense of the earth, the sense of the high sky, the sense of the air in between. I wanted to create that Renaissance concept of the above, the middle, and below. People were watching, people were moving on a height – travelling up, travelling down. Light played a fundamental part in creating and defining the imaginative boundaries of those various spaces. Light you can change in a second. In a play like Mutabilitie you have to pick a modern audience up and hold it in a vice-like grip, so that they feel confident and comfortable in the world you are showing them. Scene changes that involve a lot of mechanics slow down the movement and can be fatal. The rational mind kicks back in and resists what the imagination is saying.

HL: I’m particularly interested in the use of space in the scene in Act Three, where there is a split stage and overlapping dialogue – somewhat like the split stage in Observe the Sons of Ulster, but this time with some gender contrasts as well.

MC: I’ll never forget that when the company finished their first reading of that scene, they spontaneously gave themselves a great big round of applause – as if they knew they were facing an acting tunnel of almost unprecedented terror. It’s something like nine pages of one-line cues spoken by 12 actors. I felt instinctively that this was first of all a piece of music, and I said to Frank, ‘It reminds me of the great forgiveness scene at the end of Act IV of The Marriage of Figaro, where everyone’s singing at the same time.’ He smiled and said, ‘You’ve got it.’ From that point of view, in performance the scene should feel as though it contains four different worlds happening at exactly the same time in four different locations, and yet those four worlds are somehow speaking across and to each other in one harmoniously discordant fashion.

I worked out the staging in a geometric pattern that grew organically out of the previous scene between The File and William. I wanted a way of creating depth and width, so an audience could feel all four scenes coming at them like pulses through each other part of the scene, so they could see four things at the same time, and hear four things at the same time, plus a choral support that came in from the high balcony. The very fixed visual structure enabled the anarchic language to explode out of it and fill the whole theatre. I knew if I didn’t give the scene a very fixed form, the explosions would lack shape and direction and would fall apart under the stress of the scene. The audience had to look from The File and Shakespeare through to Sweney and Maeve, and then from Spenser and Elizabeth through to Ben, Richard and Annas, with Hugh, Donal and Niall framing the scene as they looked down. It was a relationship of angles that I wanted to get.

HL: My recollection of that scene in your production is that through most of it the women were standing and the men were seated.

MC: That was a deliberate ploy. It is the women at that moment who are driving the emotional heart of the play, as they always do in a Frank McGuinness play. They are holding the men up. The File is desperately seeking something from Shakespeare, but she is also holding out hope and possibility to him, in many ways. Sexual, but also offering him redemption, allowing him to reconnect with his power, if he will only share it with her. Maeve is desperately trying to keep her king up, who has collapsed Lear-like on the floor and who wants to die, who no longer feels that he has the right or the strength to live or to rule. Maeve tells him, ‘You must live to fight.’ Annas is offering love to Richard, she is offering to leave her people, her family, everything, and live (as he says) as a whore, in his dirty theatrical world in London. Elizabeth is facing her husband down and saying she will live with him, will die with him, if he will only leave Ireland. So there is this extraordinary passion in all of the women that has an impact on the men, and I wanted to have that felt, with the women standing and the men sitting. There were moments when standing and sitting were reversed, or when Elizabeth came down the stairs. I timed the movements with a balletic quality so a ripple went through the scene.

The visual shape was the easiest thing. Getting the shape, the rhythm of the delivery was hard. The cast were all superb consummate professionals, but you will not find an actor who will gladly walk into a scene that has probably something like 150 one line cues shared by twelve individuals. Your life is too much on the line! Every single night after they warmed up individually they came together to use this scene as a company line call, because they knew it is one of those tunnels that when you are in it you must believe you can reach the end in one piece, together. Frank always asks a great deal of his actors, and no more than in this scene. I set out by directing them to play it without a single pause, at a ferocious, driven pace. I would not say there was resistance, but there was a silent, stunned horror at this command. To be fair they went with me, and they knew at the end that they had something extraordinary to play, which had a huge impact on them every night in the playing. It’s a scene in which you are wrapped up, pierced, and overwhelmed by language that comes at such a pace that you don’t have a chance to grab any particular moment. You have to let it rush into and through you. Every night, for good or ill, you could feel the intake of breath in the audience. The buttocks would be clenched. They would not move a muscle for these seven minutes or whatever it took, and you could feel the collective heartbeat racing. People sat stunned. It is an astonishing wave of sound.

I believe we have become culturally obsessed by the idea that language is something to be worked out, to be made right, that we’ve lost the musical, gut quality inherent in its very sound – the aural power of it to affect us physically as a sound wave within which there is meaning. I was influenced in my approach to the scene by Elizabethan composer Thomas Tallis’ extraordinary work Spem in Alium, which has 40 voices singing across each other, around each other, through each other. Every time I play this piece for people they absolutely know what it is about. They cannot understand it because it is in Latin, but people will talk for hours about what they see and understand from it. They see and hear feelings that they are not getting from the literal meaning of the words but from the musical sound of them. That’s what we set out to do in that scene from Mutabilitie. To allow words to collide across space, to ricochet off each other, to echo each other. The scene is full of antithesis. We hunted out all the words that echoed each other. One of the breakthroughs for the actors came in rehearsal when I asked what I would regard as the opposite harmonic/discordant couple to play the other scene. They said the lines that were coming at them from another place. Sweney and Maeve got to speak as Shakespeare and The File; Shakespeare and The File got to speak as Sweney and Maeve; and so on. Suddenly the actors understood the impact of the scene as a collective whole. They were not only speaking as their own characters, but they were in some sense reaching behind or above them to the other characters. That’s how we bound it together.

HL: The dinner scene in which the Irish are serving the English is another scene in which power is important.

MC: As a director there are scenes that tickle your fancy – and they are often the scenes the actors least like at the start of rehearsals. They often seem to revolve around some kind of ritual such as eating, or some kind of formal event. On the page, this mealtime scene is the most dogmatic of all in the play. There’s the singing of the great Protestant hymn ‘There Is No God but God Alone’ at the beginning. Then there’s Spenser’s lecturing of William on the Irish and their vices, and Elizabeth’s counter argument by which she praises the landscape and climate. Not a scene on the page to set an actor on fire. Yet the scene immediately excited me because I felt its power lay in the characters that say not a word, the servants Hugh and File. A scene of contrast between what is being said with the mind, and what is being said by the body. It’s one of those fantastic scenes in which a public thing is happening in which the people speaking forget that there are people listening – a scene that becomes rather like a play with a play.

I wanted the audience to be aware that they were watching a great poet and a great aristocrat serve an aspiring poet and aspiring aristocrat. I wanted the issue of power, personal and public, sexual and family, to be the physical sub-text of the language of the scene. The audience had to be watching The File and Hugh, whilst listening to Edmund, his family and their guest William. We explored it from the point of view of what it is like for The File and Hugh to be in that scene, what The File knows about her relationship with William, what Hugh’s relationship to William is about, what Hugh’s relationship to Spenser is about, what is going on between the File and Hugh at this point in the play. Spenser is oblivious to it all of course. But I staged it so as to let the audience in on the game. The scene became a constant eying up of each other and of pertinent decisions to move. We deliberately choreographed their whole setting of table, and their deliberate placing of objects such as bread and water on it at appropriate moments in the lines, so there was basically an echo going on, a sub-text, that Spenser was not aware of, but that the audience was. Denis Conway, who played Hugh, played that scene with a tremendous, quiet power. I think he haunted it. He and Liz Schwarz as The File never once broke the boundaries of service, but through their movements and the way they held themselves told us of what it was really about.

Emotionally the scene is also important for Spenser’s development. A moment that always touched me was when Spenser finds himself under severe emotional stress and his son sings to him the lines from the hymn in an effort to reach out to him across the stage. A contact between son and father is made at last. This sad, cornered man and his young boy trying to join with each other, but they can only do it through singing, not through holding or touching.

It gives such pleasure when a scene like that comes together. When we finished it and when the rest of the cast saw it in run through, people came away saying ‘I thought that scene could not be made to work; I did not know why it was there. Now I know exactly why it’s there. Wow! What a powerful scene.’ We knew then we’d got it right.

HL: McGuinness has described the end of this play as ‘ambiguous’. Where, if anywhere, do you find hope in the conclusion?

MC: Our production ended on a more upbeat tone and note than I believe the original did. I passionately believe that it does have great hope in it. I feel it strongly because I am both Irish and English. This whole issue that has haunted both peoples for so long and sadly still has many miles to go yet before being resolved. I think one of the reasons the play did not do well in England is that there is still abject refusal within English culture to accept the truth of its relationship with the island of Ireland, both in terms of the violence and destruction and also the contradictory love affair that has always existed between the lands. Our two cultures have been intertwined for centuries now and will be forever, so it is vital that we start to look at this relationship with creativity and hope rather than judgment and despair. We need to look into the true heart of our joint stories to recognize that we are far stronger together than apart.

Whenever there is a meal there is hope. Whenever there is a breaking of bread, a sharing of wine, there is hope. Whenever people can sit down and do the most basic, natural human things together, there is hope. Yes Niall and Donal (the priest) are standing in the background watching as Hugh, The File, and Annas sit with the English boy and give him their food. But it is Hugh, The File, and Annas that hold the power. In the great, great scene that precedes it, the family is forced to accept its guilt. Hugh acknowledges that in killing his own parents, his ancient past, he has also killed his right to retributional judgement of others, for by his actions and the actions of his tribe, he is as much to blame as anyone for the pain that is now in the play. He has become that great Shakespearean concept – ‘no-thing’. He frees himself of his ego and becomes a child wandering through the forest. When the child is found, the threat of violence rears its ugly head once more. We worked hard to create the sense of Niall and Donal circling the child like hunters preparing the act of sacrifice, preparing the act of brutality. That desire was there in the scene. Just before they sit down to eat, it looks as though they are going to do harm to the child. Annas says ‘We have a child’, and Niall cries out ‘An English child’, and Donal, ‘A hostage!’ to which Hugh responds emphatically ‘We have a child!’ I’ve just become a father. You think you know it before, but when you have a child you really know that every child, whatever race, whatever colour or creed, comes into this world a pure thing. If we learned more from our relationship to our own childhood and to children in general, we would perhaps produce a better world. That’s why Hugh’s answer to Donal is so important: ‘We have a child!’ A child does not become a dogma or an ideology or a part of a nation until we have corrupted it. The purity of a child must always be recognized, because it’s about possibility.

Hugh is given a choice when he meets this physical child. It’s like re-meeting his soul, and the strange thing is that the soul is an English boy. They sit down together, and there are the simple words, ‘There is milk.’ The priest tries to say, ‘There is little’, but The File says, ‘Fetch our little milk. Drink the milk. Eat.’ And the child eats and drinks. They then all eat together. I believe the whole purpose, the whole balance of the play is disturbed if you stage this scene without favouring hope. Yes, with Donal and Niall at the edge, weapon in hand, watching, there is still danger, but the real power and beauty lies in the sight of a man and a woman who have lost a child sitting down with the child of their enemy and sharing the last food and drink that they have. The milk of human kindness.

We have too much cynicism in our world, too much reaching into easy platitudes and over simplified interpretations of history in an effort to justify all kinds of brutalities. The play is about the fact that each has done so much to the other and it is now time to move forward. It is important that we say that loud and clear–not forgetting the past, but not obsessing about it either. The sight of a child sitting down and eating is about the future.

HL: If you were required to say in a few words what Mutabilitie is about, what would you say?

MC: In the simplest terms, Mutabilitie is about the fundamental truth that the secret to life is about accepting change. The universe is apparently fixed and yet at the very same time it is free. There are constants that will one day change. Everything that is born must pass into the darkness if there is to be new life. All our visions of ourselves will change into something else in the future. It was inevitable that England and Ireland would have a history. It was inevitable that that history would involve things that brought sadness and joy. Many things would change that many people desperately wanted to hold on to. However, until you accept this fact of life you will not be able to accept the lives of others, you will not accept the fact that life is a process of give and take and flow. The goddess Mutabilitie still sits on the hill and says, ‘What are you blaming me for? Without me you cannot exist. Without change you cannot have any constancy.’ The play speaks of this truth from a political point of view, a historical point of view, from a sexual point of view, from an emotional point of view, from a personal point of view. That’s a theology, an idea of life that most people struggle with because it’s so frightening. When people see their nearest and dearest murdered, their culture raped, they want someone else to pay for it. It asks a lot to say, ‘This has happened, we are alive. What are we going to create out of this change? Possibility or more pain?’

The play is begging two cultures, two races, to move forward, with the past, but accepting and embracing the changes that have happened. For all of the pain and all of the terror, we are both responsible and we are both changed. That change has possibilities and hope for the future.

HL: Did post-colonial theory or gender studies have an impact on how you approached the play?

MC: As a maker of theatre I don’t let myself worry about that kind of thing. I was obviously very, very personally aware of post-colonial issues. You can’t have my very English accent and live in Ireland and not be aware of the post-colonial environment in which you live and what it means to the Irish collective unconscious. Thus I would approach such theory from a standpoint of personal understanding rather than intellectual exploration. I did not want to read points of view. I have absorbed a lot from ten years of living in Ireland. The post-colonial experience was very much in the production room, because it could not fail to be; we had a cast that was primarily Irish, but with several English actors as well. For everyone there was a journey. At times very strong points of view came up, differences between the two cultures came to the fore. There was never anything other than great camaraderie, but the experience of being a post-colonial nation with the colonizer in the rehearsal room produced important debate. It brought the play home. Irish actors would jokingly refer to other Irish actors playing English characters as ‘turncoats’ and ‘informers.’ Then they would have to recognize what they were doing by this. The actors had to absorb the fact that this was not a play about who was right and who was wrong. It’s a play about experiencing the totality of colonial experience, for both the colonized and the colonizer. In England there is still a failure to grasp this duality of experience, to see that the experience of being a colonizer has brutalized them too. That is why they are so frightened of any kind of perceived assault on the upright pillars of their culture, in particular William Shakespeare. The idea that William Shakespeare was gay or at least bi-sexual, that still remains an absolute no-no in so many quarters. But far worse would be to suggest, as Frank does, the tainting of his creativity by a influential visit – real or imagined – to another culture, particularly Ireland.

One of the scenes important to me is in Act Two, when The File and Shakespeare, shall we say, conceive Sonnet 18. That was one scene that Frank and I spent some time on. In the original draft it was very clear that The File was offering lines to William. He was struggling to make the connections, and she would give him various phrases. In the printed version, William speaks almost the whole sonnet. I asked Frank to let me return to his original idea; that William is making the sonnet, but The File has shared moments of creative influence and helps him shape it. As William grows into the sonnet he is leaning on The File for support. She as a great creative talent offers him little moments that help make the connections he is reaching for. So the sonnet in some sense is a collaboration. I think a number of English members of our audience found that scene very difficult to take: the idea that someone else would come between the Holy Bard and his great force. Other people were astonished by the idea, which gave great tangibility to the brilliant tradition of the bards of Ireland (as well as the likes of Shakespeare being but a continuation of this ancient, Shamanic line) and also to the idea Frank’s playing with – the bringing of Shakespeare to Ireland to re-release this creative force within modern Irish poets. You’re always going to upset people when you step on holy icons and suggest that they’re not the way they are perceived. One of the things I love about this play is the way Shakespeare is presented. He’s an extraordinary creation, ambiguous, contradictory, troubled. Able to be one thing one minute and another, another. Driven by some ferocious gift that he has almost no control of. The greatest theatrical, the greatest poetic maestro of the ages and obviously a huge influence on Frank.

In terms of gender, it was only an issue in terms of the acting of the play. The female characters tower over it, equal and impressive. The actresses were all powerful forces in their own right. Rarely have I had the pleasure of working in a room in which the balance of power between the genders was so evenly matched. No theory needed to take place here. Just hard sweat and tears from all.

HL: What McGuinness play would you like to direct next?

MC: A new one please, Frank! No seriously, there’s nothing more enticing than directing a new piece. One reason doing Mutabilitie was so exciting is that in many ways it was a new play from an Irish point of view. Other than that, probably Innocence, though I’ve a deep love for Carthaginians, which I directed with a student cast from New York University. I’ve been surprised there has not been a production of Carthaginians in a front line theatre in the Republic for the last few years, considering everything that’s happened of late in the North, including the on-going Bloody Sunday inquest. But maybe that’s exactly why it hasn’t happened.

HL: What qualities in a director help when approaching a McGuinness play?

MC: You have to love the imagination. You have to be driven by a desire to produce poetic drama. You’ve got to be able to balance flow and sharp edges. Frank’s plays are not comfortable. They have great form. They have wonderful sweep. They have tremendous energy, and it’s easy to see them glide across the page and across the stage. But there are these stunning, staccato punches that come up underneath the through-line of the play. Moments or lines or characters that just barge their way into the text. You must never try and quieten these moments. Try and make them fit. Like fire crackers, they are just best set off. You’ve also got to be willing to take risks with his work. Not try to limit it, but set it free. Allow it to be beautiful and ugly at the same time. The trial scene in Mutabilitie is a truly ugly scene and should be disturbing and upsetting. It comes on the back of a moment when the play appears to give the Irish justification for all of their hurt and pain. Suddenly we see them acting in a truly barbaric fashion. You could easily try and hide that scene, tame it, but you’ve got to be willing to say Frank is putting everything on the stage, warts and all, and it’s important to really show the warts. Something about the visceral, physical urgency of the man himself comes through in these moments.

And you’ve got to completely understand the concept of the Other. You’ve got to be driven by the idea that Frank takes Outsiders – whether they’re Outsiders because of their culture or because of their personal sexual culture as gay men – and understand that they are engines of change. Because they are not at the centre and trapped by the centre, they are free. Things that are fixed need something uncomfortable and jagged and dangerous to break them free. Dido in Carthaginians is a classic example. He is not a figure of fun. Like a true clown he is a dark and sad figure as well as a gloriously funny one. He has a tremendous vitality that is unsettling as well as joyful. It’s important never to make Frank’s characters smooth.

HL: It often strikes me that McGuinness’s Outsiders, Dido and others – if they survive – have learned strategies for coping with difficulties in the world that face all of us. These Outsiders, then, function as role models for those less outside, providing clues for survival in this dangerous, glorious world.

MC: Exactly. Those moments in Mutabilitie where sexual lines are crossed are those moments when characters reach into their true hearts and are truly honest with themselves or someone else for the first time. They’re not playing sexual games for advantage; they’re caught in a fuller apprehension of themselves. It happens to Hugh, it happens to The File in the great love scene when the two men and the two women find themselves close to a homosexual or lesbian moment. It releases them in a sense. I think Frank sees that liberty as a creative force for good. People are enabled to break through because they’ve seen something that otherwise they wouldn’t have seen.

HL: How would you position McGuinness in relationship to the rest of contemporary Irish drama?

MC: I believe Frank McGuinness is one of the most important playwrights working in the world today. I believe his canon will have longevity greater than that of some playwrights who at the moment enjoy greater public awareness and acclaim. Something about it transcends the time and place it was written in. Carthaginians will be played in 400 years time and felt in the same way it is felt today; it will not date. I believe Mutabilitie will come in to its own in future years as others realize its greatness, as it breaks free of the particular limitations set by contemporary culture. I do not think McGuinness is a contemporary playwright. His greatness is that his plays feel very ancient and very forward, very future. Along with people like Marina Carr he is one of the last voices that is writing theatre of imagination and poetry and metaphysics. He creates a theatrical experience that transcends the normal. I hope and believe that the best is still to come. He’s still a young writer, a ferociously active writer of great passion. I look forward with great anticipation, always, to the next Frank McGuinness play.

Extract From: The Theatre of Frank McGuinness: Stages of Mutability, edited by Helen Lojek (2004)

Cross Reference: Mason, Friel, Murphy, Barry, History, Memory.

See Also: ‘Echoes Down the Corridor’: Irish Theatre – Past, Present and Future, edited by Patrick Lonergan and Riana O’Dwyer