As the Abbey Theatre celebrates today with a big party, Belinda McKeon assesses the year's ambitious programme, which had some gems among the safe and familiar.
However interesting the unfolding events in the political life of the National Theatre may have proved over the past 12 months - from an outsider's perspective, at least - the focus of the theatre's artistic director, Ben Barnes, as he launched his programme for the year, was firmly on the drama about to take place on the Abbey and Peacock stages themselves
His plans for centenary year were extraordinarily ambitious. Last November, they came as a package which seemed to contain one elaborate project after another, with a total of 23 productions, as well as 10 readings and three national and international tours, planned for the year ahead. On a budget of €4.5 million, with an ongoing deficit stemming from the Arts Council cuts of 2003, and with the specially created fundraising committee for the centenary programme yet to draw in the finances necessary to support it, casualties seemed certain - and certainly, with two productions cut from the programme in July of this year (Lennox Robinson's Drama at Inish, to be directed by Jim Nolan, and Paul Mercier's new play, Smokescreen), they have been suffered.
But that left 21 productions standing clear of the choppy waters of structural and financial strife, going ahead regardless of the problems which seemed to threaten the very future of the National Theatre. In itself, this is an achievement, given that it is always artistic activity, in its becoming and its realisation, that is exposed to the greatest risk by external difficulties in a theatre. When morale among the makers of theatre is low, theatre itself can too easily suffer. This, however, was not visibly the case on the Abbey stage. In fact, on the evening in September when the political crisis seemed to peak, as the artistic director saw off a motion of no confidence at an extraordinary general meeting, the feeling among both actors and audience members in the Peacock - where Colm Tóibín's first play, Beauty in a Broken Place, was rolling out its engaging vision of the early troubles of the National Theatre - was described by many as electric.
Then again, for the show to go on is perhaps the founding principle of theatre; for the show to be something worth staging is entirely another matter. The evidence of his four years at the Abbey suggests that it would have been impossible for Barnes to match the sheer quantity of his programme with a surfeit of quality. As in each of his past programmes, safety and familiarity lurked in the corners where innovation might have flourished, with a series of 17 revivals of canonical Irish plays, staged during the Dublin Theatre Festival, never likely to set any box office alight. Regardless of the peaks and valleys in the standards of its parts, what was produced by the Abbey in Ireland season, taken as a whole, was a series of well-made plays.
One of them was magnificent: Robin Lefevre's rich interpretation of Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, featuring not one but three superb performances, from John Kavanagh, Risteárd Cooper and David Pearse. Another was intriguing: Conall Morrison's enchanted and strangely disturbing take on George Fitzmaurice's The Dandy Dolls, a neglected classic which won many new fans for its author through its Abbey staging.
Most of the others ranged between the agreeable and the inoffensive, shadowed by the vague threat of dullness. These included Barnes's own production of Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert, with strong turns from both Owen Roe and Mark Lambert; Bernard Farrell's I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell, directed with the requisite lightness of touch and safety of humour by Martin Drury; and Yeats's Purgatory and Synge's Riders to the Sea, the much less successful parts of the trilogy directed by Morrison. Earlier in the year, Barnes's production of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World slotted into this same safe category.
Only one of these productions, Brian Brady's interpretation of Marina Carr's emotionally and linguistically demanding tragedy, Portia Coughlan, emerged as deeply flawed. Brady's stunted staging drained Carr's already improbable phrasing, the already stretched moral canvas of her outlook, of all conviction, and left an admirable cast scattered, powerless, across an under-utilised stage.
Regrettable as it was not to see any of the plays of figures from the earliest years of the Abbey, such as Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson, in full production (Robinson's Drama at Inish being one of those dropped, and space limitations being cited as the obstacle to staging Lady Gregory's work), the series of one-off readings which took place in October at least provided an opportunity to air less familiar works from the canon, including Lady Gregory's Spreading the News, Denis Johnston's The Moon in the Yellow River and Walter Macken's Home is the Hero. It was disheartening, too, to see the space afforded to younger directors in the abbeyonehundred programme restricted to this 10-day series of readings, presented in an unadorned rehearsal room of the Abbey. To see what they might have done with the work on the main stage would have been a daring exercise, and worthwhile for it.
Where their peers among the younger generation of Irish playwrights were concerned, Barnes's programme hit upon one notable success. Defender of the Faith, the first play from the Co Meath-born journalist and satirist, Stuart Carolan, presented the conflicts of country, of family and of self in searingly memorable language, deft with drama that is in turns moving, funny and unsettling, Carolan is a find, with his ear for dialogue at once vulnerable and bitterly unrepentant, his feeling for characters trapped in a time of sectarian animosity. He represents the achievement that the National Theatre should aim towards, certainly once a year, but more if the programming and the resources permit. That achievement is to find a new play, by a new writer - and looking in unusual places to do so if necessary - which exhibits striking potential, and to see that potential through.
This year, the Abbey achieved this not only with Carolan, but with the novelist Colm Tóibín, admittedly a writer of greatly more mature talent, but one also making the transition to the stage from another medium for the first time. Tóibín's Beauty in a Broken Place, a re- imagining of the creative relationship of Yeats, Lady Gregory and Sean O'Casey, was written with insight and wit, but was held back by the decision of its director, Niall Henry, to downplay the complexity of the O'Casey character by drowning him in props and costumes which may have been intended as humorous but which came across as merely patronising.
Other forays into new writing were less successful, with Paul Mercier's Smokescreen failing to make it to the stage, Eugene O'Brien disappointing with Savoy, his follow-up to the 2001 hit, Eden, and Peter Sheridan's Finders Keepers failing to banish sentimentality from its exploration of a Dublin childhood.
O'Brien proved himself a serious talent with Eden, a play in which the inner worlds of two individuals, a husband and wife, and their psychological pain, were stunningly depicted. O'Brien's penetrating lens failed him, however, when it was applied to the psyches and turmoils of the three men in Savoy. Whereas the conviction of the dilemma presented in the first play stemmed from its simplicity, from O'Brien's understanding of the banality of the sources of suffering, in Savoy he thrust a complex network of difficulties on to a play which called, rather, for the economy of expression which rendered Eden so powerful. In this, O'Brien was let down by the literary department of the Abbey, which should have honed and strengthened the play's focus during its period of development. He deserves more candid treatment of his work in future.
Ben Barnes's proposals for the restructuring of the theatre, although containing elements which have yet to be approved by the theatre's board and which veer worryingly towards a commercial model of a National Theatre (in its vision of income development and a seasonal model, including a summer season unabashedly aimed at tourists), at least strike the right note where the development of new writing is concerned. The idea of a studio or laboratory, which Barnes has spoken of this year in interviews with The Irish Times, is one which demands to be taken seriously by those responsible for the shaping of the new Abbey, both at management and Government level. Barnes's vision seems to be of a studio in which the new ideas of writers, directors, designers and collaborators would be allowed to develop away from the pressure of critics and audiences over a period of time sufficient both to expose and to resolve the problems in new work.
He insists that the devotion of resources to such a facility would not lessen the Abbey's commitment to new writing. At surface level, this is difficult to believe - with new writing behind closed doors, would not the stage be cleared for work that, however laudable, would come only from familiar and already successful artists? - but, such is the urgency for the careful, unhurried development of new work on the stage of the National Theatre that some benefit of the doubt may, for once, be owing to Barnes.
Ironically, with the Peacock Theatre "dark" this month owing to the postponement of Mercier's Smokescreen, a trial run of this laboratory approach has been taking place. The participants in what has been called "Open House" include the performance artist Amanda Coogan and directors Jimmy Fay, Raymond Keane, Paul Meade, David Parnell, Michelle Read, Gavin Kostick and Caroline McSweeney. Funded largely through the Abbey's Facing Forward scheme, an initiative for artists announced along with the centenary programme, they have been working on projects of the abstract and experimental sort to which the National Theatre's doors have not exactly been thrown open in the past. The work is taking place regardless of whether an audience is likely to see these projects at some stage in the future, and Ali Curran has spoken of her interest in continuing the initiative into 2005.
What is not owing to the artistic director, however, is anything approximating praise for the way in which he, and the management of the Abbey, have allowed the embarrassing and bizarre spectacle of The Shaughraun, a gleefully trivial 19th-century melodrama in a music-and-dance-infused incarnation by Riverdance producer John McColgan, to dominate the Abbey stage in what should be, in theatrical terms, its proudest year. The Shaughraun, which held court all summer and has now returned to the Abbey stage for a long, long, winter run, has been well talked-up by Barnes, by the Abbey's managing director, and by McColgan, but in terms of the Abbey's self- image as a theatre of note, it represents only an abandonment of pride. Certainly, this is a matter of taste - the review of the play in this newspaper, by critic Helen Meany, met with opposition of the "lighten up!" variety on the letters pages, and perhaps there is something to be said for a kicking up of the theatrical heels, especially during a year purporting towards festivity.
Unfortunately for The Shaughraun, a visiting production from Hungary - László Marton's Vigszínház company and its exhilarating Dance in Time - came to the Abbey this year to show how celebratory spectacle can be accomplished with visual panache, humour and lightness of touch without shirking the sensitive exploration of questions more profound than the getting of the girl. Barnes, in a published diary of his visit to Marton's Budapest theatre in 2000, is on record as admiring Dance in Time for the brilliance with which it epitomises both a vibrant sense of physical (and musical) theatricality and a sense of responsibility towards questions of identity, both personal and national.
Such a dynamic is exactly what a national theatre, in its showcase production, should aim towards achieving; not heavy-handedly, but with the imagination, the openness and the confidence of Marton's work. Admiration for Marton's achievement was obviously the reason for Barnes's bringing Dance in Time to Dublin; better still, however, to have seen that admiration manifest itself in the fostering of a work that would compare with its achievement.
Ironically, it was the work which played downstairs at the Peacock during the summer run of The Shaughraun, and which satirised that blockbuster even as it depicted, with memorable humour and compassion, the troubled persona of its creator, Dion Boucicault, which came closest to achieving that mix of thoughtfulness and exuberance. Stewart Parker's Heavenly Bodies, directed by his niece, Lynne Parker, was a masterstroke, and it is to be hoped that the stories of Abbey box-office staff directing disappointed Shaughraun ticket-seekers to Pygmalion in the Gate, rather than sending them downstairs to this play, are urban myths and nothing more.
Like the other European works which visited the Abbey this year, Marton's production had a regrettably short run. Dance in Time, the Polish production of Festen and the Slovenian production of A Midsummer Night's Dream came and went in the space of four days, giving audiences little chance to experience the powerful realisations of these works, and costing the Abbey much more to mount than it stood to recoup in box-office receipts.
Receipts were more obviously a problem with the home-grown productions in the Abbey in Europe season - despite relatively long runs, neither Tom Murphy's new version of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard nor Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes (based on Sophocles's Antigone) succeeded in attracting more than 36 per cent of box-office business. Ticket sales are, of course, no indicator of artistic standards, and while neither work broke any dramatic mould, they were by no means as dire as those figures might suggest. What they were, however, was over-cautious (Murphy) and over-eager (Heaney) and, while this may seem like a no-win diagnosis, the work with which these plays appeared in the European season illustrated compellingly how theatre can only thrive once freed from these unsure alternatives.
Next year is Barnes's last as artistic director. His five-year tenure reaches its close in December 2005, and with his sights set on an international career, he will be eager to get noticed - for artistic reasons, that is - in his last lap at the Abbey. The signs at this stage are far from unfavourable - László Marton returns in April to direct Frank McGuinness's version of Ibsen's A Doll's House, and a new play from Vincent Woods will also be placed in the hands of an exciting European director, Olivier Py. Meanwhile, the reunion of The Great Hunger collaborators, Tom McIntyre and Tom Hickey, in a new play from McIntyre about the murder of 19th-century Irish "witch" Bridget Cleary, is a prospect to relish.
And, in March, once The Shaughraun has gone off to Broadway or Hollywood or wherever its heroes and villains find their new home, the Abbey will stage the musical-theatrical extravaganza which, with a bit of foresight and an ear to the ground of the Dublin theatre scene, it could have premièred on its own stage as the original, intelligent, innovative smash hit of a centenary to remember: Improbable Frequency, by Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter.
But better late than never. Here's to many happier returns for the National Theatre.
The Abbey Theatre celebrates its 100th birthday today, December 27th, with a public day of celebration at the theatre, including:
12.30-2 p.m.: swing band, street performances
1 p.m.: official birthday toast with champagne and giant birthday cake
On stage, 2.30-5.30 p.m.: performances of the first four plays to be produced at the Abbey by companies chosen in a Drama League of Ireland contest earlier this year (sold out).
Abbey Rehearsal room, 3-5.30 p.m.: Storytelling for familieswith well-known performers/musicians: Two Chairs - Nuala Hayes and Ellen Cranitch, with Jack Lynch, read stories based on Lady Gregory's versions of folktales and legends; The Sound of the Gong, a potted history of the Abbey by Fergus Linehan senior and Tomás Mac Anna, performed by ex-Abbey Players and directed by Tomás Mac Anna.
Events are open to the public and free (except for four Drama League of Ireland plays, which are sold out). Details: 01-8787222, www.abbeytheatre.ie
