No doubt it came as something of a surprise to you, as it did to Kevin Myers, that the Abbey Theatre has 150 employees.
There have been nights when I was there and everyone in the audience could have had one, with still a few to spare. But of course the Abbey is, above all things, a surprising place; no doubt you also shared my surprise that the director of a national institution in crisis was at the peak of the crisis directing a play at a festival in Australia.
That class of caper is possible only when you have the unreal economics and unreal priorities of subsidy, in an unreal institution as the Abbey. It has always been unreal. Its intention was to create a national theatre for Ireland, reflecting the realities of Irish life, whatever they might have been. As it happened, such "realities" were barely relevant, because the trio behind the Abbey - William Butler Yeats, Augusta Gregory and Annie Horniman - were blissfully ignorant of Irish life. As indeed was Synge, one of the first writers they staged. He wrote some of the most excruciating dirge-dramas the theatre of the English-speaking world has ever had the misfortune to endure.
The strange thing was that there was actually a native market for the cod-Irishry that the Abbey dabbled in. This is because many of the theatre-goers of Dublin know as much about the Aran Isles as they do about Albania, and you could have Aran Islanders talking about the waves do be being this and the clouds do be doing that, and no one would know whether they were talking tommy-rot or the purest Aranese. I certainly wouldn't.
The Abboteers soon locked horns with the Shinners, over The Playboy of the Western World, which was actually a true masterpiece: how wonderful that the Shinners should resent not its eerily prescient understanding of the tolerance of homicide in Irish life, but the appalling sexual connotations of the word "shift". Dark times indeed if the Shinners came to power - which, by God, they duly did.
As it happens, the first Shinner to get his hands on the Abbey was also an outsider to the plain people of the new Ireland - Ernest Blythe, who during the Civil War had expressed his artistic temperament with an irrepressible enthusiasm for firing squads. As Minister for Finance he cut the old-age pensions and gave the theatre a subsidy. In times of trouble and stress, the last things a national theatre needs is to be beholden to the government.
In time Blythe became the Abbey's director, and combined profoundly authoritarian instincts with a perfectly horrible manner. Under his dire direction, for 26 dreadful years, the Abbey veered between presenting cheap kitchen comedies and endless theatrical homages to the men of 1916. Even O'Casey's great trilogy become subverted, in production, into essays about the splendours of the Rising.
Meanwhile, Abbey actors were perfecting their own grisly theatrical dialect, Abbeymara, best exemplified by Siobhan McKenna, who did not so much act as stand mid-stage and proclaim, declaim, exclaim and reclaim the soul of Ireland.
The dead hand of state control, state sponsorship and state politicking governed the Abbey when the theatre should have been influential and free in shaping the intellectual spirit of the country. Instead poor bloody Ireland got an endless recycling of the same plays: Gunman of the Western World, The Shadow of a Paycock, She Stoops to Juno, The Importance of being Ernest Blythe - the same woebegone repertoire, repeated and repeated down the ages. No wonder the American bus tours came in for a single act before exiting, post haste. What they were fleeing from wasn't real drama that people actually wanted to see, but a ghastly hall of mirrors, in which various forms of cod-Irishry were being paraded around the stage.
Now it is true that those days are long over - but what isn't over is the ever-brooding presence of the State, its money, its patronage and its politics, even if only in the rather kindlier shape of the Arts Council. It was with no little alarm that I read last weekend of Liz McManus's terrifying call on the Minister for the Arts to show leadership on the crisis in the Abbey. No, what the Minister for the Arts should be showing, pending the elimination of his portfolio altogether, is a clean pair of heels.
We don't elect politicians to run bookshops or art galleries or concerts, yet we have a peculiar notion that we should have a Minister for Arts, regardless of how artistic he or she is, whose permanent job is to supervise the perpetual imbroglio that is the Abbey Theatre. Thanks to years of state interference and dithering, the Abbey is now the theatrical equivalent of the Sunni Triangle. This is certainly not what poor John O'Donoghue entered politics for.
The simplest thing for the State to do is to sign the entire place over to Eithne Healy, and then walk away from it (thereby ending all further ministerial responsibility for the "arts"). Eithne's husband Liam already runs the far end of Abbey Street rather well. No doubt she could do an equally fine job on her end of the street. As for funding, well, let the Abbey sink or swim, as theatres do in the US. If the finest playwrights writing in English in the past half-century or so - Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, David Mamet - can survive in theatres which receive no state sponsorship, might our playwrights not do likewise?