The Hirsch conundrum: are all the best young directors working in Newfoundland? - John Hirsch Prize winners Danielle Irvine and Jillian Keiley

INAUGURATED BY THE CANADA COUNCIL IN 1996 TO RECOGNIZE ACCOMPLISHMENT IN BOTH Anglophone and Francophone theatre communities, the biennial John Hirsch Prize for emerging directors has been awarded four times. Two of the four Anglophone prize-winners come from Newfoundland. Both are women. Even while competing for the limited number of theatre and film jobs available in and around St. John's, Danielle Irvine and Jillian Keiley remain close friends and theatrical collaborators.

Keiley received the award first -- in 1998. She was also first to make her professional debut in St. John's, directing a zany project developed in the final year of her BFA programme at York University. In Your Dreams Freud (1994) was an absurdist musical comedy, blending Dr. Seuss, Freudian psychiatry and classical mythology, featuring a singing and dancing Greek chorus, a game-show host, randy university students with their Aristotelian professor, and a theatrical facilitator demonstrating that incest screws up your DNA. It was quite an opening statement.

Since then, under the company flag of the provocatively styled Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, of which she is founding Artistic Director, Keiley has presented audiences with exciting and innovative shows that her co-prize-winner calls "incredibly creative, heart-stopping, overpowering, and sense-filling."

Constantly testing performance modes and theatrical boundaries, Keiley brings to the job a radical imagination, together with a penchant for large-cast, technically demanding productions. Whether in collaboration with playwright and actor Robert Chafe (Under Wraps: A Spoke Opera, 1996; Empty Girl, 1998; Signals, 2000; Emoticons, 2001), or with her own wordless, metronomic performance concept (The Cheat, 1995), or with a pop megamusical (Jesus Christ Superstar, 1998), she has created a complex system of scored and choreographed performance called kaleidography, which she has taught and demonstrated in Vancouver, Calgary, Banff and Halifax.

The recipient of the John Hirsch Prize in 2000, Danielle Irvine is less theatrically flamboyant than Keiley -- although this generalization was belied by the pyrotechnics of The Who's Tommy (1999) and by her exquisite staging of Ed Kavanagh's children's story, Amanda Greenleaf and the Spell of the Water Witch (2000), in which mesmeric underwater effects were created by balletic movement and evocative lighting design. Lighting is one of Irvine's fortes.

A self-confessed people-watcher, Irvine seeks out emotional authenticity, while establishing the complexity and subtlety of human interactions. She draws a nuanced truth out of her actors. After majoring in Anthropology and English at Memorial University, Irvine was one of only four Anglophone students admitted in 1994 to the directing programme of the National Theatre School of Canada. On her return from Montreal, co-founder and Artistic Director of First Light Productions, she directed Place of First Light, an account of the history of the Wabana Mines on Bell Island -- amongst the world's largest producers of iron ore until their closure in 1966. Part documentary, part human drama, part guided tour, the production was performed for three summers (1997 to 99) in and around the abandoned mine workings.

So, what accounts for two prizewinning directors emerging from a provincial population base of less than half a million, with an audience base in and around the capital city of no more than 150,000?

A long tradition of cultural self-sufficiency, fostered by geographical isolation, has created strong drivers of theatrical excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador. Amateur theatre thrives in Labrador City, Corner Brook, Grand Falls, Gander, and St. John's. The annual provincial drama festival -- running for seven nights this year - showcases community groups, many of whose members are amateur only in the financial sense. In high schools and junior highs, theatre arts and drama clubs flourish. Memorial University offers a BFA (Theatre) program at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook, while the Department of English on the St. John's campus offers a theatre/drama specialization, which first introduced Irvine to the craft of directing. The collective theatre movement and the existence of the LSPU Hall in downtown St. John's have also played no small part in creating the physical and psychological conditions for theatre to flourish.

Currently, much of the work of Keiley and Irvine comes out of the LSPU Hall, where Keiley served for six years as assistant animateur and artistic associate. Irvine is a former chair of the Board of Directors. Both acknowledge the vital contribution of their theatrical predecessors, who established and maintained the artist-run space where indigenous theatre could grow.

Before their involvement with the Hall, though, the two directors cut their teeth on Shakespeare. In Memorial's Reid Theatre, Keiley was a lanky, baffled Helena in MIJN Drama's production of A Midsummer Night Dream (1990). She remembers the director lining up female auditioners to compare their height, since Hermia calls Helena a painted maypole. Keiley was the tallest. She got the part.

Thereafter, in summer breaks from York's BFA program, Keiley maintained contact with Shakespeare, as assistant director on MUN Drama productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona (1991), Romeo and Juliet (1992), As You Like It (1993), and Much Ado About Nothing (1994), being succeeded in that capacity by Irvine in productions of The Comedy of Errors (1995) and The Taming of the Shrew (1996).

Earlier, while still an undergraduate, Irvine had cofounded Dick's Kids, a company that initiated outdoor production of Shakespeare in and around St. John's, starting with The Tempest, performed on the cliffs of Logy Bay in the summer of 1993. Given the notorious unpredictability of the local climate, this venture was courageous to the point of lunacy. But it worked. Open-air Shakespeare, performed through July and August by a successor group (Shakespeare by the Sea), is now a fixture in the St. John's theatre calendar. And this summer Irvine has been invited to Strafford to work with David Latham as assistant director of Two Noble Kinsmen.

Fittingly enough, the two directors-to-be first met while working on a Shakespeare production (Romeo and Juliet) and they have collaborated on two others -- a modern-dress, gender-blind version of Julius Caesar (1995), produced and lit by Irvine, directed by Keiley, and a highly original version of A Midsummer Night Dream (1998). Conceptualised and directed by Keiley, the Dream was performed as part of Irvine's Place of First Light Festival -- in the collar of the Number 4 mine shaft on Bell Island.

The playing space was too small, sight lines were poor, seating was sorely limited and sorely uncomfortable. Nevertheless, played in front of an oversized, chain-link, spider's web, on which Puck and Oberon clambered, costumed in black, embossed with fluorescent designs picked out by black light, it was an unforgettable Dream, dominated by elemental fairies emerging from absolute, subterranean darkness.

Neither Irvine nor Keiley belongs to the whip-and-chair school of directing. In a close-knit theatre community, many of their actors are also friends, whose friendship they manage to retain, even if they cannot always cast them. But both admit their ultimate loyalty is to their audiences -- to giving them that unique frisson of awe, delight and recognition that is the raison d'etre of live theatre.

Keiley most often does it with elaborate choreography and striking acoustic and scenographic effects. Irvine more frequently arrives by way of sensitive direction that locates authentic human connections -- between actor and actor, between actors and audience.

Keiley's shows are characteristically design-driven. They can be visually and technically stunning. The design of Empty Girl, for example, transformed Chafe's kinky, naturalistic script about a carnival side-show into a surreal son et lumiere performative experience, with action in front of a psychedelic Big Top being shadowed by silhouettes of back-lit actors performing behind the scrim.

Her productions can be tough on actors, as she is the first to admit, because the dominating, even outlandish, designs are so challenging. Actors may be required to perform in a maze, with severely limited playing space (SchumannBrahmSchumann, 2000), to serve as tesserae in a human kaleidoscope (Jesus Christ Superstar), to perform with metronomic precision in a synchronised group of 80 (The Cheat), or to function both as chorus and shifting human set, concealed beneath a giant sheet (Under Wraps). Actors become cogs and gears in a high-powered performance machine.

In many of her shows Keiley explores the nature of communication and the interface of music and performance. A new piece called Icicle, which premiered in Whitehorse in February 2002, deploys dialogue, song, chimes, puppetry, choreographed movement, and even an invented language to tell a folkloric tale of a disintegrating iceberg. No doubt about it, taking an ice-narrative to the Yukon in winter calls for real chutzpah.

As a theatrical teller of stories, Irvine is less aggressive and less prescriptive than Keiley in her handling of text and performance. Her directing is explorative and actor-focused. Painstakingly, almost diffidently, she builds from the ground up. Design is modified by rehearsal process, embracing discoveries of cast and production team.

Given her aptitude for working closely with actors, it is not surprising that her directing credits should include a goodly number of small-cast plays: Torquil Colbo's almost-one-man Beyond Zebra (1996), John Gray's two-handed Billy Bishop Goes to War (1997), Robert Chafe's one-man Charismatic Death Scenes (1998), Daniel MacIvor's three-handed Never Swim Alone (1999), and Chafe's latest two-hander, Butler Marsh (2001).

The tactful direction of Chafe's Charismatic Death Scenes exemplified her strength. With action contained by sculpted lighting, she eased the actor-author through his portrayal of a writer retrogressively enacting his life from death to childhood, accompanied only by four typewriters on stools and a wrapped Christmas gift placed centre stage. Impeccable timing and emotional control kept the audience totally engaged.

In contrast to Keiley, whose directorial stamp is blazoned on her productions as plainly as a Nike logo, Irvine's effect is more elusive. Coaxing actors into finding their relatedness, unobtrusively shaping and clarifying narrative, fusing production and performance into a seamless whole, Irvine aspires to total sublimation of the directorial presence.

With their immense respect for each other's work, Keiley and Irvine continue to learn from one another. During the past year, they taught theatre in tandem in St. John's, and both were invited to teach at the National Theatre School by Sherry Bie, the new head of the English section.

Their influence on one another is perhaps best illustrated by a theatrical collaboration last year. Produced in January 2001 as a benefit at the LSPU Hall, Hard Light was a set of monologues chronicling the family history of Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey. Directed by Keiley, the production paid tribute to the style and process of Irvine.

Seven symmetrically placed actors remained immobile on stage. When it was their turn to speak, they were plucked out of the dark by Irvine's tightly focused lighting. One of the actors was Keiley herself (directed by Irvine) in the role of the gangly girl who finally finds a man tall enough to marry. No bells, no whistles: just authentic, character-driven, actor-centred, collaborative theatre.

And, as I watched Keiley acting for the first time since 1990, I ruefully recalled who it was that lined her up to see how tall she was.

Gordon Jones is a freelance theare critic in St. John's.

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