The area of co-production is more problematic. The 1997 Coisceim/Abbey co-production, Toupees and Snare-drums slipped entirely through the cracks between dance and drama, for instance. A more successful outcome to the Abbey/Barabbas co-production which will go up this year is keenly anticipated, but one independent director described the Abbey's part in co-production exercises with the words: "Give us your cool."
That was all part of fostering artistic excellence, however. What practically nobody imagined was that Mason, who put box office problems down to the gap between "the imagination of the public and the imagination of the theatre" was going to be the champion of community arts.
However, in 1995 the Outreach Department was set up under the dynamic stewardship of director Kathy McArdle, to find ways to bring those imaginations closer together - which often meant bringing the theatre closer to the people. Examples of the work of the department would include a tour to youth centres of a new play by Enda Walsh, Sucking Dublin and a Youthreach project which brings young trainees into the theatre. Then, in 1998, Sharon Murphy was appointed Education Officer with funding from the Department of Education and the Gulbenkian Foundation.
Looked at more closely, this work can be seen as tallying with Mason's insistence that the Abbey is a national institution. Indeed, at the Abbey Debate in December 1994, an open discussion of the role of the theatre which was another Mason initiative, it was suggested that the Abbey look at IMMA's outreach programme as an example of how a national institution could interact with the wider community.
By tiny steps such as these, Mason has managed to change attitudes to the extent that his vision of the theatre as a national institution, funded through the Department of the Arts, albeit on the Arts Council's advice, is now very widely accepted. While there is still discussion about what the relationship should be between the funding bodies - some worry that the theatre might come under political influence if it were funded through the Department, and also that it might atrophy if it didn't have to compete for funding - Mason's contention that the National Theatre needs a high and reliable level of public subsidy or it can shut up shop, is now widely understood.
When Michael D. Higgins was Minister for the Arts he rowed in with Mason on this one, and Sile de Valera has been, if anything, more supportive still of the idea. In 1997 she established the National Cultural Institutions Council, which counts the National Theatre among its members, along with organisations like the National Concert Hall, the National Library and the National Museum. She has called on the Abbey, the Department and the Arts Council to resume their famous "tripartite discussions" on the funding future of the theatre.
However, nobody imagines that the theatre's biggest problem - its building - can be solved by dipping into Arts Council funds. The cold, forbidding, uninviting nature of Michael Scott's gem of modernism in Abbey Street is now openly talked of. Again, Mason's great achievement here has been to effect a gradual change in public opinion. The Abbey commissioned Theatre Projects Consultants and McCullough Mulvin Architects to come up with a plan for a theatre on the same site which people would want to go to, and it was costed at £25 million in 1997. No political action has yet been taken on the plan, and no fund-raising committee has been formed, but it seems at least possible that this may still happen.
This is a long catalogue of achievement. But there is one area in which Mason's six years have been a disappointment. The man who vowed that the theatre "must remain a writer's theatre" has brought a disappointing number of good new plays to the stage. Belfast playwright Gary Mitchell was prompted to send in In a Little World of our Own by former literary manager, Christopher Fitz-Simon, and was immediately greeted with excitement by Mason, but he is arguably the only major new talent that Mason has brought to the Abbey.
A theatre which does a lot of new work must have its failures, but recent years have seen a surprising number of obviously half-baked plays making it onto the stage. Darragh Carville's Observatory and Chris Lee's The Map-Maker's Sorrow - and even plays by such established playwrights as Frank McGuinness (Dolly West's Kitchen), Brian Friel (Give me your Answer, Do!) and Sebastian Barry (The Only True History of Lizzie Finn) badly needed to go through a few more drafts. The literary department, currently under the management of Judy Friel with Aideen Howard as Dramaturg, must bear some responsibility for this, but the buck stops with Mason.
Meanwhile, exciting new Irish writing has been going elsewhere. Conor McPherson sent This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison, a series of three interlocking monologues to the Abbey, and had a meeting with Christopher FitzSimon, but Mason was not excited by the project and nothing came of it. The play was eventually done in a Fly by Night/Iomha Ildanach co-production, and on foot of this and other small-scale projects, McPherson started writing for London's Royal Court. His play The Weir has been running there for the best part of three years. Other writers who created a major stir outside the National Theatre during Mason's tenure include Martin McDonagh and Mark O'Rowe.
It has not been the period of highest achievement for Mason as a director, either. His production of Synge's The Well of the Saints was an excellent reanimation of a classic, but the acclaim it received at the Edinburgh Festival was a surprise here, and this may have been less because Irish people are blinkered and curmudgeonly than that it seemed to have a message about Ireland which was easily grasped by an international audience. His revival of Frank McGuinness' Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, which also triumphed at Edinburgh, was impressive but it had a static quality which the original did not. Tom Murphy's The Wake, another Edinburgh success, was also disturbingly static.
To Mason's huge credit, however, he has turned these Edinburgh successes to account, and negotiations are still on-going about an Edinburgh/Abbey co-production at the festival this year.
Mason's problems have been greatest with new work - is he too respectful of the writer's text? He has worked with some superb design from people like Monica Frawley and Joe Vanek. However, his productions of By the Bog of Cats (Marina Carr), The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (Tom Kilroy) and Frank McGuinness' Dolly West's Kitchen seemed to suffer from direction which had its emphasis on the wider picture but not the details, and this seemed to be where it got its (that word again) static quality.
Mason is at last free to concentrate all his energies on directing again. It must have been painful for him - as it would be for any artist - to have had to invest so much time in wrangling, persuading and politicking. The last six years represent a huge and generous commitment to public life by a working artist, in the tradition of Yeats's work as a senator. Mason's attachment to the founding fathers (and mother) of the theatre is suddenly understandable when seen in this light. He said in an interview in 1997: "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."
The balance sheet shows Irish theatregoers to be the main beneficiaries of Mason's tenure; to them he has bequeathed the miracle of an Abbey Theatre which is not in crisis.
