Bush Moukarzels response to Aaron Monaghon
I am delighted the Bush Moukarzel has written the below response to Aaron Monaghon’s recent comments. I was very upset when I read the article, but I couldnt quite articulate why. I have huge respect for Aaron. I think he is one of the most compelling performers around. I am sure from the work I have seen him do that he is someone who knows how to work hard at your art, at your CRAFT. He knows how much that means to him and how much it means to people so I was hurt to read him be so throwaway, unkind, offensive and disrespectful to the WORK of his fellow artists.
For the last four years I have been making shows with people playing versions of themselves with not 40, but hundreds of people in the audience. Young, hip people, old people, people from all over this city, people from different backgrounds, people who have never been in the theatre before. That work has been about alot more than theatre itself but that has a part of it, as Bush says below, the theatre is life. So if I am taking this a little personally, thats because I have been breaking my back to serve a vision of a theatre that can change the world, by talking about whats going on in our society, with as diverse a representation of that society sitting in the same room in the audience. I have been working very hard at that with very little tax players money. I dont know who the artists aaron is slating are, because he doesnt name them so maybe I dont have a right to take it as personally.
Theatre is in crisis. But we will get nowhere by being divisive, ignorant and rude to each other. I am shocked that a fellow artist could be so dismissive of work they dont understand. We will get nowhere by being petty and publishing insignificant ill thought out dressing room chat in our national newspapers.
Over to Bush- for those of you who havent seen it.
Mr. Monaghan in his recent interview in the Irish Times (29.11.12) articulates what he sees to be a crisis in Irish theatre. He rightly calls for “real open dialogue” guided by the need to be “honest”. With respect to that calling I wish to defend what I presume to be the type of theatre he nominates as being responsible for the aforementioned crisis.
According to Mr. Monaghan the type of theatre responsible for the current crisis is that which involves people “playing a version of themselves” as well as performances that are “about the theatre itself” (as opposed to being about the world presumably?) where there are “only 40 people in the audience”, an audience made up of “very particular, young, hip” people. He counteracts this type of theatre with the work he is involved in - principally in his role as a long standing actor for Druid Theatre, as well as performer/artistic director of his own Cavan-based company Livin’ Dred. In reference to his own company he applauds the fact that he was dissuaded from making “experimental work” and that the company is now orientated toward “crowd-pleasing” theatre.
I wish to challenge this picture of these two opposing forces in contemporary Irish theatre, not of course as a personal attack aimed at Mr. Monaghan, but as a way of entering a conversation and speaking up for a type of theatre misrepresented in his interview.
Firstly, the notion of actors playing versions of themselves has a tradition that extends right to the start of 20th century theatre and the experiments against naturalism that were typified through the work of Meyerhold and Piscator (and later Brecht). The driving force behind these experiments may have originally been a wholesale rejection of the psychological method of Stanislavski, but have developed into more of a meditation and examination on the nature of acting and illusion - whether its possible or even desirable to be someone else. Similarly, performances which purport to be “about theatre” are concerned with highlighting the context and form of the storytelling to better understand narrative outside of traditional sympathetic-immersive identification with the performance. Of course, this depends on the quality: at best it is intelligent illumination, at worst it is self-referential to the point of nullity. But questions of quality should not lead to a wholesale rejection of the technique.
It is hard to know what Mr. Monaghan is referring to with regard to the shows for a hip audience of 40 people because, in spite of being described by the interviewer as “determined to get himself in to trouble” with his outspoken views, Mr. Monaghan never names an example of the type of theatre he is criticising. Work by practitioners such as Dylan Tighe - whose project The Trailer of Bridget Dinnigan involving a cast of Traveller-women - and THEATREclub - whose project Heroin reached communities not usually drawn to the theatre - are both examples of projects with people “playing versions of themselves”. Both productions reached audiences that are often excluded from the mainstream of Irish theatre. At any rate, if the issue is of this type of theatre being overly subsidised, Mr. Monaghan has no real cause of alarm: it is well known that the majority of funding goes to the Abbey theatre and Druid - institutions engaged with the kind of theatre he believes in.
However, his endorsement of what he calls crowd-pleasing work evokes the old distinction between commercially-orientated theatre (which gives people what they want) and the experimental theatre which aims to give people what they don’t know they want. It is a distinction that Howard Barker describes as the difference between ‘the theatre’ and 'the art of the theatre’. These do not have to be at war with each other - but a theatrical landscape that favours one at the expense of the other really would be a culture in crisis.
Mr. Monaghan’s argument seems to have its focus on Irish theatre, presumably talking about the needs and cultural legacy of this country. He rightly champions the work of writers such as Martin McDonagh and Tom Murphy (particularly Murphy’s masterpiece A Whistle in the Dark). It just needs to be added that experimental avant-garde aesthetics are not outside of the Irish tradition and have a forebear in one of this country’s greatest masters. It was James Joyce’s insistence on looking away from what he saw to be the cul-de-sac of the 'Celtic Revival’ and towards the European avant-garde that influenced and shaped his masterpiece Ulysses. The concerns of experimental theatre are incorrectly aligned to the “young” and “hip” - terms suggesting fashionable transience - and are more correctly situated in a long-standing tradition of art and culture.