Playwright Paul Mercier has just been named Abbey Theatre Writer in Association. For the next year, Mercier will be writing a site-specific piece of drama for the Abbey stage, and working with the theatre on some of its workshops and Outreach programmes.
"The award allows me to take the opportunity to try something I wouldn't normally do," explains Mercier. "My aim is to write something I wouldn't have done with Passion Machine, or on my own. I have to create something new for the Abbey over the year. It may take more than a year, but the idea is that I will be creating a new work specially for the Abbey stage."
Unlike writers in residence, Mercier will not be required to be based in the infamously overcrowded theatre. "My head will be there, but my body will be elsewhere!" he says. "But when it gets to the stage of doing the show, I will be there full-time."
Mercier's award follows Passion Machine's recent run of Diarmuid and Grainne at the Olympia, the revival of Studs at the Gaiety and Mercier's Down the Line at the National Theatre.
The award, which is sponsored by the Anglo-Irish Bank and is worth €11,000, has previously been awarded to playwrights Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, Billy Roche, and Jim Nolan. It is unusual in that it is not competitive; candidates do not apply, they are approached and asked if they are interested.
MERCIER isn't the only playwright with good news this week. Enda Walsh has begun a summer residency in Taos, New Mexico with Sage Theatre Group. While there, he will work on a new play and oversee the American début of Bedbound, his Edinburgh Fringe First award-winning play, at Taos's Festival of Contemporary Irish Theatre. Earlier this year, Bedbound ran at the Royal Court in London.
Three Sage Theatre productions of plays by Irish playwrights will be staged at the Taos festival (August 1st-25th): The Good Thief by Conor McPherson, The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh, and Bedbound.
STILL on theatre, the innovative company Barabbas makes its second appearance in London in recent years, performing at the Greenwich and Docklands Festival. The 10-day festival is London's biggest multi- artform festival, and last year sold some 130,000 tickets. Barabbas's production of Gerard Stembridge's homage to the magic and insanity of theatre, Nightmare on Abbey Street, was originally performed in Dublin as Nightmare on Essex Street (it débuted at Project on Essex Street). Londoners might have been flummoxed by an Irish play bearing the title of one of their adjoining counties, so it was changed to "Abbey Street", felt to have an association abroad with Irish theatre.
THE Gaiety Theatre this week formally opened its new Plaza café and took the opportunity to announce its programme for the rest of the year and its continuing palns for refurbishment. Following the current run of the most hirsute band in Ireland, The Dubliners (marking 40 years of performance and joined by Ronnie Drew and Jim McCann), Anna Livia International Opera presents Verdi's Il Trovatore and Freidrich Von Flotow's Martha. The cast of the theatre's lead summer production includes Mick Lally, Mary McEvoy and Maureen Toal. No, not Glenroe at the Gaiety, but a staging of the late John B. Keane's The Chastitute. Then Alan Stanford directs a production of Romeo and Juliet for Second Age Theatre Company, followed in September by Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming.
The theatre will close after the final performance of Opera Ireland's spring season 2003, when the auditorium will be re- vamped and backstage facilities improved. For anyone who's ever sweated under the lights and squashed their long legs against the seat in front, the Gaiety promises that air-conditioning will now cool brows and new seating will provide more leg-room.
DO YOU live in or around Killaloe, Lough Derg, or Limerick? Do you have a living room in which you could swing a large horse, as opposed to a small cat? Or indeed, an airy kitchen or hall, with stairs on which people can sit? Daghdha's Living Room Project is looking for such rooms in those areas for July 18th-20th and October 17th-19th.
Daghdha's Japanese artistic director, Yoshiko Chuma, devised the project some 10 years ago, and it ran originally in New York. The basic idea behind the project is that of a barter system. Five musicians - double bass, cellist, flautist and two vocalists - seven dancers and their director arrive in your living room to play and perform for your family, friends and as many neighbours as you can squash into your house. The performances are improvisation-based, and thus each is unique.
In return for being entertained, the host house provides that splendid institution, "refreshments". No money changes hands, a novel concept in these times. For details, tel: 061-202804 or e-mail www.daghdha.com
A FRANCIS Bacon Symposium will run on November 8th and 9th at Trinity College and the Hugh Lane Gallery (which houses Bacon's reconstructed studio, where he worked from 1961 until his death in 1992). The symposium's inaugural address is by Brian Clarke, executor of Bacon's will.
Other speakers over the weekend include Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane; Matthew Gale, curator of the Tate's collections department; Hugh Davies of San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art; and Ernst van Alphen of the University of Leiden. Early booking fee until July 12th is €200; thereafter €250. For details, tel: 01-8741903 or e-mail www.hughlane.ie