HE didn't have to do it. He had plenty of more obviously attractive options. But Patrick Mason has agreed to stay on as Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre for another two years, and there can be no-one, even among his most vocal critics, who can fault his courage.
"I have to admit that it was a very difficult decision to make," he says. "But two things swung it for me. One was the unstinting support of the chairman, the board and the shareholders, and many expressions of support from within the theatre. The other was the knowledge of how much has been achieved, that we have over the four years put in place a very remarkable young team, and I would like to see their new work developed and promoted."
Mason had definitely decided to leave, when the board and shareholders approached him and asked him to stay on. They felt there were special circumstances which made it very important that he stay, circumstances relating to the tussle going on between the Arts Council and the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht as to who should fund the Abbey.
Mason has always been of the view that the Abbey should be funded directly by the Department, as a national institution, as are IMMA and the National Concert Hall: "National institutions have fixed costs, and if funding goes down, the institution still has the fixed-cost commitment," he argues.
Critics of this arrangement believe it would expose the Abbey to the possibility of political pressure. They also feel the Abbey should fight it out with the rest of the theatre sector for funding rather than having its own cache, regardless of how well it is doing. The new plan, as Mason understood it, would seem to have been something of a compromise, with funding perhaps coming from the Department, but on the Arts Council's advice - the "Scandinavian model" of which he speaks highly.
At the beginning of the year, Mason told this newspaper a new agreement on funding had been reached between the Council, the Department and the theatre. There followed a storm of statements. The Arts Council said it was still in the middle of tripartite discussions and had made no agreement; the Department said the process was "well advanced", bunt stopped short of saying it had "endorsed" the plan, as Mason had said.
"It would now appear that, to put it mildly, there is unfinished business," Mason says. "We're back in meetings. Apparently, there were problems of interpretation. It turns out our understanding of the Arts Council's policy document was not their understanding, let's put it that way."
Mason was accused, by arts workers who remained nameless, of deliberately upping the ante by making a premature statement. This infuriates him: "I was just going on what they said in their document. It's in black and white in their document." Certainly, the relevant paragraphs in Going On are open to Mason's interpretation: "The Council accepts the general thrust and philosophy of the papers on the nature, status and remit of the National Theatre Society which have been incorporated in recent annual grant submissions. The Council will determine the level of funding to be offered to the National Theatre Society on the basis of the new framework agreed between the Council, the National Theatre Society and the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht."
"I find it a little odd that the Arts Council has apparently ignored its own findings," says Mason. He adds: "There are factions within the arts community which are frankly determined to dismantle the place and factions who would support my policies, though they may disagree with the details. It's not a question of this body or that body, it's more contentious and complex than that."
Does he think there is a clash of cultures within the Arts Council itself?
"Yes. There are all the signs of it," he answers.
Patrick Mason must nearly forget, at times, that he is a theatre director. But although critics of his management of the National Theatre are many, almost no-one denies his greatness as a director. ,The list of his directing credits is very long, but the premieres of Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa, Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert, Frank McGuinness's Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme and Tom MacIntyre's The Great Famine are four to start with. He began his directing career in the Abbey as an assistant to Hugh Hunt on The Silver Tassie in the early 1970s; he had met Hunt as a student in his native Manchester, where he grew up Catholic and half-Irish.
Mason's sense of his place in the Abbey tradition is extremely strong. He has a portrait of Hugh Hunt in front of his desk, and draws satisfaction from the fact that a man first employed by Yeats had employed him. He gazes at AE's portrait of Lady Greory, and says: "She was a great woman, a remarkable woman. Particularly as Willie Yeats must have been a royal pain to work with. I don't think it's just sentiment which makes me think that after such courage has been shown I don't want to be the one to let it down."
This attachment to the founding parents has distanced him from many people, particularly as he insists on using phrases from Yeats to define his artistic policy. When you read that he is committed to building up "an Irish School of Dramatic Literature" in his theatrical manifestos, A High Ambition, A Real Theatre, and The National Theatre, it sounds a false note in today's international world. To explain the phrase, he has recourse to its historical context, a time when there was no sense of an Irish theatre; he explains its contemporary use so simply, it makes Yeats look pompous: "You can say there is an Irish experience, just as there is an English experience or a Welsh experience, which needs to be explored, and can only be explored in an Irish way, or an English way or a Welsh way."
He then leaps to a discussion of the internationalism of any national theatre, and his commitment to "opening up the repertoire" to international work which is not known here. In 1994, he had explored the Irish repertoire of the early century (Moses's Rock, Katie Roche), in 1995, had explored American work (Angels In America, The Crucible), last year, he had concentrated on European plays (The Marriage Of Figaro, Six Characters In Search Of An Author). Here is the magic number three again; three artistic manifestos, three years ... beginnings, middles and ends. Mason seems to organise his life and work in artistic patterns. The difficulty with this kind of programming, I suggest, is that the audience will not necessarily embark on the three-year learning curve, but will want variety at all times. While 1994 was a disastrous year for the company, in 1995 there was the highest aggregate attendance since 1988 (65 per cent) and in the first quarter of this year, the attendances were in the late 1970s (the Auditor and Comptroller General's Report on the theatre's finances, released to such uproar a couple of weeks ago, referred to figures which were two years old).
This could mean that the audience is becoming confident in Mason's Abbey, or it could mean that this year's menu has just happened to be more tantalising than that of recent years. The tape runs on as we play ping-pong about the significance of box office: Mason sees the Abbey as having a responsibility to "educate" the public. "The imagination of the theatre doesn't always connect with the imagination of the audience. Usually, the theatre is blamed, which I think is a fairly futile exercise," he says.
"Sometimes the vote of the public can be right." "It can also be wrong." "It can also be right." "You must have dialogue with the box office, but you have to strike a balance. The issue is what is an appropriate balance between boxy office and subsidy, given that weld now know the gap between the imagination of the public and the imagination of the theatre causes box office problems?"
The Abbey's current subsidy stands at an annual £2.7 million, which is more than 40 per cent of the Arts Council's drama allocation. The Arts Council has long argued that the theatre's dependence on subsidy should be reduced by increasing box office to an average of 75 per cent; Mason has long argued that this would be impossible without damaging the product. While a 75 per cent box office may net seem particularly high to the average punter, it is far higher than that required in publicly funded national theatres in other countries. But then, this country has a fraction of the arts funding available in many other economies, and it may be foolish to make comparisons. Mason has often asked the question - can we afford a national theatre?
This question comes at a time when life is hard for national institutions: "There is this theory of monolithic nationalism, which is breaking up," says Mason. There is the feeling abroad that, as Eduard Delgado wrote in the Arts Council's Views Of Theatre In Ireland: "What really makes a national theatre is the sum of all theatre experience in a country."
Some would like to see the Abbey as a kind of garage for the many and proliferating vehicles of Irish theatre. While the independent sector's support of the Abbey comes across as strong in the Arts Council's recent report, its interaction with the rest of the theatrical community was rated as poor by 81 per cent of respondents.
"Why are independent companies so obsessed with being part of this institution?" asks Mason. He will pursue co-production, "where appropriate", but otherwise is interested in working with individuals from the independent sector which has provided him with most of his young team: "The work we do here is through individuals, and that is authentic artistic dialogue, he says.
Michael Scott's box on Middle Abbey Street does nothing to soften the Abbey's monolithic image. In 1995 the Abbey published its own £16 million plan to alter radically and upgrade the building, but there has never been an official response. Then a couple of weeks ago, the Abbey was in the headlines again, when the Arts Council floated the idea of the Abbey moving to the new "Opera House" proposed for the quays.
Mason is enthusiastic about the idea of an opera-friendly venue, but would be opposed to sharing a theatre, as the Abbey is a year-round operation. In any case, he says: "I don't think it's just sentimentality which makes me think a great theatre should lie at the heart of a city." He was never formally consulted about the Arts Council plan, and was astonished that it was made public before a feasibility study had been done.
He is more likely to be able to build plays than a theatre in the next two years. His advocacy of the playwright's place in this great writers' theatre is unapologetic: "The Abbey ethos is about the importance of language in the theatre. Language in its fullest, poetic sense." The money and the politics aside, what he most wants to leave behind is voices in our memory: "When you look back, I think you will hear voices, and a lot of those were heard here first and were supported by the National Theatre."
"THE truth is, we have become fast friends ... what?" (JPW to the Man in Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert) And remember, King James, you know the result, we know the result, keep to the result" (during the mock fight of King Billy and King James in Frank McGuinness's Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme)... "It's not fair they should teach us desperation so young, or if they do, they should never mention hope" (Aunt Julie in The Mai by Marina Carr) . . . Just a few voices which still sound clear, through the confusion of the passing years, and make one wish Patrick Mason a very satisfying two more years in the job.
