Audience expectation and the expected audience – writing for the international stage

Ursula Rani Sarma

I began writing plays in the late 1990s while a student at University College Cork, where I was studying English and History. The drama society of UCC, Dramat, was where I first enjoyed the experience of the theatre. Growing up in West Clare, my opportunities to see plays were few, and mostly consisted of whatever Theatre-in-Education company was touring whichever Shakespearean play was on the school syllabus at the time. So my first memories of theatre are of the three witches wearing tie-dyed leggings writhing about in some freezing cold school hall. It is interesting that, as I look back on those years now, I would not have considered that any of the theatrical productions taking place around the country were happening with me in mind. They merely existed; the idea that they would have taken me into account at the time of their conception was entirely beyond me. I did not see myself as the audience, and this is important, as it was that realization that informed the early plays I wrote while at UCC and in the years that followed.

After directing Innocence by Frank McGuinness in my first year at university, I spent several hours in the Boole Library looking for another project. I leafed through all the classics and some of the contemporary plays, and it occurred to me that so many of those plays simply did not speak to me. I had chosen Innocence over the better-known plays in the canon as I found a relevance and timeliness in McGuinness’s questioning of the role of the church. At that time, the sexual abuse scandals within the church were beginning to break, and the manner in which they shook people’s faith had a huge effect on me. Having being reared Roman Catholic but with a huge awareness of alternative religions such as my father’s Hinduism, I had been used to questioning the church’s teachings from a young age. The majority of my peers, however, were not. I remember a great sense of betrayal amongst many of the Irish people that I knew. I hadn’t realized before discovering Innocence that theatre could challenge how we think about the world, and this continues to be the type of theatre that excites me and which I endeavour to create.

At that time, I had never seen a play which attempted to capture the experience of a young person growing up in rural Ireland – not the Ireland of Synge or O’Casey or Friel, but my Ireland and my generation who were caught somewhere between studying Peig and watching MTV. This was my history, my story, and I had yet to see it on stage. My first play, written while in my third year in university, was called Like Sugar on Skin, and it was my attempt to create the type of play which I would have liked to see, with young people from the countryside as central characters, dealing with their past and present and worrying about what kind of Ireland the future would bring. It was the success of that play at that year’s Irish Student Drama Awards in Galway which made the prospect of becoming a playwright a possibility for me.

This desire to create the kind of work which I would have loved to have seen as a young person living in rural Ireland continued to sculpt the plays which followed once I left university. It seems ironic looking back that my first professional production …touched… premiered abroad at the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe Festival two months after I sat my final exams at UCC. Realistically, I had no concept of what an international theatre festival like the Edinburgh Fringe involved; all I knew at the time was student drama. I had no expectations about who would be sitting in the audience or about their nationality, and so once again I wrote and directed a play that I thought I would enjoy watching myself. The success of …touched… meant that I was suddenly given the label of a ‘young up-and-coming Irish Female Playwright’. I had an international presence and within a year I had commissions from the Royal National Theatre (RNT) and the BBC. In a sense I began as I meant to continue, writing plays for an unknown audience abroad. I spent the following two years in Ireland, writing and directing Blue for the Cork Opera House in 2000 and Gift for the Belltable Theatre Limerick in 2001. Then I was offered a residency with the RNT in London and I left Ireland for the foreseeable future. Looking back, I consider that first wave of plays to be reflective of my own innocence at the time. I had little exposure to other contemporary plays, and was writing into a vacuum of sorts.

What followed was a number of commissions from UK-based theatre companies. I was commissioned by the BBC and the RNT some years before I was approached by RTÉ and the Abbey Theatre. While Writer-in-Residence for the RNT, I also received commissions from companies such as the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and Paines Plough in London. I was twenty-three with five plays to write including a new one for the Abbey. In 2002 and 2003, I experienced a phenomenon which I thought was writer’s block but which, I realize in retrospect, was panic – and that directly related to my growing awareness of an expectant audience. I was suddenly very aware of the pressure of a particular theatre company having a pre-existing audience of people who were used to seeing a certain type of play. There was an expectation of what the work would be like before I had even chosen the title of the play. I was somewhat intimidated by the audiences who attended the plays I was seeing at the Royal Court and the Bush in London amongst others, and I was preoccupied with a question: what did I possibly have to say to them? It also struck me as disconcerting at some level that, at the time, many of my experiences at these theatres involved a middle- to upper-class, predominantly white audience watching gritty plays about inner-city Black or Asian kids with drug and social problems. I simply could not imagine where my work would fit in.

While still coming to terms with this block of sorts, I remember returning home to west Clare and standing on Lahinch golf course, with my mother explaining why I kept swinging the club without managing to actually hit the ball. Apparently if you lift your head too soon to see where the ball is going to go, you will end up missing it entirely. I flew back to London with this analogy in my head: if I kept worrying about who was going to receive the work, I would never get the work done at all. In order for me to create work for an audience I had to begin by ignoring them, or more accurately by treating myself as the first audience member. And so I reverted to my initial tactic: write for yourself and send it out there. The ‘block’ eventually disappeared. It was possibly the most important lesson I learned in my career in terms of dealing with my audience.

I remained in London to take up the Position of Writer-in-Residence with Paines Plough. The longer I stayed away from Ireland, the more I became aware of my own identity, not only as an Irish playwright but as a mixed-race female Irish playwright. I recall having to fill out an equal opportunities form for the company and realizing that I didn’t tick the white or Irish box but instead the mixed-race one. I couldn’t recall ever having being faced with this option in Ireland. The idea of boxes and the need for people to assign one to me fascinated me. I began to write a play for Paines Plough entitled Without You which was not set in Ireland, a trend which continued with my short play When the War Came, which was written for and produced by The New Theatre Company in London in 2005, and with The Spidermen written for the RNT’s Connections series in 2006. I wondered at the time if they would describe these pieces as Irish plays despite the fact that neither the setting nor my own name would mark them out as such. I began to think about what made me an Irish playwright to an international audience. Was it my passport, my accent, the tone of the language itself, or none of those things?

In the years that followed, I was fortunate to have a string of commissions from companies outside of Ireland. In some ways I suppose this has kept me from forging the kind of relationships with theatre companies in Ireland that would have ensured that more of my work would be seen at home. As it stands, I have had more productions of my new plays abroad than at home, with some recent productions in New York, San Francisco, Edinburgh and Greece. I believe there are a few reasons for this. Firstly, there are simply more companies in the UK that are in a position to commission new work and with whom I now have a good working relationship. Secondly I myself have spent much of the period since 2000 outside of the country. And thirdly, there has been a lack of interest in producing the work of female Irish playwrights within the more heavily-funded companies in Ireland. There is a noticeable change in this trend over the past couple of years and I am optimistic that the future will hold many more opportunities for female playwrights to be produced at home. However, the reality remains: if I had not been so strongly supported outside Ireland in my formative years, as a playwright it is unlikely that I would have produced the body of work which I have written to date.

There are so many aspects of audience expectation that I could discuss but I thought it might be of interest to mention briefly my experiences of translation and how this has opened up an unintended audience to my work (in the sense that they were not anticipated at the time of writing). My work was first translated in 2002 when Blue and …touched… appeared in German. It shocked me at the time that these plays – which for me were so specific to Ireland and the world of my childhood – would find a home in Germany. How would they get the cultural references? I worried. What, in effect, would become lost in the translation? The translator, Anna Opel, was appointed by my German agents Felix Bloch, and I was somewhat relieved when I began to receive her emails, which asked me about specific details that she did not understand and which, when translated literally, did not achieve the desired effect in German. This series of emails between us was educational for me as I began to realize that, often with my work, it was not so much the words themselves which were important: instead, it was a certain beat or tone shift within a scene that really mattered. For example, I had to let Anna find a suitable joke to replace one in a scene that gave much-needed relief after a moment of intensity. This meant relinquishing a certain amount of control over the work itself, which took some getting used to. This experience is not the typical one, however – as I was to discover. There have been many translations of my plays where the translator has never been in touch. This concerned me at first, despite my being assured that my agency would only approve the highest-quality translators. Still, I continue to wonder about those tricky tonal switches, which are so important in the work, and how the moments of particularly Irish humour or pathos translate to Romanian, Polish, or Dutch.

The most positive experience of translation which I have experienced came in 2003 when the RNT commissioned me to translate Italian Playwright Luca de Bei’s play The Dogs in Front of the Hare. At the time, the National Theatre Studio had a specific model in place for translating contemporary new work. They would try to match a foreign playwright with an English-speaking one who they felt shared a similar aesthetic sense. A literal translation was commissioned first: that is, an individual translates the text word for word. After this, Luca and I spent a week together at the studio with the person who had carried out the literal translation and we worked through the play line by line. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and wished that I could have had an opportunity to have one of my own plays translated in a similar process. Again, it became apparent to us both that the literal translation at times did not serve the original. I empathized with Luca’s initial concerns that the play he had written in Italian would not be the same play in English. After a period of six months, the translation was complete and we both found the process entirely fulfilling.

It seems to me now that the longer and more widely a play lives and travels, the less control you have over it as an author. Translation is an area which continues to fascinate me as more and more of my work is staged internationally in languages I will never understand. There have been more productions of Blue and ..touched… in Germany than in any other country. I certainly did not think when writing the play in 2000 that the expected audience would be in Hamburg. In 2005, I was commissioned by a theatre company in Heidelberg to write a short play, which would be then translated into German. This in itself posed another interesting concept: the first time the play would be heard, it would be in German. I was present in Heidelberg for the premiere of the play, which is called Patriotism and which is set in an undefined location. I wondered as I sat there with a predominantly German audience if anything at all marked the play out as an Irish one, besides the programme note.

As these experiences watching my work abroad continued, I began to accept that the more specific the human experience documented in a play, the more universal its appeal. The three teenagers dealing with their lost innocence in rural Ireland in Blue were relevant to audiences in Athens, New Jersey, or New Zealand. Orpheus Road, written for Paines Plough in 2002 about the young love between a Catholic boy and an atheist girl in Belfast during the Troubles, was quickly translated, produced, and published in Romania. I have never even been to Romania and it often strikes me as strange that my work has visited places I have yet to see.

I continue to write predominantly for an international audience and am currently under commission from several theatre companies that are based outside Ireland. I still believe that to a huge extent it is necessary for my own best practice that I deliberately not think of the audience or of what they expect from my work. The moment I begin to think about what the audience might want or not want is a dangerous one, as with it comes the natural second-guessing of the artistic impulse. This impulse is the seed from which the play grows and it needs a certain amount of time and space free from expectation and judgement.

I have a natural affinity with the kind of art which considers less what the audience wish to see and perhaps more what the artist believes they need to see. I don’t say this from any position of self-importance, or from a belief that the artist is a prophet; I am merely speaking of personal preference. I respond to work which attempts to hold a mirror up to society and reflect it back onto itself, exposing both the favourable and unfavourable elements. In an entertainment industry that measures success in terms of box office sales, I believe it is important to continue to create this type of theatre. As more and more of the general public seem drawn to escapism and entertainment at the level of reality TV shows, it is important to me to produce plays which I find personally stimulating, and which encourage audiences to think about the world they are in and the society they make up.

The themes which concern me at present are in some way expressed by these words from the comedian Bill Hicks:

Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired.

Go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here, here’s American Gladiators.

Watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators; here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America – you are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!⁸⁰⁰

I am interested in the concept that people eventually end up trading their voice and sense of empowerment for economic prosperity and a peaceful socio-political environment. And I am also interested in looking at those individuals who are not willing to make this exchange, either consciously or unconsciously, and in asking what happens to those who do not or who cannot conform. I try not to think if these themes are of interest to whatever audience will eventually watch these plays. All I know is that they are fuelling my artistic impulse at present.

In conclusion, I would say that the notion of audience expectation and the expected audience is one which I return to often, because it challenges me to redefine which box I fit into. The more expectation there is placed upon me to write a particular type of play, the more determined I feel to write the work that I want to see myself. I do not feel limited by the labels of Irish, mixed-race, or female; nor do I believe that my being able to be described as these things should indicate the tone or subject matter of the work I have created. I began writing for theatre because I wanted to create engaging stories, which attempt in some way to show a glimpse of the human experience, an experience, which I believe, transcends gender or ethnicity or language. All I expect from my audience is that they might take the time to come and see my work, and all I hope that they expect from me is a play written out of genuine need and desire to document some small element of the human experience.

Extract From: Irish Drama: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan (2012)

Cross Reference: Reception, Globalisation

See Also: Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi