The pressure on the Abbey to reach a final agreement with the Government on the site for its new theatre is mounting. It would need a green light by the end of the year, given that it wants, ideally, to be in its new venue in time for its centenary on December 27th, 2004.
Artistic director Ben Barnes favours moving out of Middle Abbey Street, and says that he and arts department officials have been touring a number of sites which have presented themselves, all within a mile of the present theatre. The site allocated by the Docklands Development Authority for a cultural facility at Barrow Street is only one of the possibilities. It is two-and-a-half times the size of the present Abbey site, and would give the theatre water frontage, which attracts Barnes. He stresses, however, that negotiations with the Department for the Arts are ongoing.
Una Carmody and Joe Melvin, employed by the Dublin Docklands Authority as consultants on the use of the Barrow Street space, have not yet produced their final report. There was speculation a few months back that an opera house would be built on the docklands site, and a South Bank-style multi-purpose cultural facility was also mooted. But Barnes is adamant that the Abbey will only move somewhere it will have a dedicated theatre of its own. The Barrow Street site, worth between £15 and £20 million, would come free. And could the Abbey sell its current site? "We may retain responsibility for it. It may be retained for theatre usage," says Barnes. "It could be traded off in some way against the Government's investment in the site."
"This striking production . . . snatches victory from the jaws of what appeared a looming theatrical disaster." So begins Nicholas de Jongh's London Evening Standard review of the Royal National Theatre's Peer Gynt, in a version by Frank McGuinness, directed by Irish director Conall Morrison. The show's genesis was particularly painful, as we have already reported here. As de Jongh puts it: "Conall Morrison is billed as Peer Gynt's director. But he left the production for health reasons while the play was still in rehearsal, amid reports that the cast was unhappy." In the Guardian, Michael Billington opens his review with the words: "I expected the worst: when one reads that a director has abused the actors at a public preview, one assumes a disaster is in the offing." The National's artistic director, Trevor Nunn, stepped in when the show was at the previewing stage, just weeks after he had stepped in to rescue the company's production of Romeo and Juliet. De Jongh gives him some of the credit for Peer Gynt's success: "How far Nunn has changed, rather than merely finely tuned, this production I can only guess. But I know he has sensibly cut the running time from almost four hours to just over three - a most un-Nunn like outburst of abbreviation. And I suspect the company's fluency and assurance is Nunn-given."
He adds, however, that the "clue" to the show's vitality is in its conception and staging, and these must be attributed to Morrison. The production places Peer's lifelong quest for a true identity in a kind of dreamscape, designed by Francis O'Connor.
Billington describes the production as "a mixture of Irish folktale and plangent melodrama". The approach pleases de Jongh more. He calls McGuinness's version "brilliantly poetic and satiric" and thinks the Irishness of this Peer "brings him into close focus".
These critics are disturbed, however, by Conor Linehan's music, which de Jongh calls "Irish-sounding - jovial and jaunty when it ought often to be sinister and threatening". The Daily Telegraph, by contrast, enjoys the "jig-influenced score".
The Arts Council is expressing no concern over the Government spending estimates, which will be published later today. The council's plan pitches its funding at £37.5 million for 2001, and staff at Merrion Square are confidently expecting that figure to be in the estimates this afternoon.
Audience figures are not yet available for this year's Belfast Festival at Queen's, which was programmed by acting director Rosie Turner and went down well.
The new director, Stella Hall, says she had a "whale of a time". Hall is only prepared to give hints of the new directions the festival might take next year, but these include: "The resonances of 2001, light, space, the universe and how we might link theatre, dance and music . . . Getting behind the youth focus in the programme, and programming popular culture as well as high art. I don't rule out the digital arts, dance music, food . . . Large, community-scale projects . . .Things in places we've never had them before . . ." She aims to give the festival a year-round presence by inviting artists into the festival's chatrooms. And how has this English woman taken to Belfast? "Oh, I love it. I feel by Christmas we'll be bedding down."
