Co-founder of Blue Raincoat theatre company and new father Niall Henry is making ambitious plans that will ensure his creative legacy
NIALL HENRY, the energetic artistic director of Blue Raincoat, is even more exuberant than usual. There are reasons for the vigour of his rapid-fire conversation, frequently exploding into a hearty laugh, but while he is keen to talk about the current transition of the theatre company he co-founded in Sligo in 1991, and its new wildly ambitious programme of development, right now there is no concern more pressing than the birth of his first child.
"She's beautiful," he writes of his baby daughter just days after her birth in an e-mail before our interview. After we speak, he inquires by text if it would be unprofessional to "try to get a mention for Phoebe Alice" (she is named after the paragon of innocence in JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye). Clearly in the throes of besotted parenthood, and determined to share it with the world, Henry's position is reflected in the life cycle of his maturing theatre company, one that, until recently, never planned on reaching middle age.
Of Blue Raincoat's five-member full-time acting ensemble, another is an expecting parent, one is soon to be married and another has just gotten engaged, "so maybe it's in the wind", Henry laughs.
The other gale of change will have a longer period of gestation. The Blue Raincoat Theatre Resource 2007-2011, a landmark development intended to create "a theatre resource of national significance", has now been underway for a year. When the new Blue Raincoat Library opens next month, a modest space in the Factory Performance Space filled with books devoted to the company's metier - visual and physical theatre - it will complete the first phase of steadily more ambitious plans.
Next comes the implementation of an annual workshop and lecture, then the publishing leg, Blue Raincoat Press, then a touring facility, Blue Raincoat Mobile Theatre, and finally the establishment of a professional theatre school in Sligo. The last of these objectives, though admirable, sounds like the most aspirational plan since the pie first met the sky. But Henry is unapologetic about thinking big. For a company long held as a boldly individual group, grafting European physical performance on to the landscape of Irish literary theatre, these seem to be the first steps of transforming a regional independent theatre company into an institution.
"Probably," admits Henry. "Purposefully, actually. Although hopefully not in a bad way. I think it's motivated by two things: the first is responsibility, the second is fear."
The responsibility is to a company that "happened by accident" when, as a graduate from two Parisian mime schools (Marcel Marceau's École Internationale de Mimodrame and Theatre de L'Ange Fou's School of Corporeal Mime), Henry was approached by his schoolfriend, Malcolm Hamilton, who proposed setting up a company in Sligo.
"I suppose I was sort of half-interested," Henry recalls, "although I didn't have moving back to Sligo on my agenda. But having finished school, walking around Paris and speaking French, you still felt like an Anglophone really. Even though I'd been there five years studying, it would have taken 10 years more before you got anywhere professionally. At least, that was the sensation."
Henry, Hamilton and Fionnuala Gallagher (who has since departed the company) acquired a theatre space on the advice of Red Kettle's Jim Nolan and Druid's Garry Hynes.
"This was pre-Celtic Tiger of course," says Henry, "so in Sligo there were an awful lot of old empty warehouses. We got a 36-year lease on an old derelict building - you would say derelict by today's standards, but it wasn't derelict then." (Either way, the building was substantially renovated in 2000.)
For the first few years of Blue Raincoat's existence, everything was based on trial and error. "I had never directed before and Malcolm had never written before," says Henry, "so while he was writing plays and I was learning to direct, we just did loads of classic plays: Equus, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, all of those types of things."
WITH HAMILTON'S FIRST PLAY, A Vinegar Fog, in 1995, the aesthetic of the company began to crystallise; a theatre that soldered lyrical displays of movement to flexible texts.
"I was always attracted to visual theatre where movement was essential. Nonetheless 'straight theatre' was often more dramatic," Henry says. "I suppose the naive theory at the time was that surely there must be a happy medium - or another way."
One of the few theatre companies in Ireland to establish a full-time ensemble, Blue Raincoat recognised that its development depended on a group commitment.
"It was clear from the very beginning," says Henry. "Otherwise I wouldn't have been interested. In my experience all the great movements around the continent had come from ensembles. Without exception. If there was any chance of the west of Ireland producing a theatre company at all, or to end up doing very consistent high-quality developmental work, that would have to be the case."
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to perceive the evolution of Blue Raincoat in specific stages. "In the beginning you're always doing this very blind," Henry says. "You say we'll all get together and stick together, but that's like saying 'We'll get married and live happily ever after'. The relationship has to progress, hopefully in healthy ways."
For years, the company's progress was founded on exploration, as performers Ciaran McCauley, John Carty, Sandra O'Malley and Kellie Hughes - all trained in corporeal mime - familiarised themselves with further European methods, guided by their own curiosity.
"We didn't have a clue what Grotowski did," confesses Henry, "but we'd go away and read a book and then copy what Grotowski did. We'd sort of take a methodology in the abstract, try to understand it and go down that direction."
Throughout this exploratory period, the company used classic texts as "a safety net", mastering their emerging physical discipline while the robust verse of Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Dream cushioned the experimentation from a hard landing.
"That was the beginning of the vocabulary within the company," Henry says. "Although there were many successes and failures within that time, I think where that worked, where we hit a balance in a true sense for the first time, was with the Alice plays."
Those plays - Alice in Wonderland in 1999 and Alice Through the Looking Glass the following year - came courtesy of a collaboration with writer and dramaturg Jocelyn Clarke, who adapted the novels of Lewis Carroll to supply an invigorating textual underpinning for Henry's bold physical interpretation. Transferring later to the Peacock Theatre, the plays also helped to secure the company attention beyond Sligo.
Since then there has been an increased focus on developing new plays and adaptations, such as Hamilton's The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, now part of the company's expanding repertory of plays, together with Clarke's recent adaptation of The Third Policeman, due to undertake a national tour this year. Meanwhile, Henry's recent exploration of Eugène Ionesco sees The Bald Soprano revived in the Samuel Beckett Theatre this week, before travelling to festivals in Bucharest and Bulgaria next month with its companion piece, The Chairs.
"A lot of people have been here for a long time - over 10 years - but the time will come when we have to go," Henry reflects. "Maybe in 10 years' time, in 20 years' time . . . Theatre companies can be quite personality-driven: if the key person goes, it can easily fall apart."
HENCE THE FIRST effort to demarcate a phase for Blue Raincoat, structured around the four-year plan to create the Resource, an effort born out of conversations between Henry and Hamilton to "piece together a theatrical infrastructure around the theatre company . . . to build something that can be passed on." Whether or not the company's reach exceeds its grasp remains to be seen.
Currently funded to the tune of €330,880, Blue Raincoat already makes a reasonable amount go a long way, paying an equal wage to each of its 12 company members. Building a library has been made possible by a grant from Sligo Leader Partnership, while Henry admits that implementing the workshop is an extension of something the company already does. "After that it gets complicated."
With the end last year of the Trinity College degree in acting studies, which revealed the huge costs involved in actor training, the establishment of a professional theatre school by an independent theatre company - mooted as a one-year postgraduate course in "performance through movement" - by 2011 sounds fanciful. If Blue Raincoat meets four out of the Theatre Resource's five targets "it will be fantastic," concedes Henry.
"There's an element of the unknown to it," he concludes. "In the same way that there was an element of the unknown when we first looked at getting this derelict building and developing a theatre company within it. Certain things seem sensible and certain things don't. This feels like a sensible investment of energy. If it all worked out ideally you'd have a very strong theatre organisation in the north-west of Ireland, and that will reap its own benefits."
Ultimately though, like any caring parents, the members of Blue Raincoat are working towards ensuring that their creation will outlive them, nursing the same hopes of any maturing Irish theatre company: that some day this will be someone else's baby. ...
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The Bald Soprano runs until Mar 29 in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, TCD
" Theatre companies can be quite personality-driven: if the key person goes, it can easily fall apart
