Pan Pan Theatre have been invigorating the Irish and global theatre scenes for over twenty years now, since co-directors Aedín Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn met studying Drama at Trinity College Dublin. A glance at their production history will offer up titles of what may seem like familiar plays: Mac-Beth 7, The Playboy of the Western World (in Mandarin), and on-stage performances of Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, All That Fall and Embers. Anyone who has been fortunate enough to experience any of these pieces will know that “familiar” is not at all how these performances feel.

“Americanitis” is a nickname for the now mostly-discounted medical diagnosis of neurasthenia, a more or less made-up mental illness that had late nineteenth-century Americans fearing the end of civilisation. The depletion of one’s “nervous energy” brought on by modern society and the fast pace of American life was said to result in agitation, anxiety, and neuralgia. It’s also the term Pan Pan have adopted for the compositional motif of their newest work, Americanitis Presents The Seagull and Other Birds. The production is a post-dramatic reimagining of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull which incorporates a concise rewrite of the much-loved comedy along with commissioned works from Irish writers.

“We started off with the idea of the show being Americanitis and it evolved into Americanitis Presents The Seagull and Other Birds,” Quinn explains. “Americanitis was the whole notion of discovery and whole notion of anxiety about making work, so that linked into the idea of [Chekhov’s] Konstantin whose anxiety is to make new work.” Pan Pan’s version of Konstantin is as a disabled son of a demanding mother, trying to express himself through dramatic writing. “He has to write but he’s trying to write in a new form so it’s that battle of idealism, that battle of trying to generate new work and the difficulty of that, really. It’s hard to describe it as being an aesthetic, it’s more to do with allowing yourself to change things, to do things differently. It’s almost like a reminder — and it becomes then a catalyst — to keep pushing things out while still trying to make new work.”

Pan Pan are so fervently committed to constant growth that each performance throughout the play’s opening run at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival will be a different experience, each day seeing the inclusion of a different commissioned work within the overall composition. At the beginning of each show, the audience will be greeted with an introduction explaining who each night’s insert has been written by, and a title sheet will be held up by the cast as the piece begins. Some involve ballet, one is a rework of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, most weave into Trigorin rapping about life as a celebrity author while the cast half-dance, half-stomp to Zebra Katz’s Ima Read. “It’s a robust concept; so you can change the text, alter content… [Changing the commission every night] is an experiment to see whether that actually keeps the show alive and keeps the performance awake.”

Pan Pan have been conducting open rehearsals for The Seagull and Other Birds, a decision which fits within their trend of inclusivity and which also adds to the evolutionary process of Americanitis, providing constant feedback from the public’s reaction to the performances. When paying a visit to one of these sessions, what is likely to strike a spectator is how spontaneous each action feels. The impromptu atmosphere never belies the long span of preparation that has come before.

Americanitis began in the 2012 Dublin Theatre Festival, as an In-Development piece, and has been rehearsed intermittently since then. Pan Pan are one of a few Irish companies who have the privilege of enough funding to carry out these large-scale projects that are reared over a long period of time and expanded globally. “It’s a long process but it always takes about two years to make a new piece, really. You need time to allow the concept to wash over you and to make the right choices.”

With Americanitis, Pan Pan are looking back while moving forward, and the project will continue to grow in the future: “Because this is a very big project, because it’s also a project we do in China,” — Space Moon Culture Company are in the middle of their run of a Chinese co-production of The Seagull and Other Birds as part of the 2014 Beijing Fringe Festival — “I think this is something we might not repeat but it might be a development for making a very open kind of theatre-making, and theatre shows. There are no rules, you know? You just keep readjusting your own, adjusting the rules that you make…The idea is that both shows will merge eventually and be one kind of strange, east meets west show using Chekhov as the spine. It’ll be an interesting experiment to put both shows together, if there’s a festival big enough!”

Americanitis Presents The Seagull and Other Birds runs at Project Arts Centre September 25 – October 5 as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. A co-production runs at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing as part of the Beijing Fringe Festival.

Photos by Matthew Mulligan