In a review of Samuel Beckett’s Lessness (performed at the Barbican last year) for the Guardian newspaper, the influential London theatre critic, Lyn Gardner described Olwen Fouéré as someone who “would be compelling if she sat doing absolutely nothing at all.” Having recently seen Fouéré’s adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s 120-line ostensible word puzzle, Gardner’s summation is largely infallible. The combination of Fouéré’s sharp features and her seemingly-endlessly flowing silver hair makes her a striking and mesmeric stage figure that commands attention, but it is her deep understanding of performance and her profound and personal connection with the material that allows for a transfixing and oftentimes haunting spectator experience.

Fouéré’s oeuvre is as diverse as it is extensive, comprising of roles such as Hester Swaine in Marina Carr’s By The Bog of Cats and the titular character in the Steven Berkoff-directed staging of Wilde’s Salomé, as well as Fouéré’s own rivverrun, which saw her perform the voice of the river in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. However, all of her theatrical endeavours are united by her innate belief about theatre’s ultimate role and function: “For me, it has a function beyond itself – a fundamental transformation of consciousness. An act of disturbance against the prescribed reality we live in.”

When Fouéré speaks about theatre, she seems wholeheartedly absolutist. She is completely and refreshingly definite in her belief and it is this very thing, this absolutism per se, that has made her such a self-aware and capable theatre-maker. If one could pinpoint a singular surfeit in Irish theatre, it would surely be its proclivity for naturalism. Fouéré, with her surrealist acts of disturbance that pose challenges to reality, offers an antidote to naturalistic excess and familiarity. Speaking about creating more experimental forms of theatre and possibly leaving more “traditional” expressions behind, she says: “I don’t think I ever moved away from ‘traditional’ or ‘naturalistic’ forms of drama because I was never really part of them! My artistic practice has led me to explore the boundaries and the no man’s land between all these forms. These are places I have always seemed to inhabit and understand better than the more ‘traditional’ or ‘naturalistic’ forms.”

Fouéré’s inhabiting of that veritable “no man’s land” may be where she feels most at home, but she is not producing work in a vacuum nor offering something completely abstract or aloof. “My work often seems like two streams running parallel to one another. The mainstream and the ‘other’ stream – the ‘other’ being the work I am impelled to create. I often say that my work in the mainstream develops my craft while my work in the ‘other’ develops my courage.” Fouéré cites the 1988 Gate Theatre production of Salomé as an instance wherein both of these streams came together as the Gate’s mainstream stage provided the space for Fouéré to tackle a canonical, well-known drama through the lens of her personal artistic vision. She has, of course, worked within the more traditional Irish canon – perhaps most notably playing Widow Quinn in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Agnes in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa as well as a plethora of Shakespearean roles including turns as Lady Macbeth, Lady Capulet and even Hamlet himself in Michael Sheridan’s Hamlet’s Nightmare.

In the early eighties, alongside composer Roger Doyle, Fouéré founded Operating Theatre, an avant-garde theatre company. It is perhaps within this company that Fouéré came into her own, developing work that was at once innovative, challenging and indubitably unconventional amidst the Irish theatrical landscape. “One of my favourite projects would be my first ever solo work in 1984, called The Diamond Boy from a short story by Aidan Mathews. It was produced by Operating Theatre and I discovered a lot that was valuable through working on it, and it was very successful too.” On the subject of favourites, Fouéré also references her role as Hester Swaine in Marina Carr’s 1998 play, By The Bog Cats. As the prophetic, tragic protagonist of Carr’s reimagining of Euripides’ Medea, Fouéré says the role “grabbed me at a very deep human level.” Fouéré – arguably one of the country’s most prolific and talented theatre-makers – has a long-standing working relationship with Carr – one of Ireland’s most prominent and famous playwrights – having previously played Woman in Woman and Scarecrow and the titular character of The Mai. She is currently working alongside Carr on a project that Fouéré’s company TheEmergencyRoom will commission. “It may be a solo or it may involve a few other actors. Either way, I will most likely co-direct and perform in it.”

If ever there was a person for whom “theatre-maker” was an appropriate title, it is Fouéré. As well as an actor, she is also a writer and director. Alongside the forthcoming Carr collaboration, she adds, “I am also currently translating a new play called Danse, Morob, which the French writer Laurent Gaudé has written for me.” Born to Breton parents, Fouéré grew up in a French-speaking household in the west of Ireland and one wonders if her upbringing, amidst the expansive rural Irish landscape has come to bare on the work she decides to make. Her decision to tackle Beckett’s aforementioned, aleatoric Lessness, which imagines a liminal space of “grey sky no cloud no stirs ash grey sand” with “little body same grey as earth sky ruins only upright” may seem a brave and fearless one to a nation who has such a historical difficulty with understanding one of its most famous writers, but for Fouéré, the experience was entirely different: “I have no method or preferred way of generating work. The material jumps onto me unbeknownst and often unbidden. I’ve never thought of Beckett as difficult. He was the first writer I encountered who instantly reconnected me to an inner life I recognised and it was a great comfort to find him.”

Despite Fouéré’s own innate understanding of Beckett, she doesn’t feel the need to dismantle Beckett’s prose to make it clearer for an audience. “I have never felt a need to disentangle or ‘counter’ him. He writes so clearly. With Lessness, especially as it is a prose piece and not a play, I wanted the performance of it to be as non-intrusive as possible, to transmit the words and images as clearly as possible – as though I was simply translating some kind of message from Morse code – avoiding any interpretation of what was being communicated. In this way, the landscape is revealed to me at the same pace and rhythm as it is revealed to the audience.”

Talking to Fouéré, it isn’t hard to understand why Lyn Gardner so quickly bestows superlatives upon her ability. Yet despite her extensive catalogue of work, she is self-deprecating in terms of her talent. She has just finished working on The Survivalist, a film directed by Stephen Fingelton, whom she describes as “an uncompromising director of singular intelligence,” but she insists she still has much to learn: “Working on The Survivalist, what I became aware of very quickly was how my skills have evolved far more for live performance than for film, and how much of a relative novice I am when working with camera. So my plan now is to hone and develop my craft in film to the point where I can work with it from a similar place of confidence and risk as I do in the theatre.” Fouéré is a rare and refreshing breed in Irish theatre, and has paved a path that has opened many doors and indeed questions about what exactly Irish theatre is and what it can be. “Irish theatre definitely exists. I am not sure what defines it – if anything – but there is no doubt of its presence.” Defining it may be difficult because of its ambiguity, but there is no doubt that whatever Irish theatre is, Olwen Fouéré is indisputably one of its most talented figureheads.

Photographs by Colm Hogan and Amelia Stein. Artwork by Aisling Reina.