Arthur Riordan is a veteran playwright and actor, and a founder member of Rough Magic Theatre Company, currently celebrating their 40th anniversary. For RTE Culture, Arthur revisits how his beloved Rough Magic began four decades ago...
I had a strange, out-of-body experience in Temple Bar a couple of years back. Granted, that's not an unheard-of occurrence in that locale, but this was a stone-cold sober, broad daylight epiphany. It was during that Covid period when lock-down had eased, but the streets were still empty, and Temple Bar was a ghost-town.
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Listen: RTÉ Arena celebrates Rough Magic at 40
I’d come in to take part in a play reading that morning, and during lunch break I wandered, masked, down East Essex Street. First, I ran into a composer I’d worked with, then an actor I knew, each working on their own projects; later I was going to see a work-in-progress show in the New Theatre. All this artistic activity, and otherwise not a soul on the streets.
That’s when it struck me that this was what the area used to be like in the mid-Eighties. Back then, Temple Bar had been earmarked to be a bus station, and having fallen into neglect, had become by default a hive of artists and activists. Decrepit old warehouses and storerooms were repurposed as makeshift artists’ studios, recording studios, and rehearsal spaces. Most importantly, there was the Project Arts Centre, which Rough Magic would pretty much colonise for a few years.
Rough Magic was formed in 1984 by seven of us, just out of college. Two directors, Lynne Parker and Declan Hughes; our producer, Siobhan Bourke; and four actors: Anne Byrne, Helene Montague, Stanley Townsend and myself. Like similar companies formed around the same time, we saw a staid, conservative theatre scene, and reckoned we could bring a much-needed vibrancy, a left-wing voice, and, you know, all that good stuff. Sure, we were young and arrogant and entitled, but it turns out we were right too.
And we had luck on our side: the people at the Project wanted to fill the space and we wanted to put on plays. So we put on lots of them, rehearsing by day and performing by night, plays by Caryl Churchill, Pinter, Brecht, Mamet, Barker and Brenton, many of them Irish premieres, along with our own takes on Shakespeare, Restoration comedies and Jacobean tragedy. It's possible to maintain a prodigious output if everyone's willing to work for shares of the ticket sales.
This was in the old Project, not the lovely sleek purpose-built theatre that stands in the same spot today, but an old, converted warehouse, one sizeable section of which had recently been burnt out and left that way. There was often an entertaining tension between whatever glossy, moneyed lives were being portrayed onstage, and the highly visible plastic bucket hung directly above, to catch the leaks from the galvanised roof.
Given our fevered work-rate (we mounted thirteen plays in our first twelve months), it wasn’t long before there was a buzz around us. Audiences came to expect innovation and excitement from a Rough Magic show. For about five years, the four founder-member actors appeared in almost every play, along with regulars like Darragh Kelly, Pauline McLynn, Anne Enright, Martin Murphy, Jonathan White, Joe Taylor, Peter Hanly, and the late Sean McDermot. Working with what amounted to a hugely talented repertory company was, for me, an invaluable experience, and one which has significantly coloured everything I’ve done since.
Gradually, we began to produce our own work. Declan was first with a beautifully dark adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman In White, in the course of which Stanley would saunter onstage with mice scurrying up and down his body, in and out of his costume. Declan went on to write many plays, among them Digging For Fire. It was an electrifying feeling, performing that play to an audience of our generation, and seeing them see themselves portrayed on stage for the first time. Another play from that time was Donal O’Kelly’s mighty one-person show, Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son, which I went and watched every night for a week, just to soak it in.
Rough Magic have commissioned many writers over the years, including myself, though my kick-start came when Anne Enright, who had moved on to helm RTÉ’s late-night talkshow Nighthawks, encouraged me to write TV comedy sketches. I did, and that was the impetus I needed. Soon, I would be sitting across from Gina Moxley late at night in the Rough Magic office, both of us giggling manically as we struggled with our first Rough Magic commissions.
and Rory Nolan in Improbable Frequency (Pic: Ros Kavanagh)
Over the past few years, my main involvement with the company has been as a writer, and my work has been very much shaped by that relationship, especially by the shared experience, vision and working shorthand that I've developed with Lynne Parker. My musical, Improbable Frequency for instance, couldn’t have come out of any other environment.
Temple Bar has changed. It’s a cultural quarter now, so lots of tourist pubs. But standing there, two years ago, I got a glimpse of what it used to be like, when we founded a theatre company. And coincidentally, later that evening, down the road in Smock Alley theatre, there was a new play going on. A Rough Magic production.
Rough Magic mark 40 years with a weekend of events at Project Arts Centre, Dublin on February 9th and 10th - find out more here - and a brand new play at the Abbey Theatre, Children of the Sun by Hilary Fannin, this April - find out more here.
