For 25 years Rough Magic has been ripping up the Irish theatrical rule book and its weekend programme celebrated an illustrious history and bright future in fine dramatic fashion

ROUGH MAGIC Theatre Company marked the anniversary of its foundation last weekend with four days of theatrical celebration at the Project Arts Centre, its "surrogate home for the last 25 years", as artistic director Lynne Parker put it in one of several addresses to the gathered crowds. On Thursday night, a live version of RTÉ Radio One's Arts Show, presented by Vincent Woods, brought together many of the founder members and key players in Rough Magic's history for an intimate trip down memory lane.

However, it was through a glimpse at its back catalogue of work and a sneak-preview of the company’s future plans that Rough Magic reminded us of its pervasive influence on Irish theatre since the 1980s.

Showcasing a series of works-in-progress and re-imagined Rough Magic classics, a faithful audience, composed both of Rough Magic collaborators and general theatre-goers, filed in and out of the Project throughout the weekend, lured back every night by the sheer quality of talent that had been drawn together to lay testament to the company’s extraordinary achievements over the last 25 years.

An ensemble of 26 actors shape-shifted between shows, with Rough Magic founding member Darragh Kelly and actor Rory Keenan managing to squeeze in four leading performances over three nights. Other long-time collaborators, such as Owen Roe, Declan Conlon, Michelle Forbes and Louis Lovett, were joined by more recent Rough Magic performers, such as Aoife Duffin and Hilary O’Shaughnessy, and new faces Sarah Greene and Nyree Yergainharsian.

The rehearsed-reading format gave a real insight into the extraordinary acting talents on show, as the austere, unadorned backdrop of Project’s upstairs stage was transformed by the sheer power of gesture and voice.

The tone for the weekend was set on Friday night with the programme's striking blend of new work and Rough Magic classics in the performance of a stunning modern version of Jean Racine's Phèdre and a one-off performance of Arthur Riordan's play The Emergency Session, both of which used music as an integral part of their conception and yet in absolutely different ways. Hilary Fannin's caustic translation of Phèdre, itself a version of Euripides's Greek classic, startled the audience with its frank sexual themes and its modern resonance. Ellen Cranitch's sensuous sea-shore score, drawn from Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1733 opera, was awash with the sound of the seaside setting, infusing the excerpted reading with salty tension.

Among the musical sextet, Robbie Harris’s scratching drum-skin percussion, Cranitch’s muted discordant flute and Fionnuala Gill’s languid soprano, in particular, promised a thrilling climax to this work-in-progress, which is mooted for full production in October 2010.

Meanwhile, Arthur Riordan's 1992 play The Emergency Session, starring Riordan himself as MC DeV, set the conservative social policies of Éamon de Valera in satirical context to the pulsing rhythms of a "hip-hop Hibernian beat". Emerging from the shadows in a formal black tie, top-hat, and white high-top basketball boots, the "all-Irish, half-Spanish, Brooklyn boy" regaled the audience with catchy numbers such as Neutral More or Less, Gung Ho Gael a Go Go, My Árasand Eire 2016 AD, which presented a prescient vision of the future in Ireland, as well as a pithy commentary on the current economic situation.

Riordan's latest work-in-progress for Rough Magic, a rhythmic musical version of Ibsen's bucolic fantasy Peer Gynt, was also showcased on Sunday evening, and music continued to be a theme in the presentation of Hélène Montague's ambitious score for Tom Murphy's operatic melodrama The Informer, which set the dark inner-city Dublin scene for Murphy's play against an evocative filmic soundtrack.

MUSIC ALSO emerged as a key theme in Declan Hughes’s 1991 play Digging for Fire, which was given slick direction by Tom Creed and included a soundtrack that both placed the play firmly in its early 1990s setting, yet allowed it to transcend that moment in its harrowing finale.

Hughes himself expressed surprise that the play spoke so well to the contemporary moment, as did younger members of the audience, who firmly identified with the Ireland portrayed in Hughes’s play: the ineffectual government, the pervasive tabloid talk-show culture, the timeless themes of youthful idealism, the disillusion of dashed hopes and dreams, and the contradictions of an anonymous Irish identity dressed up in borrowed American garb. Hilary O’Shaughnessy, in particular, gave a moving performance as the central character Claire, holding nothing back despite the informal format. Other readings, of Pom Boyd’s 1994 play Down Onto Blue and Gina Moxley’s 1995 play Danti-Dan, directed by current and graduate directors of Rough Magic’s Seeds mentor scheme, also wore their years well.

The biggest surprise of the weekend, however, was the rehearsed reading of Boomtown, written by Pom Boyd, Declan Hughes and Arthur Riordan, and first performed at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1999 to mass critical opprobrium.

According to one contemporary commentator, it “received the sort of reviews that theatre companies have nightmares about: definitely more Black Magic than the Rough Magic we’ve become used to”. Yet in the assured hands of director Darragh McKeon, the sleazy, sordid Boomtown world sizzled with contemporary resonance.

The absurd stage directions, which were read alongside the action, seemed to belie any possible success in full production, and yet the images of bloated publicans Mammy and Daddy, tearing human bodies apart in the back of a van, exploded powerfully in the audience’s imagination. Even in failure there seems to be redemption for Rough Magic: sordid, yes; “an extraordinary failure” – as Declan Hughes called it – perhaps; but maybe it was a play that just came before its time.

As the performances gave way to celebrations of a more bacchanalian kind, the original company members, those who have come and gone since, and those still working for Rough Magic gathered together to reminisce on the experiences of the last 25 years and to look forward to the next 25.

If the work on show this weekend is anything to go by, the future looks set to be as exciting and illustrious as the past has been.