He inherits from Patrick Mason a hugely prestigious co-production with the Edinburgh International Festival, which will open during the August festival and then come to the Eircom Dublin Theatre Festival - a production of Barbaric Comedies by the Spanish writer Ramon Valle-Inclan, translated by Frank McGuinness and directed by the Catalan Calixto Bieito, with an Irish cast of 25. "I've got a few lines on this in my press release which you could use," he suggests, as, in Irish theatre, only he would.
However, his co-productions will not just be international. He is instituting a system of "Peacock Partners", companies which will do a season at the studio theatre during the summer, supported by the national theatre's skills base. The first Peacock Partner will be Sligo's Blue Raincoat company. "What they do," says Barnes, "is very distinctive and accomplished." The company is already working with designer Blaithin Sheerin, voice coach Andrea Ainsworth and lighting designer, Paul Keogan, and will stage Jocelyn Clarke's versions of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-glass at the Peacock this summer.
He aims to widen the community of the national theatre. The resident director system will be dismantled, and instead there will be a team of eight or 10 associate directors who would be free to pursue freelance careers while directing once or twice a year at the national theatre. Garry Hynes of Druid, Lynne Parker of Rough Magic, Conall Morrison, now freelance, and the distinguished English freelance director, Deborah Warner are the stellar names so far signed up.
He will hold open auditions twice a year to give actors a chance to work at the national theatre. He will also set up a roster of associate actors, who will have access to the theatre's training resources even when they are not rehearsing a show there. "I am the first artistic director who can sit here without the issue of the remnants of a permanent ensemble," he says. His commercial nose twitches at the thought of casting stars - "not being afraid to use a hook to bring audiences in. People came to the Abbey to see Brian Dennehy, but they left having seen The Iceman Cometh." He has already been talking to Gabriel Byrne and Sinead Cusack, and the response has been, he says, encouraging.
Barnes is keen to explore a more flexible ticket-pricing policy, which would safeguard concessionary rates but exploit the level of disposable income that some people now have: "Maybe prices could be higher at the weekend. A lot of people ring up and say `I want to see a show; give me the best seats' and they're mildly surprised if it costs less than £20." He doesn't respond to any invitation to complain about the level of the Abbey's funding and believes he can have a "consensual rather than an adversarial" relationship with the Arts Council. Nor does he seem to have the view, as Mason did, that the theatre should be funded through the Department of the Arts as a national institution, though he says that the proposed rebuilding of the Abbey throws "into the melting pot where ownership of a new building would reside".
The rehousing of the Abbey is likely to be Barnes's greatest challenge. He points out that the building has not been refurbished since 1966, but really, few theatregoers would argue that the Abbey doesn't deserve a new or nearly-new home. He favours a massive refurbishment of the present building, bringing the audience into much more intimate contact with the stage, and opening the venue to shoppers and browsers and coffee-drinkers all day long. He says that two reports on the matter have now been commissioned by Government, and he has an article on the proposed new national stadium at the ready in which the Taoiseach promised £41 billion nationally for "infrastructure".
If a decision isn't made very soon, there won't be the time to rebuild before the theatre's centenary in 2004. They must be at home for the party, and if no decision is forthcoming, Barnes will favour staying put for four years, with some funding to do emergency work. He sees the period in exile as an opportunity: "It could force us to connect with the audience in the rest of the country and internationally. We could do seasons in Dublin and maybe keep a studio theatre, but not take over another major space."
He obviously sees the national theatre as, quite simply, the theatre the nation produces - though he will not be shy to deliberately tangle with questions of national interest on the stage: "Tom Kilroy and I have been talking about a version of Wedekind's Spring Awakening. From the background of his schooldays, he can't help but refract it through what we know now about those times. We do have a responsibility to interrogate the past."
He makes the interesting point that there has been such huge change in Ireland "in my lifetime and in your lifetime" that Irish playwrights find it hard to come up with a version of the present and instead focus on the past. As to the future of theatre in the new Ireland, he says: "It's one of my predictions that in this info-tech age, as people's lives get more and more compartmentalised, they will put more value on communal experiences, like concerts and theatre and churchgoing." Is he religious, I ask, thinking it might explain his earnestness? His response is unintentionally hilarious and pure Barnes: "I have an interest in the monastic life of the 11th and 12th centuries." F.X. Martin was a mentor at UCD and Barnes considered lecturing in history.
He then adds: "I suspect I'm interested in what made people sequester themselves away." Like he does in the rehearsal room? He has said he is "very private" and enjoys the formalised intimacy of the rehearsal room.
He agrees that he is not "theatrical": "I have a very full personal life: my best friends are not in theatre; I'm very involved in my local area (Greystones, Co Wicklow)." He met his wife, the actress Julia Lane, in 1996 while rehearsing a play in Britain, and they have had two daughters in rapid succession - Elishka, who is 17 months old and Milena, just five months old. "They're the light of my life," he says, and, typically, places an array of photographs before me on the table." He says his daughters are giving him a perspective on the "transitoriness" of life, forcing him to look outside the material for something "more spiritual, more elemental".
No, he'll never be a luvvie. He agrees, but he counters: "I'm passionate about the theatre I do. I'm going to work tirelessly here to create an artistic dispensation which is open and inclusive and which people can be comfortable with."
Frontrow has been held over due to pressure on space
