In eight years Joe Dowling's vision of a new Minneapolis theatre has been made real. It wouldn't happen here, he tells Belinda McKeon
Not long after he became artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, word of just how big a success Joe Dowling had proven in that role made its way back to Ireland. There was talk of billboards. There was talk of pictures on the sides of buses.
Dowling, it seemed, had rapidly transformed the fortunes of the ailing theatre founded by Tyrone Guthrie in 1963. He had increased ticket sales, attracted a new audience, and directed a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream which had broken box-office records for a Shakespeare play.
"That's our Joe up there," began a report in The Irish Times in 1997, describing how the face of the Dublin-born director and producer beamed down from a height at several points in the Midwestern city which was eager to express its thanks to the director.
Back then, Dowling talked of making changes at the Guthrie, maybe bringing the two stages (which were located in separate buildings miles apart) closer together. Instead, he built a new three-stage theatre, designed by one of the world's leading architects, which is already being praised as one of the finest marriages of structure and site since Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum on the waterfront of Bilbao. It came with a price-tag of $125 million (€99.42 million), $90 million (€71.58 million) of which has been raised in private donations on top of a hard-won base of $25 million (€19.88 million) in state investment. That leaves $10 million (€7.95 million) yet to raise, but Dowling has no reason to believe it won't appear.
That he is now sitting in his office with a panoramic view of the Mississippi River, only eight years after "going for broke" and proposing to his board that that it should undertake the building of a new Guthrie, seems reason enough for such confidence. Just two years into his term when he made the proposal, he expected to be met with scorn.
"I thought they'd say: 'You know, the sooner you get on an Aer Lingus flight and go home, the better.' But they didn't," he says.
And Dowling, who had a career both illustrious and chequered in Irish theatre before moving to the US in the mid-1990s (the youngest artistic director of the Abbey, he resigned after an acrimonious struggle with the board in 1985, and went on to found the Gaiety School of Acting, of which he remains chairman), knows that things would have been different had he pitched such a plan on the other end of that Aer Lingus flight.
"Think of the years of bureaucracy and interference that has happened in relation to the Abbey move," he says. "When they first proposed the idea, it was way back when Patrick Mason was artistic director, and there they are still, 10 or 12 years later, still in the old building. And eight years later, we have this. And that's the difference, in terms of what people here believe about the arts. Both about the arts and also about what's possible."
HE DOESN'T WANT to appear smug, he says - and, to be fair, he doesn't. Rather, his attitude to the delay behind the Abbey move, and to public feeling for the arts in Ireland, seems driven by a mixture of pragmatism and sheer relief. Relief, that is, at being as far away from it all as possible, though he still maintains a "low-grade connection" with the Irish theatre scene. Indeed, the first show at the new Guthrie will be by an Irish company - DruidSynge this week kicked off its American tour in Minneapolis, before moving to New York later this month. Other Irish associates of Dowling also flew west for the celebrations, including Fiach Mac Conghail, director of the Abbey, Tony O'Dalaigh, former director of the Dublin Theatre Festival, and Patrick Sutton, director of the Gaiety School of Acting.
With the additional stages at the new theatre, Dowling says he is looking forward to more "cross-fertilisation" with Irish theatre companies, reiterating that he wants to bring the Abbey to the Guthrie in the near future. What he doesn't want, however, is to be an Irish ambassador for companies or artists hoping to get a start in the American scene. To Irish artists who would complain of being neglected by Dowling in favour of American peers when it comes to auditions or meetings, he has a curt reply.
"I wouldn't tolerate that for a second," he says. "I'm not the Irish artistic director of the Guthrie, I'm the artistic director of the Guthrie. And I'm part of this community now."
For the new Guthrie's opening scene, at a gala celebration last Saturday, Dowling chose the old Guthrie's most beloved closing scene: the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Titania and Oberon call for the blessing of the house and Puck calls for the audience's applause. The Shakespearean fairies were followed by a lengthy parade of musical numbers, mixing Broadway with classical; examples of the contemporary American theatre for which the Guthrie is so respected may have been judged too devoid of glitz and glamour for an audience largely comprised of wealthy benefactors. The black-tie gala was attended by 1,500 people, some of them paying up to $1,500 for their tickets, while an estimated 20,000 packed the various spaces of the theatre on Sunday, when an open day of free performances and fireworks drew an eager Minnesotan crowd.
THE GUTHRIE IS Jean Nouvel's first building in North America; a project intended for lower Manhattan was shelved after September 11th, 2001. Given his international renown - other buildings include the Arab World Institute in Paris and the Lyon Opera House - this first is a coup for the Guthrie, as well as a signal that Dowling and the board see themselves as competing on a global scene, and as taking risks. What most impressed him about Nouvel, says Dowling, became apparent during a visit to the Lyon building.
"I was blown away by the fact that he had taken the backstage as seriously as the lobby," he says.
And this is saying something. Because Nouvel takes the art of the lobby very seriously indeed. Witness the yellow box. The yellow box, which houses the black box studio named after Dowling, raised almost every eyebrow that encountered it over the opening weekend. Literally hung by Nouvel on the outside of the ninth floor, it looks from a distance like an enormous, mismatched Lego brick slotted defiantly into the theatre's blue-black bulk. It has its critics, one Minneapolis commentator unfavourably comparing the Guthrie to an Ikea store, yet, like almost every feature of Nouvel's strange and beautiful design, the studio space is as thrillingly disorientating as it is dazzling. From inside, the studio lobby is bathed in an eerie yellow light, while the view of the wide Mississippi below, of the falls and of the long stone bridge bounded by disused mills and grain silos, is too vast and complicated to take in in a single glance.
It's the same at the many precisely and dramatically framed viewing spots throughout the theatre: a bend in the street suddenly looks as perfect as a brushstroke, a rusted ad for flour becomes a sculpture. Along and above the long, sloping lobby on the fourth floor, which connects the thrust and proscenium stages, meanwhile, faint presences of Guthrie actors from the past seem to float alongside and opposite slits of windows lined with deep mirrored panels; the walls and ceilings are papered with digitally printed airmail paper carrying barely-there images of past performances. Perspective is stretched and pulled like a rubber band. The technique is echoed on the exterior of the building, the dark steel of which - coloured, Nouvel explains, for the sky at twilight, the hour of the theatre - both reflects back the surrounding landscape of hologram-like images from eight pivotal Guthrie plays.
Again, the effect is eerie, mysterious, uncanny - just the way Nouvel wanted it. Giving a tour of the theatre to journalists, Nouvel, aged 60, wears only black, speaks often in sentences that sound like philosophical treatises, and has a bearing that makes his every move and gesture look like a statuesque, regal pose. He speaks of how ghosts are everywhere in a building. In the case of the Guthrie, he explains, the ghosts include not just the performances and the performers of the years gone by, but the activities, the industries, the livelihoods which used to make a theatre of this riverside site.
"A building is an echo, a long story," he says. "I wanted to create a sense of continuity, of memory."
SET ON THE river on which a formerly agrarian city relied for its sustenance, the new Guthrie reflects the ghosts of the apparently unsightly buildings around it; its circular form echoes the grain silos, its coloured glass windows the neon signs. On the roof, two vertical LED electronic signs playfully imitate smokestacks. And, in the building's most dramatic statement, a massive cantilevered section stretches almost 180 feet over the river like a gangplank. From here, the views are spectacular; the outdoor space is like an amphitheatre on the water. Nouvel knows how to get the Guthrie patrons in the mood for the sensory tricks of the theatre.
"It's a game, all of these things are part of the game," he says of the way the building's many levels and spaces work together.
But gathering the millions of dollars in state investment and private donations necessary to pay Nouvel's fee and ensure that the building was finished to his high standards was hardly a game for Dowling and his board.
Convincing the board that a new theatre, and a big-name architect, were needed was the easy part. To raise the money, several courses of action had to be taken. A professional lobbyist was hired. For two years, Dowling himself personally lobbied the office of every single senator and member of congress in Washington, leading to what he calls "some very aggressive meetings". A grassroots campaign urged people all over the state of Minnesota to write to their legislators to ask for support for the Guthrie - and it worked. As did the appeal for donors, with more than 4,100 people coming forward over the eight-year period it took to bring the theatre into being.
Dowling really doesn't hold back when it comes to the gaping differences between Ireland and the US where public support of the arts is concerned. As a queue of punters eager to see their new theatre stretches around the building and down towards the river, it's hard to think of a reason why he should.
"Can you see that sort of line on Lower Abbey Street?" he asks. "No. It wouldn't happen. This community feels a sense of ownership of their cultural institutions in a way we've never cultivated in Ireland. With the exception, I think, of Druid.
"I think Druid in Galway have managed to become an important part of the city, both socially and economically. That's the same with the arts institutions here. We're not peripheral. We're at the centre."