Patrick Mason seems a liberated man these days - celebrating 30 years in Irish theatre, directing again at the Abbey, and an honorary doctorate to boot. He talks past and present with Patsy McGarry
There is a most bearable lightness about Patrick Mason these days. He has about him an air of happy, lively liberation. It probably helps that he is directing Hugh Leonard's Da - "an outstanding play, wonderfully crafted, beautifully achieved" - which opens tonight at the Abbey, where it has not been staged for 20 years.
But that is hardly the whole story.
It also probably helps that he is receiving plaudits from many quarters for his truly extraordinary contribution to Irish theatre since he arrived in the Abbey as a neophyte voice coach an unbelievable 30 years ago this month. Unbelievable because the years, too, seem to have fallen from him.
Trinity College Dublin will award him an honorary doctorate of literature on Friday. He felt "very honoured" by this. In February 2000, he received a special tribute award at The Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards for his "outstanding contribution to Irish theatre, in particular during his tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre over the past 10 years".
He was still hurting then. In a wonderfully salty valedictory address - or so it seemed - reported in The Irish Times on Valentine's Day 2000, he said his first reaction on hearing the news about the award was "I'm too young to die". He felt then that "obviously there was some deep irony involved" in him getting such an award from The Irish Times. "Maybe I'll find out tomorrow morning," he said.
His relationship with The Irish Times went back "a long, long way", he continued. He recalled the then medical correspondent writing that Mason's direction of a play had been "brilliant, perhaps too brilliant". That, he thought, was like a doctor saying "the patient is healthy, but we'll soon deal with that". He recalled that another Irish Times journalist had said of his production of The Well of the Saints, after it was acclaimed at the Edinburgh Festival, that "foreigners are perhaps not the best judges of Irish theatre".
Mason would probably have concurred with Oscar Wilde's view that "in the past we had the rack, now we have the press".
But the award co-sponsored by The Irish Times was simply belated recognition of the great work of a huge talent. This, after all, is the man whose innovative productions brought to life such works as Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger (which "opened up, an emotional imagination rooted in the people"); Frank McGuinness's The Factory Girls and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme ("it communicated on so many levels, the social, political, spiritual. It was an extraordinary exploration of the Protestant psyche and very gripping drama"); seven Tom MacIntyre plays, Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats, and new plays by Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Hugh Leonard, and Sebastian Barry.
He agrees that, over the years, he has tended "to gather kindred spirits, an ensemble of like-minded souls" in the theatre around him. They would be people who have "shared the same passions, interests, beliefs about theatre". For instance, whereas theatre can be "just another entertainment option", it can also "still be something much more engaged and engaging . . . where an entire public act of the imagination, involving audience and actors, can take place . . . a communal imagination." Theatre was "a central public act".
There is competition from other media, such as cinema, where "different levels of engagement are required - different disciplines requiring differing responses". But good theatre can "engage an audience intellectually, emotionally, imaginatively".
He also directed the very first production of Dancing at Lughnasa, described in The Irish Times, at first, as "not one of Brian Friel's best plays" before overwhelming London and New York. Friel asked him to direct it, though he had never directed a Friel play before. He believes the playwright saw something in his previous productions which prompted the choice. Lughnasa was, he felt, the "first inkling of the new Irish global culture" that emerged during the 1990s, followed by such as The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Riverdance. "I mean,here was a play, Lughnasa, whose name they couldn't even pronounce. In America, they wanted us to call it Dancing."
He has also excelled in directing the more classical works of Shaw and Wilde, for instance, particularly at the Gate Theatre. Whereas he is identified very much with the new in theatre, he does not believe the innovative "should be promoted at the expense of the classical . . . memory is necessary as well". That is where a national theatre comes into play. It is "a bank" of the "central cultural memory", which is also required "to keep an eye on world theatre" to avoid becoming parochial.
And then there is opera, including three productions he directed for the Wexford Festival. He supposed he was "something of a conservative" in the area, "tending to go from text and character". Opera, he feels, is "more about the conductor and designer, than maybe about the director". He is sceptical of opera directors from "the conceptual school", who "can be brilliant" but are often otherwise.
He will direct Billy Budd for Opera Ireland in 2004, and last year was director of the successful Silver Tassie, an O'Casey play turned opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage. He feels O'Casey's instinct for melodrama lends itself to opera, about which O'Casey knew little. He regrets that Kurt Weill and O'Casey had not met in, say, 1920s Berlin. The Silver Tassie was rejected by the Abbey.
There may have been quibbles about Mason's directing style (for an emphasis on "the word", a tendency towards the cerebral), but few dispute his standing as one of the truly great directors in Irish theatre these past decades.
No, "the problem with Patrick" was never about his artistic sensibility or ability. It was about the politics of theatre, in particular the political bear-pit that Irish theatre became during the 1980s and early 1990s.
He considers such politics "ridiculous" doesn't like them, but believes that "like the weather, you live with it". It has also bred a new type of being, the arts administrator, addicted to "awful infighting", whom he admits he enjoys "winding up".
"I prefer to deal with the ego of a good playwright/actor than the ego of an arts administrator," he says.
Problems in the arts during the early 1990s were caused by starved institutions fighting bitterly over scraps of funding in a small pond where the Abbey was perceived as a dinosaur in decline, eating up resources smaller theatres believed they could use better.
"The Arts Council was robbing Peter to pay Paul," Mason recalls. Funding was "unbalanced" and "disastrous", with the Abbey crucified by fixed costs, dictated by its remit, which were not taken into account. It was the time of what Michael D. Higgins described as "the poor wars" in the arts world.
The Abbey was in deep crisis "with low morale, debts of over £600,000, constant attacks and a very real threat of the theatre being dismembered". Added to that was the perception that there was more drama to be found in the Abbey's boardroom than on its stages.
IT WAS in this climate that Mason took over as artistic director in 1994. He was in a no-win situation. He was seen as the board's man, to begin with, at a time when the board inspired no confidence.It probably did not help that, for his first press conference as artistic director, Mason published a manifesto entitled A High Ambition (after Yeats) and insisted on referring to the Abbey as "The National Theatre Society" (again a Yeats term, for which he too was pilloried). Add in a certain hauteur in presentation and you had the go-ahead for one of the most unsightly savagings in recent Irish theatrical history, with not a dead sheep in sight.
The media pack, of which this reporter - then theatre critic with the Irish Press - was one, waded through Patrick's entrails with an abandon which was as awesome as it was awful. He remembers it well.
Those first three years in the job as artistic director were "horrific", such was the scale of the problems. He found them "absolutely exhausting", so much so that he felt it was affecting his own work as a director. But by 1997, he had turned the situation around. By 2000, he had helped give the theatre its longest period of stability in decades, had balanced its finances and regained for it a proper standing as a truly national institution.
From it all, it is the staff he remembers most positively. They were "phenomenal" through those difficult years, he says. In 1996, a consultant from abroad said of the Abbey that he had never been in a more productive theatre - "14 productions, two tours, and standards were very high", he remembers of that year.
One of the least-mentioned legacies of his Abbey tenure are the feasibility studies on the theatre he had done. Three documents were prepared, still in the public domain but none of which have been referred to in the recent debate on the future of the Abbey. It perplexes him.
"In 1994, as artistic director, I got the place surveyed," he says. The theatre was already almost 30 years old and "nearing the end of its useful life". A "generous grant from the Iveagh Funding Trust of £35,000" made a feasibility study possible.
Essentially, it was concluded that the Abbey and Peacock theatres should remain at the present site. The existing building should be gutted and a new auditorium built (with capacity for about 550 people), which would provide optimum conditions for the spoken word and bring the audience into the productions.
When his tenure as artistic director was over, at the end of 2000, he was still smarting. He hated "the mean-spiritedness of the press attacks, that sort of reportage generally. I work in a business which couldn't exist if people were mean-spirited", he said at the time. He continues to feel that way. Who could blame him? And maybe we've all moved on since those trying days.
He has been taking it comparatively easy this past 18 months, deliberately. Allowing a ravelled sensibility some care, perhaps. Da is his first play at the Abbey since his leaving in 2000. On the horizon is a production of The Tempest in the UK and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf - in Danish - in Denmark next spring.
As to the past? "A word or two before you go." He has "done the state some service, and they know't. No more of that".
Da opens at the Abbey tonight
