Profile/Michael Colgan: Bono speaks highly of him, actors and writers admire him, and his staff are loyal to him, but his first love will always be an old building on Parnell Square, writes Shane Hegarty
In 2001, Michael Colgan spoke about the theatre business. "I don't think audiences will sit down for two hours anymore unless you give them a reward," he told Jeananne Crowley. "And the reward you give them is by telling them that they have been to an Event. When you Event something, you've a much better chance of getting them to sit through even five hours." The Gate, he promised, would continue to "event with a capital E".
The Beckett centenary has certainly become an Event. There will be nine plays alone in the Gate Theatre, of which he is director - although that might be considered a doddle seeing as it was the first theatre to put all 19 of Beckett's plays on in one go. The rest of the city will host a varied programme, although it might have become just another festival on a cluttered calendar if Colgan, as chairman of the Beckett Centenary Committee, hadn't invited Bono to launch it.
Bono did so via a pastiche of Beckett, in which Colgan featured prominently. The country sat up and took notice. The event gained its capital E.
At the Gate, the Beckett season follows a revival of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, starring Ralph Fiennes, the entire run of which was sold out weeks before its opening night. Colgan, tongue-in-cheek, blamed his fan clubs from Belgium, the Netherlands and Iceland for block-booking seats, although the theatre's accountants are unlikely to be so picky. Faith Healer will begin a Broadway run next month.
Faith Healer arrived not too long after a Pinter season celebrating the English playwright's 75th birthday. It was the Gate's third Pinter festival, but this one rather fortunately coincided with his being awarded a Nobel prize. In Britain, there was a sudden realisation that their greatest living playwright was only fully valued in Dublin and whatever that Nobel did for Pinter's reputation, Colgan's ripened in the reflected glory.
The Daily Telegraph dispatched someone to the city to find out what was going on, and the subsequent report described Colgan in breathless terms. He is "Ireland's most feted theatrical ambassador" credited with transforming the Gate into a "cocksure David to the Abbey's reeling Goliath" and creating the "yawning chasm in terms of prestige [ that] has opened up between them".
Colgan's not a man who would shy from such praise. His reputation is as a modern impresario, an old-style producer and brilliant administrator with an unwavering self-belief that gave him a knack for inspiring loyalty, and, occasionally, loathing.
"You will hear him coming before you see him," says Anne Clarke, co-deputy director at the Gate Theatre for 18 years until 2002. "He is incredibly persuasive, but he is also great company, great fun. When directors, designers and actors come here they know they'll have a great time creatively. He will be omnipresent at everything right up until opening night. He is also pretty relentless, in that if he thinks something is right then he will pursue it to the bitter end. He absolutely inspires amazing loyalty, a great strength given that his staff work flat out and under immense pressure."
Perhaps that explains his ever-thickening contacts book. Michael Gambon, Penelope Wilton, Kenneth Cranham and Frances McDormand have also performed at the Gate. He persuaded John Hurt to return to the stage for a previous Beckett season, and the presence of American TV star Christopher Meloni in Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge recently attracted enormous interest.
In 2002, with producer Alan Moloney, he completed the mammoth task of having each of Beckett's plays filmed, screened on television and then released as a four-disc, 11-hour DVD box set. That the work was of mixed quality was largely overlooked, such was the blinding array of talent on the credits list. There were performances from the late Sir John Gielgud (his last), Kristin Scott-Thomas, Alan Rickman and Julianne Moore. Among the directors were Conor McPherson, Damien Hirst, Neil Jordan, Atom Egoyan, Richard Eyre, David Mamet and Anthony Minghella. It was testament not only to his obsession with Beckett, but to his powers of persuasion.
He has required ingenuity, he constantly points out, because the theatre runs on limited resources. The Gate will this year receive €850,000 from the Arts Council, while the Abbey has three years' funding worth €25.7 million. Colgan was only this week spotted cornering director of the Arts Council Mary Cloake at an event. Perhaps he was repeating his mantra, that the Arts Council doesn't reward success, or his accusations of its attempted interference in the Gate's programming. Or perhaps he repeated what he is reported to have said when the funding was originally announced: "There's no rhyme or reason as to how the Arts Council make their decisions, but I think they must do it alphabetically - certainly 'A' does well!"
As former drama officer of the Arts Council, Phelim Donlon was often at the receiving end of Colgan's displeasure, but he says that the scars heal quickly. "He is a great showman, and he does not pull any punches if he feels that the work is undervalued or denigrated. But I never found him difficult to deal with. As long as he finds that the people he is dealing with are equally direct in where they are coming from, he will accept it and deal with it. I never had any sense that it was personal."
The 55-year-old Dubliner is a father of three, now separated from wife and former Gate colleague, actor Susan Fitzgerald. When receiving a Special Tribute award at The Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards last year, he said he could never repay his debt to her "on and off the stage. Publicly, I want to acknowledge that".
He has been artistic director of the Gate Theatre for 22 years; a staggering length of time in the world of theatre. Some wonder why he stays there, given that it is a small player for such a big character.
"He loves the Gate," says Clarke. "Sometimes, I think it's as simple as that."
In his early career he was a director at the Abbey and a tour manager of the Irish Theatre Company before making his name during a successful period as director of the Dublin Theatre Festival.
When he took charge of the Gate Theatre in 1983, it was a venue living off a tattered reputation. Under its founders Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, it had been renowned as a home for the avant-garde. But, by the 1980s, with average paying audiences of just 25 per cent, it was in danger of leaving one era without making it to another.
Colgan quickly set about rebuilding its reputation by upping the quality of its productions, and through successful international touring of its productions, most notably of Beckett.
However, he attracted accusations of having jettisoned the theatre's tradition of experimentation. He is considered a conservative producer. Bold, certainly, in the scale of the events he stages, but not one for taking risks on new writers. There may have been new plays in recent years, but they were from established playwrights such as Brian Friel, Conor McPherson and Frank McGuinness.
"It's probably a fair criticism, but I don't think it means he has no ambition or interest in producing works by lesser-known or new writers," says Donlon. "If he had two spaces available to him, I think he'd be more than happy to use that to mount more courageous or experimental work. But he's almost a prisoner of his own success. His instinct has been good, and he's built up the audiences, so it would be difficult to move away from that."
It appears to have been an undertone to a row he last year had with playwright Tom Murphy at writer Colm Tóibín's birthday party, during which Colgan ended up with a bowl of curry over his head. It has been claimed that Colgan said of Murphy, "You're only a provincial playwright." To which Murphy retorted: "And you are the keeper of a museum on Parnell Square". A bowl of lamb korma became involved. After the incident, though, the two men shook hands and remained at the party.
Such a denunciation is unlikely to spark a crisis of confidence. His self-belief appears to be running as high as the box-office sales.
"A Dublin woman once said to me, 'all you do is exercise your personal prejudices'," Colgan remarked in October. "I explained that's just what a producer does."
The Colgan File
Who is he?
Director of the Gate Theatre
Why is he in the news?
He is head of the Beckett Centenary Festival. The Gate Theatre is staging nine Beckett plays over the coming weeks, a solid follow up to a sold-out Faith Healer, which starred Ralph Fiennes
Most appealing characteristic:
He has a knack for attracting star quality to the Gate
Least appealing characteristic:
He has been accused of eschewing the bolder works which originally made the Gate Theatre's name
Most likely to say:
'We'll do every Pinter, Friel and Beckett play, in a single day, with Bono starring in every one of them!'
Least likely to say:
'If I hear another word about Beckett, I'll scream!'