Passive aggression

Focus THEATRE GOES ON tour at the end of August with their latest production, Marsha N orrman's 1983 Pulitzer-prize-winning 'Night, Mother, a play about two women dealing with the decision of one of them to commit suicide before the night is out. Jessie the daughter (Deirdre O'Connell), is determined to go gently into that good night; Mama (Ena May), by contrast: means to go screeching when her time comes. Their clash has for its immediate context the simple activity of putting the house in order. Its larger context, and the interpretation of the play, are more difficult to determine. At one level it seems a variation on the Beckettian theme that it matters little where you get off the bus "because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it's the same place when I step down to it." At another level it could be read as a study in passive aggression worthy the pen of Albee:
Jessie will kill herself, but she will effectively kill her mother off first.

At a third, more comprehensive, level it is a kind of morality play, a reworking of Everyman with, as its particular.contemporary target, Ameriican necrophobia: sub specia aeterniitatis there is nothing Mama can place in the scale to outweigh Jessie's reevolver. Whatever its interpretation, however, it is a play ideally suited to one of the most prominent of Focus's peculiar virtues - its ability to express the playwright's darker purposes through an intense realisation of ordinary time, ordinary place, ordiinary people.

Focus, now in its sixteenth year, has a remarkable record, and not merely for survival. Though tradiitionally associated with those playywrights it performs better than almost any other Dublin theatre - Ibsen and Tchekhov - it is nonetheless extremely wide-ranging and Catholic in its prooductions, which include well over fifty plays by modern authors from at least ten different countries. As surprising, too, are the actors it has helped to form: Gabriel Byrne, Olwen F ouere, Tom Hickey, Ena May, Johnnie Murphy, Rebecca Schull are but some of the many actors who at one time or another have enjoyed the advantages of a Focus training.

WHAT ARE THOSE ADVaNtages? It is instructive to look at exactly what goes into the 5-6 week rehearsal period of a Focus play. It begins with simple readings - at whose apparent dullness, whose total lack of Thespian flair, the naive listener would be appalled. But the actors are not concerned with rhetoric, with what figures they will cut, or to what addvantage they will appear eventually. Rather, the text is the respected means through which they work to discover what the characters are like as emboodied in one another. It is a company theatre, where the actors look at, not through, each other. By definition the star system cannot exist.

Then follows a series of character studies, five or six "off-text" improviisations on each individual character's experiences, habits, relationships, as are hinted at or directly mentioned in the text as having existed or taken place prior to the action. Though all acting be a matter of masks, here the mask is created from within, not put on in the wings; so that when the actor steps on the stage, he does so with a past that is inevitably leading him to this present. Consequently even the hum blest part in a Focus production reveals an intensity and conviction equal to those of the larger roles. Nor need the audience ever suffer the emmbarrassment of watching the un connvinced actor going blindly through his or her motions.

From improvisations off text, the actors move to those on text, to exxplore the intricacy and quality of the play's various "beats" - the motifs, whether contained in person, object or relation, that determine the play's rhythm and texture. Their area physical and emotional - is defined through words and actions which, while not necessarily in the text, are yet consonant with the text. The actor's perennial nightmare, then, the mental blackout, when it occurs in Focus goes unnoticed - the hole is patched with exactly the same mateerial, and the patch shows no edges.

Through all these stages, including the final one where the text itself at last becomes the medium, the actor has a wide variety of exercises upon which to draw as he becomes aware of potential deficiencies and weak spots. It is studio work - animal studies, colour studies, psychological gestures, the personal and private moment, sensory recollections, effective memory exercises. The method of approach varies, the goal remains the same: to tap every available source in the actor's own experience to consolidate the experience of the character he is to become, his time and place. It gets hot in Focus, but if it's cold in the text, it's cold on stage.

In fine, the basis of Focus is sheer hard work - informed and informing - which issues forth in acting that involves the audience less in the tradiitional suspension of disbelief than in simple belief itself. No other theatre in the city can boast of such a tradiition, with which 'Night, Mother is entirely in keeping.

'Night Mother will be performed in Limerick, at the Belltable Arts Centre, from 27 August to 1 September; in Sligo, at the Hawk's Well, from 4 to 8 September.