We first produced Alice in Wonderland in 1998, an adaptation we commissioned from Jocelyn Clarke and it is that adaption of the story that we are using now to produce the final production of our 25th anniversary programme here in Sligo at Blue Raincoat.

Since we began the company in 1991 we have produced work in many different styles of theatre and using a number of different starting objectives. We have bought plays off the shelf in the theatre sections of book shops (the starting point recommended by Peter Brook); had plays written for the company by company members, commissioned writers to create plays for the company, devised from an idea, devised from no idea (not recommended), commissioned adaptations of books that we have chosen and also commissioned writers on ideas we were interested in exploring. Over a hundred productions and 25 years later, after many mistakes and misdirections, the manner in which we develop our work today is, as one would expect, a conglomeration or accretion of the approaches that have worked, taken from the above.

Our impulse has always been to experiment, but, as Etienne Decroux pointed out to would-be explorers “the painter can burn a painting but the play opens, the fresh results of experiment for all to see”. Experimenting might be exciting, but it’s definitely no fun in the pub on opening night when the show hasn’t worked. Repeated insistence on an avenue of experimentation that you can’t fully realise is a sure way of losing your audience. So, it has been very important for us to develop a strategy to negotiate the fine line between the experimental impulse and the realities of needing to produce a play on time that will engage an audience. Today that strategy is embodied in the choices we make across a rolling two-year programming cycle for the company. In the current cycle there are three strands, new work, the experimental aspects of Yeats work and repertoire pieces. What has most relevance to us, is that the decisions we make in each of these strands have relevance to the other parts of the programming. In each strand the inclusions we make must leave room for the development of themes and style of theatre we are working on. The new work strand will have the most scope and the other two strands feed into the new work either in terms of technical or theme development.

Through being very conscious of all three strands we find ways to develop the form/style of the theatre we are working on, while also saying the things we want to say, the way to say them, and indeed in some cases find out what it is we want to say.

Example:

Our “new work” strand has been approached by the company in many different ways. On about eight occasions in the last 20 years we have selected a work of literature and adapted it for the stage. The first time we did this was the original production of Alice where we found we had a structure that while rich in ideas was none the less uncomplicated in terms of language. The latter allowed us play in the visual and physical aspects of theatre that interested us then – without suffocating the text, a mistake which we had made a number of times since we had started the company. That production was a key moment for us because it was probably the first time that we felt we were able to do the theatre we wanted to do, and the people that came to see it were happy that we had done it our way. Finding the correct balance between the various theatre forms has been an uppermost priority ever since.

We have since adapted Through the Looking Glass, a trilogy of works from Flann O’Brien as well as biographical pieces on Donal Crowhurst, Yuri Gagarin, and Earnest Shackleton, roughly one every two years. It’s taken us a long time but our relationship with these classics have slowly guided us to a place where we feel comfortable with that particularly annoying problem....... what to do and how to do it.

And we do poor old Yeats – the arch experimenter of Irish theatre – just for the technical challenge.

Blue Raincoat presents Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, adapted by Jocelyn Clarke and directed by Niall Henry, until November 5th at The Factory Performance Space, Sligo. blueraincoat.com