Failures raise issue of public subsidy

LAST Saturday night, again, a very fine theatrical production ended a relatively short run with poor box office returns. John Crowley's striking Abbey production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, universally praised by critics, went the way of practically every well staged international classic on the Dublin stage in the last few years. Like the same director's productions of The Crucible at the Abbey and Phaedra at the Gate, like that theatre's excellent Harold Pinter festival in 1995, like Patrick Mason's brilliant staging of Angels in America at the Abbey last year, Six Characters played to houses that were, in numerical terms, very disappointing. These failures raise the question of public subsidy in a whole new way.

There is, of course, nothing new about Irish productions of international classics doing bad business at the box office. What is new, I think, is very good Irish productions of international classics doing bad business at the box office. In the past it was very easy to explain poor audience response by reference to poor productions. And this was, paradoxically, quite comforting it seemed to suggest that audiences had good taste. This illusion has now been stripped away. It is no longer possible to blame the theatres. Well directed, well acted, well designed performances of great plays have met with a depressing degree of indifference.

And it's not as if the mainstream repertoire has been over burdened with international plays. The Arts Council's Theatre Review last year showed that in the Republic as a whole just a quarter of the plays staged between 1990 and 1994 were non Irish works. At the Abbey in the same period, the figure was even 1 owner 14 non Irish plays out of 80 staged, representing just 17 per cent of the repertoire. And even though Patrick Mason announced in December 1994 that last year was going to mark a significant expansion of the non Irish repertoire, this didn't in fact happen. Just two of the 19 Abbey and Peacock productions in 1995 The Crucible and Angels in America were non Irish. So, in spite of Patrick Mason's stated concerns about the "narrowing and thinning out of repertoire in the Irish theatre", his own institution's repertoire has been getting, if anything, narrower. And given the disappointing box office response to even mildly adventurous programming, who can blame him?

The problem, moreover, goes deeper. It is not just that it is hard to find an audience for non Irish plays. It is also that the pulling power of Irish work has traditionally been dangerously dependent on a few big names. By my reckoning, in the last five years of the 1980s, half of the main stage Abbey performances were of plays by one of the following writers Brian Friel, John B. Keane, Tom Murphy, Bernard Farrell, and Hugh Leonard. This kind of overdependence on a very small group of playwrights was always going to be unsustainable. Now that it has proved to be so, it leaves the Abbey in a situation where its basic box office targets are virtually unattainable if it is, at the same time, to fulfil its artistic remit.

The Abbey's subsidy is calculated on the basis that it will achieve a "cash occupancy" of 60 per cent, a figure which effectively means that it has to fill 70 per cent of its seats to break even. Addressing the board and shareholders of the Abbey last March, Patrick Mason revealed that in 1995 the theatre achieved a cash occupancy of just 50 per cent. He pointed out that of the 79 plays staged in the Abbey itself between 1984 and 1995 only 25 achieved the requisite cash occupancy.

It is easy to say that this failure is the fault of the institution itself. Its structures have remained unreformed. It has failed to tackle the problem of permanent company which was identified by the Abbey board itself over a decade ago. Is production standards are still somewhat inconsistent. But none of these failures explain the basic problem that in Dublin even world class theatre cannot attract 500 paying customers a night.

Productions which have failed in recent years to attract the requisite audience include not just the ones already mentioned, but moments of real magnificence like Tom Hickey and Godfrey Quigley in The Gigli Concert, Donal McCann in Faith Healer, the production of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, which has just played in Paris, and Garry Hynes's brilliant re-visiting of Conversations on a Homecoming.

IT is time to ask the hard questions about Irish theatre and subsidy that have not really been addressed in the Theatre Review process. Why have steadily rising standards not been matched by rising audiences? Is serious theatre still a central part of Irish culture? Is it becoming, like opera or ballet, a minority interest, nice to have around, but in essential to a mass audience? And if the only way to fill theatres is to put on work that would make a profit on a commercial basis anyway, what is the point of public subsidy at all?

These fundamental questions have to be answered soon. The notion that there is a big audience out there to be enticed into the theatre with high quality productions is no longer sustainable. Neither is a system of subsidy based on an expectation of levels of box office revenue that have proved, time and again, to be unavailable. Either a play like Six Characters in Search of an Author is worth subsidising for a relatively small audience that wants to see it, or it isn't. But the middle way of pretending that such productions will get a mass audience and wondering, at the end of the year, why the theatres that stage them have large deficits, is just a thin illusion in search of a disaster.