Friel gets top honour from Aosdana

ArtScape: Brian Friel has been elected a Saoi by the members of Aosdána, its highest honour. The President, Mrs McAleese will present him with a golden Torc at a ceremony expected to be early this year.

The Donegal playwright is on a bit of a roll at the moment, and the surprise is probably that he wasn't a Saoi already. The 71-year-old recently won best play at the Evening Standard theatre awards for The Home Place and rehearsals for Faith Healer - with movie star Ralph Fiennes, Ingrid Craigie and Ian McDiarmid - started this week, prior to its Gate opening on February 7th. And Friel's first play at the Abbey in years is likely to be his version of Turgenev's A Month in the Country later this year.

Members of Aosdána - there are currently 208 - elect a Saoi, for "singular and sustained distinction in the arts" following 15 nominations by members. In line with Aosdána's procedures, the secret vote is by post, and 50 per cent plus one of the electorate must agree. Up to five people can hold the honour at a time, and Friel joins the all-male list of Louis le Brocquy, Benedict Kiely, Seamus Heaney and Anthony Cronin (the most recent to be elected, in 2003). Previous saoithe include Samuel Beckett, Sean Ó Faoláin, Patrick Collins, Mary Lavin, Francis Stewart and Tony O'Malley. Aosdána's regular general assembly will be in early February.

Abbey appoints four

Abbey director Fiach MacConghail is continuing to change how the theatre is structured. This week he named four new associate directors "to provide creative support to him and the Abbey team in the various areas of their own expertise". The new associate directors - director/ producer David Gothard, designer Paul Keogan and directors/writers Conall Morrison and Bairbre Ní Chaoimh will advise on programming, artistic policy and new concepts of design. Paul Keogan's most recent design project was Siren Productions' acclaimed Titus Andronicus in Project in December and he is working on Paul Mercier's new play, Homeland, the Abbey's first production of 2006, which opens on January 14th. Conall Morrison's recent Abbey work includes The Importance of Being Earnest and Hamlet. He is due to direct The Bacchae of Baghdad, his own adaptation of Euripides, for the Abbey in March. MacConghail will also be drawing on Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, artistic director of Calypso Productions, for her "skills with new communities". David Gothard is a London-based director and arts producer who worked at the Royal Court in London and the Traverse in Edinburgh in the early 1970s. He brought pioneering visual theatre to London in the 1980s as artistic director of Riverside Studios, where he nurtured young British artists including Stephen Daldry, Peter Greenaway, Hanif Kureishi and Simon McBurney, while Samuel Beckett was twice in residence.

Meanwhile, there's still no news of the new Abbey board, which may be in place by the end of the month. And it will be interesting to see how the theatre fares with Arts Council funding, which presumably will affect its programming, if it is not to get into another financial hole. The theatre is in the enviable position of having its past debts covered by the Government, because of getting its house in order.

Only the first half of the year's programme has been announced. This includes two outings as a "receiving house" - first for the International Dance Festival Ireland, which takes over the theatre for 10 days in late April and then for Aurélia's Oratorio, which wowed the Galway Arts Festival last July. It opens in May.

Generating new work of high quality is surely a requirement of a national theatre, but will it be able to write cheques big enough to pay for it?

Producer for Druid

Druid has appointed Felicity O'Brien as producer, a new role at the Galway theatre company. O'Brien has worked with the Dublin Theatre Festival as programme co-ordinator

and as special projects manager responsible for the festival's in-house productions. A DCU graduate from Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, she started her career at the Galway Arts Festival and has also been line producer with St Patrick's Festival and production stage manager with Riverdance.

Druid also announced this week a new production of John B Keane's The Year of the Hiker to play Galway and Dublin's Gaiety Theatre in late spring. The final production in Druid's Keane Trilogy (Sive 2003, Sharon's Grave 2004) will have the same creative team (Garry Hynes, Francis O'Connor, David Bolger, Davy Cunningham and Kathy Strachan).