The Abbey theatre is planning four world premieres over the next year, with new plays from Irish playwrights Marina Carr, Tom Mac Intyre, and Billy Roche and Sam Shepard from the US.
At the announcement today of the theatre’s programme until mid 2009, Abbey director Fiach Mac Conghail, said he was “pleased and relieved” at the endorsement from the Arts Council.
The council yesterday announced it is renewing its three-year funding of the national theatre, committing more than €30 million over the next three years. The theatre will receive €9.2 million in 2009, €10.0 million in 2010 and €11 million in 2011 totalling €30.2 million.
Mr Mac Conghail said the theatre has a relationship of “partnership and co-operation and trust” with the council, and that they had been working together over the past six to eight months to agree the funding, the announcement of which was “not a one-night stand scenario” he said.
Fiona Shaw, directed by Deborah Warner in the British National Theatre production of Beckett’s Happy Days will be at the Abbey for the month of October, as part of its Dublin Theatre Festival line-up.
In the Peacock for the festival will be the Irish premiere of Delirium, Enda Walsh’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (a co-commission between the Abbey and the Barbican in London).
In a response to changing audience behaviour, the theatre also plans to change the start times of performances – from October, shows at the Abbey will begin at 7.30pm, and plays at the Peacock will begin at 8pm.
Plans for the theatre’s relocation to the Docklands are still in train, Mr MacConghail stressed, and the theatre should open about five years after the architectural competition is announced.
He was not emotionally tied to the current Abbey Street site, he said, and he wants the theatre to move to the Docklands, where there will be space for three theatres, a cinema, restaurants and rehearsal rooms.
Following the theatre festival, Jimmy Fay will direct Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Abbey; Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s version of The Playboy of the Western World will return for the Christmas season.
This will be followed by Marina Carr’s new play, Marble, and then Comedy of Errors, directed by Jason Byrne, in what Mr MacConghail hopes will be an annual Shakespeare production. At the Peacock Billy Roche returns to the national theatre with Lay Me Down Softly in November, followed by Marivaux’s La Dispute, the debut of young director Wayne Jordan. Sam Shepard’s new play, Ages of the Moon, written for Stephen Rea and Sean McGinley, and directed by Jiummy Fay, opens on March 3. Later, Tom MacIntyre’s Only an Apple, directed by Selina Cartmell, opens at the Peacock.