CultureShock:The new Abbey design has greatly improved the auditorium - could it make the theatre's projected move to the docklands redundant, asks Fintan O'Toole
When John Synge was first imagining his masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, he saw it opening in a ploughed field, where Christy Mahon would hit his da with a loy. But, as Lady Gregory later recorded, "when he thought of the actual stage he could not see any possible side wings for that 'wide, windy corner of high distant hills'." And so the play opens in the kind of interior setting that the old Abbey could most easily accommodate.
This is something we tend to forget: plays are often written for specific spaces and those spaces affect both text and performance. Shakespeare's work changed radically after 1609, when his company, The King's Men, acquired the indoor, intimate Blackfriars Theatre. The "actual stage" of the old Abbey Theatre helped to shape the work of Irish playwrights for almost half a century. It will therefore be fascinating to see what effect the superb redesign of the Abbey auditorium, currently getting its first test with Billy Roche's The Cavalcaders, will have on Irish playwrights, actors and designers.
One of the interesting aspects of the new design is the way it moves, in some respects, back to the future. The original Abbey was an intimate space. The auditorium was just 42ft by 51ft, though its capacity was actually a little bigger than that of the new auditorium. People were packed in: as actor Gabriel Fallon put it, "your knees were in your neighbour's kidneys". With its horseshoe-shaped balcony adding to the sense of enclosure, the audience seemed, not just on top of each other, but on top of the stage.
This intimacy shaped much of what seemed, at the time, so revolutionary about the so-called Abbey style. The famous economy of movement and gesture owed much to the paucity of space on the stage. The prevalent naturalism was underscored by the fact that the actors did not need to project their voices at any great volume. More negatively, the recurrence of essentially the same set - the kitchen of a peasant cottage - was not unconnected to the old Abbey's lack of facilities for the construction and storage of scenery. It is not accidental that the plays whose rejection marked the Abbey's decline, Denis Johnston's The Old Lady Says No! and Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie, use exterior spaces.
Michael Scott's new Abbey had many of the drawbacks of the old space without most of the advantages. The auditorium was almost perversely misjudged. Its fan shape drew on classical auditoriums, but then its relatively flat floor took away the tiered effect that makes those spaces work. The balcony never worked for audiences, but the actors' natural eyeline was straight towards its blank front. The acoustics were terrible, so that even though the audience was no bigger than in the old auditorium, the actors could no longer speak in a natural tone. The intimacy of the old space was lost, but the new space had none of the flexibility, dynamism or concentration of a more contemporary theatre. Playwrights, by and large, may have continued to write for the Abbey, but they stopped writing for the Abbey space. They wrote what they could and hoped that directors, designers and actors could make it work on the Abbey stage. And much of what they wrote tended to fall between the Abbey's two spaces, being too big for the Peacock and too confined to fill the main stage.
John Keogan and Jean-Guy Lecat's new design, like all the best ideas, is brilliantly obvious. It largely restores the fan-shaped auditorium to its classical roots, raking the tiered seating down from where the balcony used to be, so that much of the audience is now level with or a little above the actors. Judging from Robin Lefèvre's production of The Cavalcaders, which had to be conceived without experience of the new space, the acoustics are vastly improved but still occasionally problematic. But the sense of intimacy has been triumphantly restored. The eye is drawn inwards towards the stage rather than across its yawning width.
Even though relatively few seats have been lost, the space feels at once grander and more compact.
The new sight lines make it possible to use the full height of the stage. Alan Farquharson's design for The Cavalcaders, understandably enough, makes only tentative use of these possibilities, but they certainly exist.
It should now be possible to imagine productions of the Abbey's traditional repertoire that are both more faithful to the style of the original plays and more radical in their use of space. It should also be possible for playwrights to think about writing for this space, seeing it as an inspiration rather than an obstacle.
The big question, of course, is whether the new design is so successful that it makes the Abbey's projected move to the docklands redundant. The new space needs to be lived in for a good while longer before that question can be answered, and there are the problems with the Abbey building that go beyond the auditorium. But the new space reminds us that there has been a theatre on the Abbey site since 1820 and that there is no reason why the process of reinvention that has been going on since then should stop, whether the Abbey stays there or not.