Mercurial Selina will make the Gate go boom!
MICHAEL MOFFATT PROFILE
Selina Cartmell takes over as artistic director of The Gate Theatre in April — and if she can bring to her new job the vigour she has brought to her work as a director then The Gate should prepare for a jolt to its system. The playwright Tom Murphy once called The Gate a museum under the 33year leadership of Michael Colgan – a bit rough, considering that, along with the classics, no other theatre here has promoted the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter more than The Gate.
And in recent years such heavyweights as Tom Courtenay, John Hurt, Michael Gambon, Francesca Annis and Ralph Fiennes have turned in great performances there.
Cartmell, who studied in Trinity College and has lived here since 2004, becomes only the fourth artistic director of the theatre since it was founded in 1928, following on from Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards and Colgan.
With her company, Siren Productions, and as a stage director with a keen interest in dance, she has shown a flair for delivering memorable, sometimes outrageous productions with innovations that go from brilliant to bonkers. And she has a particular talent for getting under the skin of plays that have an underlying core of violence, hypocrisy or corruption at their heart such as King Lear, the bloody Greek Medea, the even bloodier musical Sweeney Todd, and Shakespeare’s ultra-nasty Titus Andronicus.
Cartmell’s imaginative direction at The Gate of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd in 2007, with a small orchestra on stage, delivered a superb production, adding the wickedly comic touch of puffs of powder substituting for spurts of blood.
Yet her deeply moving production of A Tender Thing, the play that visualised Romeo and Juliet growing into a sad and helpless old age, showed how well she could handle a sensitive subject.
Artistic directors rarely make headlines but their influence can be extraordinary, especially when they move into traditional areas. More than 80 years ago Edwards and Mac Liammóir at The Gate put the skids under the staid Irish theatrical scene, producing the latest work from America and the Continent, emphasising stage design and the role of the director.
Cartmell has had enormous success as a director, winning ten awards for her productions, and she gives the impression of someone who fits neatly into that historical context.
Her work reminds me of a story about the composer Kurt Weill who complained to great Broadway producer/director Joshua Logan about the ‘boomboom style’ of theatre. Logan replied: ‘If that means never bore an audience then I say boom-boom-boom forever.’
Cartmell’s programme starts in July this year. It could be boom-boom time for The Gate.
‘Outrageous innovations that go from brilliant to bonkers’