the college drama troupe graduating to the big time
Last Sunday evening, John Donnelly sent an email to the 48 members of his cast. "We have to up our game," he wrote. "We are nowhere near good enough. We don't want to be labelled as amateurs."
That may have been a little unfair. Donnelly's large and unruly cast are precisely that: amateurs. So amateur, in fact, that even though their show opens in three weeks at the Olympia in Dublin, Donnelly can barely get them for rehearsals: they're in the middle of exams.
A week-long run at the Olympia would normally be the province of an ambitious professional company. But June 15-20 will see the theatre being taken over by Dublin City University's drama society's production of Rent.
Rent was one of the most successful new musicals of the 1990s. A cross between a rock gig and a musical, and originally based on Puccini's La Boheme, it tells the story of a group of broke young musicians and artists living together in New York's Lower East Side.
It won the Pulitzer and Tony awards, and ran for 12 years on Broadway, finally closing last year. Key to the show's success was the fact that the story being sung on stage was so clearly that of its cast. These were young musicians and actors singing about trying to become famous musicians and actors, and they poured their hearts into it.
As well as success, Rent had acquired an aura of tragedy when its creator, Jonathan Larson, who had struggled as a writer for more than a decade, died suddenly of a rare illness the night before it opened.
Amongst Larson's legacies was not just the show, but a new demographic: "Rent heads". The Broadway theatre used to offer $20 seats in the front two rows of the orchestra, available two hours before the performance. Fans would camp out to get them, seeing the show repeatedly and performing it amongst themselves.
Gradually, Rent seeped into the culture, and so perhaps it wasn't so surprising that when the drama society at DCU got an injection of eager new members some years ago, they found they all had a love of Rent in common. The Rent songs became the society's soundtrack, and they slowly became more ambitious in staging their annual musicals.
Then, in September last year, the Broadway run of Rent closed, and suddenly the rights for amateur performance became available. DCU Drama were quick off the mark, and acquired the rights for a short run at their campus theatre, the Helix, earlier this year. They brought in a professional director, John Donnelly, and he set about auditions.
On the face of it, the circumstances weren't promising. DCU is not a traditional arts university and has nothing like the decades-long traditions of student drama at its Dublin rivals, UCD and Trinity. The university is more vocational in its philosophy and its student body is traditionally more focused on their core activity: study.
According to the producer of Rent, Bob Ó Mhurcú, who graduated as a mature student last year, there is "an unwritten rule" amongst DCU's clubs and societies that extra-curricular activities remain extra-curricular: you may be a star on stage by night, but you go to your science lectures in the morning.
But those auditions provided something of a shock for John Donnelly. "I have never found that well of talent in one place at one time," he says. "From the moment I was auditioning, I knew I had something extraordinary on my hands."
Rent was a big success at the Helix, and then Donnelly brought a video of highlights of the show in to management at the Olympia. "We'll take a look and get back to you," they said. Just 10 minutes later, they called and offered the show a week's run in June (June 15-20, see www.dcuforrent.com).
According to Bob Ó Mhurchú, Rent is the first student production to transfer to a main stage in town. That might be a bit of a surprise to Des Keogh and Rosaleen Linehan, who were doing that from UCD Dramsoc in the late 1950s; even still, that precedent proves how rare an event this is.
The student drama societies have an auspicious record in spawning professional theatre. Druid emerged out of University College Galway in 1975; Rough Magic out of Trinity Players in 1984; and Fishamble (then Pigsback) in 1988. Conor McPherson puts his first plays on in UCD in the mid 1990s.
Some of John Donnelly's cast have taken the first steps in the professional direction, applying to leading drama schools in London (which are notoriously difficult to get into, and prohibitively expensive). For now, though, they have professional standards to reach, on one of the main stages in Dublin.
Despite the apparent scepticism of his email, Donnelly has no doubt that his cast are something special. His role is to make them realise that. "I'm not just directing a show here," he says. "I'm trying to nurture talent."
That could be a line from Rent.
colinmurphy@independent.ie
- Colin Murphy
