Halfway through his first three years as director of the Abbey Theatre, Fiach MacConghail sees his role as 'curatorial' and believes every Irish person has a say in the future of the National Theatre, he tells Fintan O'Toole
Such is the allure of the Abbey Theatre's history that those who run it tend to defend the institution's honour even while they are being driven quietly mad by its problems. Fiach MacConghail, who took over as director of the Abbey in June 2005, is a striking exception. He came into the job as a result of the worst crisis in its history, taking up the reins a full five months before he was scheduled to do so, simply to negotiate the Abbey's survival. He was chosen, unlike all of his predecessors since the 1960s, not for his stage skills (he does not direct plays) but for the managerial abilities and political nous demonstrated in his previous jobs running the Irish College in Paris and the Project Arts Centre, and as adviser to the Minister for the Arts, John O'Donoghue. Less than two years on, and with a €25 million three-year funding package to support him, he still sees himself as a man gradually nursing a patient back to life after a near-death experience.
"To be frank about it," he says, "from June 2005 until September of last year was the learning curve, taken up with getting the information on how to run the organisation, getting rid of the malfunctioning, understanding what things cost. During that period I encountered a severe lack of knowledge about how the organisation was run. From middle-management to stage crews, everybody was doing their jobs but there was no linkage between them. Information going to the top was highly dysfunctional. Secondly, there was bad reporting of finances, from ordinary simple things like how much money was made at box office that morning to how much a production cost. And thirdly, there was the alienation of the artistic community. Actors and writers and theatre artists - their patience was tried and they were undervalued.
"I had to go through a root-and-branch reform of the structure of the Abbey, looking at what was missing. Largely it was to do with knowledge. You couldn't fault commitment, or loyalty, but you could fault lack of expertise, lack of an openness to change. We looked at everything, from how we relate to the punter in terms of our box office to how we make sets, to stage management, to casting. All we've done in the last year is to steady the ship and I imagine all we'll do over the next year is continue to set it on course. This three years is about consolidation, it's about me learning the ropes."
The worst aspect of the mess he inherited, he believes, was not the crumbling building, the financial deficit or even the fact that the Abbey's management systems were so opaque that the theatre didn't actually know how much it was losing. It was an underlying weakness in the Abbey's most important and distinctive function: the production of new Irish plays.
"Frankly, whatever we think about the money and the deficit and the corporate governance of the organisation, the most awful legacy that I inherited was the paucity of new Irish writing ready to be on stage at the Abbey Theatre. I was in denial about it for a while, but we've nearly lost a generation of Irish writers and, ultimately, if the Abbey is not at the races as a crucible for new Irish writing it will reflect badly on all Irish theatre. Because this notion that if we don't do it they'll go elsewhere in the Irish theatre is wrong. They'll just leave the country or go to film and TV. We inherited about 10 commissions when we started and we've now added another 18 commissions, and we have lured back both the older generation - Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, Mark O'Rowe, Sebastian Barry, Donal O'Kelly, Billy Roche, Tom MacIntyre - and also a younger generation like Liz Kuti and Jessica Cooke. We've re-affirmed to them our commitment to their work. That sounds obvious but it was that serious, that detrimental a scenario."
Why, though, has relatively little new work emerged on the Abbey or Peacock stages in the last 18 months? It takes two or three years for work to reach the stage, he says, and the Abbey has been guilty in the past of putting on plays before they are fully ready. "Work has gone on stage undercooked and that's something we have to hold our nerve on. We're not going to fall into the trap of putting on plays for political reasons, that if we don't do a new play then our funding will be cut. We have to take our time with this. We have to gain the trust of the writers. The Abbey will ultimately be judged over a period of time on whether we've discovered new writers and supported mid-career and senior writers, by not only doing new work but also revisiting previous works."
IF HE IS willing to resist the pressure to stage new works before he thinks they're ready, he is also determined to avoid what he believes to be another fault of his predecessors: doing things the Abbey is not funded to do. "Through all that mayhem and crisis-management of winter 2005, we had to put together a three-year business plan, on the premise that if it was worth keeping the Abbey, this was how much it cost. I took three themes: change, consolidation and preparation for growth. We looked for €28 million [ from the Arts Council] which included things like doing eight shows a year in the Peacock, seven in the Abbey and touring, developing a system of understudies, and a large investment in the literary department. We got €25 million and the first thing I did was not make the mistake of my predecessors, which was to go ahead and fulfil the ambition of the €28 million. The understudy thing went, touring went and there was a reduction in the expected number of productions."
Twenty-five million euro over three years is still a lot of public money, however. This year's grant of €8.5 million is more than four times those of the Gate Theatre and Druid together. Even in the context of a profound crisis that saw the winding-up of the National Theatre Society and the creation of a radically new set of structures, the Abbey has to justify its privileged position by doing things that other companies cannot do. That distinctiveness, MacConghail argues, lies essentially in the political realm.
"There's an iconic, almost Pavlovian response to the Abbey Theatre, a huge resonance from its role in assisting in the formation of the Republic. It was one of the intellectual debating chambers that evolved into a national movement. At times through its history it dissociated itself from that responsibility. I'm a political animal, and I think if a citizen sees work at the Abbey Theatre over a year, it is the Abbey's responsibility to assist that citizen in reflecting on the concerns that are in the ether in a changing society. The role of the Abbey is to provide an arena for the citizen to reflect on what is happening in Ireland. It's not the responsibility of the artist - it's my role to place the artist in that debate. Every programming decision I make and the way we mediate that programme to our audiences is a political act. We still have to do great productions, good art; we don't have to hammer the notion of politics on the stage, but I think it is important that what makes us distinctive is that we have to reflect contemporary Ireland."
A word he uses a lot in this regard is "curatorial". He sees himself as a curator of other people's work who makes his own impact by the way that work is arranged and juxtaposed. "One cannot populate plays on stage in isolation. Audience are smart, they will see an energy, a sense that there's an overarching view, a journey, a curatorial journey. Probably the only good thing I'll say about myself is that I absorb other people's passions. If I can continue to listen to what the writers and actors and directors want, what they're picking up in their communities, then I can contextualise it for our audiences."
Who those audiences are is another open but fundamental question. "There is no such thing anymore as a typical Abbey audience," he says. "We don't know our audiences yet. One of the things we're doing is getting to know our own locale, the Bulgarian bar up the road, the Larkin Community College, how they can have a more fruitful relationship with the Abbey. Both onstage and offstage we have to reflect contemporary Ireland. We're not there yet. Nearly half of our front-of-house staff are from immigrant communities, but that's not yet reflected on stage."
A KEY PART of this process is change in the Abbey's relationship both to plays and to actors. In terms of repertoire, he is looking both to encourage the large scale and to protect the small scale. The new financial stability allows the Abbey to move away from the prevailing notion that writers have to tailor their work to the economics of small casts. On January 2nd this year, the Abbey had 52 actors on its payroll (the casts of The School for Scandal, A Number and Julius Caesar) and this, he says, is a conscious demonstration that "now we can do big plays, writers can write big plays". At the same time, however, he intends to reshape the Abbey's system to allow for the shorter runs that take pressure off the more experimental or difficult plays.
"At the moment, we're doing 11 shows a year. My ambition by 2010 is to be doing 16 shows a year. Largely for funding reasons in the past, one had to run shows for six or seven weeks. That exposed work that had to be done but didn't have the box-office appeal. The freedom that three-year funding will give us for our second three-year plan is that when we decide to put on a play with minority interest, we can adapt the calendar to that. It's okay for us to open a play on the Abbey stage and only run it for three weeks. Now, I present five works in the Peacock every year. We're only going to run these shows for four weeks, which creates an energy, makes audiences commit earlier, and takes some of the pressure off the work."
He also believes that the Abbey should develop better relationships with the acting community. Part of this involves the building of bridges to those senior figures who currently work almost exclusively in England. Stephen Rea is returning for Sam Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horse next month, and MacConghail has had "detailed discussions" with Fiona Shaw and with the three Cusack sisters, Sinead, Sorcha and Niamh. But he recognises that such established stars "will come and work at the Abbey when it's right for them" and that the theatre has to develop its own luminaries. "The Abbey has responsibility to nurture and develop actors more and challenge them more. One of my ambitions is to begin to look at a core company again. It is the 21st century and the notion of permanency doesn't run, but a core company that populates two or three plays in the Peacock and the Abbey - Garry Hynes's work with Synge has shown that one play and one performance can inform another."
These ambitions, and the substantial funding that is available to back them up, will inevitably generate the pressures to succeed that have been kept at bay by the very depth of the crisis he inherited. He remains, however, coolly resolved to value steady progress over spectacular gestures, trusting that the public will be patient so long as they can see that a journey is under way. "The pennies are dropping, and maybe that's what this three years are about, not taking anything for granted and actually admitting that I might not know everything either. I don't necessarily know how to run the Abbey so let's go down this open, honest and public journey about how we do this. All I'm expecting at the end of these three years is that the ship is going in the right direction, that we have a sense of ourselves in terms of our artistic vision, our commitment to writers and theatre-makers and to developing theatre arts in Ireland."