Arts organisations in Cork are gearing up for its term as capital of culture. Mary Leland reports on the planned refurbishment and renaissance of the Triskel and the Everyman
She hasn't been in the city for five minutes, yet Penny Rae is plastered all over Cork. Or, at least, her introductory project - enormous photographs and commentaries from teenagers interacting as young Europeans - can be seen on walls high and low throughout the city. As the new director of the Triskel Arts Centre, she has already launched an introduction to her proposal for Cork's term as European capital of culture for 2005. The placards declare "Here We Are!" - but as a statement of arrival for Rae, the venture takes some beating.
Pat Talbot, in contrast, works more quietly at the Everyman Palace Theatre, although an uncharacteristically frantic atmosphere indicates the theatre's commitments for 2005. As artistic director, Talbot is overseeing the completion of a schedule to be included in the 2005 programme listing, with a July deadline imposing urgent priorities in contacts, casting and finance. There is a feeling that both venues - Triskel in Tobin Street and Everyman on McCurtain Street - are drawing a deep breath before diving into the flood of alterations and rearrangements planned for the next couple of months.
At the Everyman Palace the alterations concentrate on the auditorium, where a five-week refurbishment plan should finish by July 19th, in time for the main summer event, The Glass Menagerie. Opening on July 27th, the production features the Emmy winner Barbara Babcock, well known for her performances in television series such as Hill Street Blues, Frasier, Dallas and Judging Amy, as well as for her film and theatre career.
In the meantime, its domed and gilded boxes will have been restored and the proscenium arch - by now probably the only one of its kind left in Cork - repaired and its ceiling repainted and regilded. The theatre is to be painted both inside and out, with new carpeting in the auditorium and foyer. Despite the chequered history of Everyman Palace, since it opened as Dan Lowrey's Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1897 it retains the late-Victorian flourish of Henry Brunton's design, with a stained-glass canopy - now replaced - over the main door on what was then King Street. (Dan Lowrey was also proprietor of the Star of Erin Music Hall in Dublin, which became the Olympia Theatre.) By the 1940s the Palace was a cinema, although the late Der Breen, founder of the Cork Film Festival, used it as a theatre following the burning of the Opera House in 1955. He was succeeded by the Everyman Theatre company which established itself in the premises after one of Cork's most important restoration projects.
While the imminent refurbishment will be of a high standard, and Talbot is delighted with the €160,000 coming from Cork City Council (in addition to €20,000 from the Heritage Council and €15,000 from the Department of the Environment), he says if he were really able to get to work on the building there wouldn't be much change from €2 million. Talbot is also pleased that he can keep two stages open throughout the refurbishment, by using the main stage as one acting area with a seating capacity of 100, and converting the back-stalls bar into another 44-seat venue.
This coincides with the Cork Midsummer Festival, and the programme spread over those weeks includes the Gare St Lazare Players with Michael Harding's Swallow, Touched by Ursula Rani Sarma, the Irish premiere of Anthony Nielson's Stitching, and the solo pieces When Sixpence was a Tanner by Cliff Wedgebury and Once Upon a Bar Stool by Felix Nobis.
Obviously, the Everyman Palace is going to look good for Cork 2005. In terms of programming, Pat Talbot doesn't give much away, but admits that a project co-ordinator is being appointed for Everyman's participation. It seems reasonable to wonder what projects the co-ordinator will co-ordinate, but negotiations are so delicate that nothing can be revealed other than that two or three international companies will be visiting and that Everyman will be producing two world premières, collaborating with theatre artists of international profile and presenting the result of the 05 playwriting commission managed by the Everyman Palace Studio in conjunction with Cork 2005.
As he disappears into the search for more office space to accommodate the new staff required to meet these demands, I wonder if Penny Rae isn't better off, after all, in closing down completely at Triskel. "Closure is a kind of rebirth," she says, and there can be little doubt but that something of a renaissance is expected of her. She is facing into a schedule in which drains, lighting, pavements and masonry will facilitate plans for exhibitions, master-classes, performances, seminars and residencies. Re-opening in September, the place is going to look different, the street, if the city council co-operates, is going to look different, and people are going to think differently. It's rebranding, basically, relocating Triskel without moving it.
In many ways, Penny Rae offered the Triskel board a package - experience, on-going and portable projects, connections from a hefty European stint with the British Council (which also took her to Zimbabwe and which coincided with a Capital of Culture designation in Brussels 2000) plus a four-year term as director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.
She visited Cork to offer the New Young Europeans proposal for 2005 and subsequently saw the Triskel job advertised. "I wanted something more hands-on in terms of work and ideas; I felt that Glasgow and Brussels and Zimbabwe could all come together in a very useful way here - and it's not without some relevance that my grandmother was from Cork!"
Her brief is to realise the potential of Triskel as a sharp-edged arts development operation, renewing its original sense of vision as an activator and facilitator, and increasing its level of practitioner participation and public access.
Although for years its major influence was on the visual arts, Triskel was always more than a gallery. Its location - a laneway joining South Main Street with the Grand Parade in the heart of the medieval city - is a statement of "otherness", and of the possibilities of retrieval for old buildings that might otherwise be demolished.
The irony is that this architectural idealism has caused some of the problems Penny Rae has to address. The entrance has been encroached on by other businesses and the lane's back-door convenience has produced general dereliction, which Rae is determined to banish. She talks of the engagement of stakeholders - local and other performing and practising groups along with social partners such as community organisations - in the renewal process at Triskel, but her first target is municipal.
"The street is an absolute priority for me; these Cork lanes could be a wonderful asset to the city and maybe we could make Tobin Street a model for other places. Already we have terrific neighbours here, such as the Kissane and Hubert bookbinders, so we're talking to all the traders and lobbying City Hall departments such as engineering, planning, environment - the lot!" Paving, plastering and lighting - including "halos of light" by artist Dan George around specific areas - are her principal plans for outside.
Inside is going to be equally complex, with the cafe moving downstairs, new windows, a doubled entrance, multipurpose rooms for residencies, rehearsals and workshops, a top-floor gallery and exhibition area and an open-plan office. While the Triskel board has re-mortgaged to get €300,000, the appeal to the city council has worked: a grant of €160,000 - matching that allocated to Everyman - has just been confirmed.
Although plans for the auditorium itself, increasing the capacity from 70 to 150, have still to be worked out, the redesign follows an intense four weeks of consultation with everyone who could, should or might want to use Triskel.
Rae'sidea of partnership is comprehensive, and many of her programme ideas, especially for Cork 2005, work through social themes such as displacement, borderlands, migration, health, education and criminal justice, suggesting a cultural perspective which is empowering as well as enlightening. She sees these themes as a kind of connective tissue between the artist and the public: "For me 2005 is a beginning, a catalyst; what's more important is what happens when it's over, what it leaves behind in terms of new ways of working, new ways of seeing things".
