Old-fashioned innovator

Back at the Gate to direct Arcadia, former Abbey artistic director Patrick Mason interrupts his 'worst day' to explain why our national theatre is so important and why it doesn't need an iconic building

‘CALL ME old fashioned,” Patrick Mason says when I ask him to describe the role of a theatre director, “but I believe that my job is to reveal a rich text for what it is: a deeply human thing. It is about emotional engagement as well as intellectual stimulation. It is about animating the depth of character and action in these false worlds. It is life lived more intensely for two hours. That is the art of it. Well, that is how I would like it be.”

This is a passionate defence of the art of the theatre from a director whose rich and diverse approach to theatrical production over the past 30 years could never be described as old fashioned. From the collaborative act of bringing Tom MacIntyre's scenic writing to life in The Great Hunger, in 1983, to his deep engagement with new plays (Tom Murphy's The Gigli Concert, Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats) and his reinvention of classic texts (last year's production of The Rivalsat the Abbey), Mason's work has been known for its rigorous involvement with the essence of theatre in all its forms.

Yet the term old fashioned undeniably suits him. With his tall, rangy figure, distinctive pale face and deep English voice, he is almost aristocratic in bearing, a shadow of Ireland’s greatest aesthete, WB Yeats. Despite the fact that I have caught him on “the worst day” – the first day of technical rehearsal, “where you are trying to put it all on stage and you only have a day to get it right” – he is a consummate gentleman, impeccably mannered, apologising for eating his lunch as we speak.

Leaning back, long legs crossed, Mason almost conducts the conversation as it evolves, his large hands grasping at the air for gestures that further animate his unapologetic and infectious fervour.

Talking about opera, classical pianists and the architecture of the theatre’s recreational and rehearsal spaces, in the Gate’s green-room-cum-drawing-room, we might have stepped back in time to a moment when art was more pure, perhaps, than it is now in the commercially imperative globalised world of creative industries.

Mason’s favourite part of theatrical creation is the very first day of rehearsal, when “anything is possible”. Actors are “heroic – call it courage or foolhardiness, but they expose themselves when they are up there in the name of their art”. Classical texts are vital to continuing traditions, “because they force us to flex our muscles. They make us match their ambition, inspire us to think beyond our own concerns.”

And yet if this seems to suggest that Mason’s is a remote, romantic approach to theatre, removed from the real problems of shrinking budgets and audience bases, this would be a false impression. He speaks as fluently about funding concerns as he does about Aristotle’s theory of tragedy.

Theatre “is not about talking about something”, he insists. “It is something to be done.”

This blend of contradictions between idealism and practicality seems worthy of a character in a play – a character, even, such as Valentine Coverly, the maths student in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, which Mason is currently directing at the Gate.

Mason’s first work in the theatre was deeply rooted in the practical mechanics of performance. Having failed to gain entry to the acting course at London’s prestigious Central School of Drama, he was recruited for its drama-teaching programme, where an emphasis on movement and voice equipped him with a thorough understanding of all the elements that conspire to create theatrical performance.

He graduated straight into an 18-month post as vocal coach at the Abbey Theatre in 1971, when “the actors had been pitched from this beautiful Victorian theatre into this modernist mess of an auditorium with appalling acoustics”. Teaching at the Abbey School of Acting by night and working with actors in rehearsal during the day, Mason soon found himself apprenticing as an assistant director, before moving to Manchester to pursue his teaching vocation at university level. After four years, however, he found himself back in Ireland, working as a director. He has continued to juggle the two careers since.

Teaching remains an important commitment for him, he says, “because there is dearth of good practical instruction for young directors, performers, especially in Ireland, and I believe passionately in the importance of good training”.

Mason’s relationship with the Abbey was to be the formative one of his professional career. Under Tomás Mac Anna’s guiding hand he was appointed resident director in 1977, eventually becoming artistic director in the 1990s, during one of the Abbey’s most turbulent periods, “at the height of a serious attempt to dismember the theatre altogether”.

“The first three years were very tough,” he says, “but once we got the finances settled the next three years were incredibly fulfilling, and we did some great work.”

This phase included landmark premieres of works by Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy and Frank McGuiness, writers with whom Mason has maintained intense creative relationships over the years.

Although his experience there left him wary of “institutions in general, even if they are a necessary beast”, he continues to have a commitment to the Abbey, on a philosophical as well as a practical level. He has freelanced as a director at the theatre since he resigned as artistic director, in 1999, but he also remains a passionate advocate of the Abbey’s role as the national theatre in contemporary Ireland.

“The Abbey represents a vital embodiment of the role that theatre should play in the life of a community,” he says, “and I would do anything in my power to defend its existence should the need arise.”

Channelling his practical side again, he insists on its importance “not just for posterity’s sake but because I truly believe that if the Abbey was dissolved we would cease to have a professional theatre in Ireland within a single generation – and that is a real threat”.

The ongoing debates about the relocation of the Abbey, he believes, pose substantial challenges to its viability. The mooted move to the GPO is “absurd”, he says, while building some new Mecca along the lines of Sydney Opera House will make the theatre’s creative potential no stronger.

“I have worked in the Sydney Opera House, and it is a beautiful building, but it is hell to work in,” he says. “Trying to match this iconic theatre with some iconic building is beside the point.”

As his technical rehearsal calls him back to the practicalities of the job, he adds that “putting it all out there on stage is the most fundamental thing”, more important than all abstract discussions about art.

“All we need to make theatre is a decent playhouse,” he says, using his large hands to bring the conversation to a close. “A decent playhouse where the audience can hear the actors and feel their presence, and can create a piece of theatre with them.”

Arcadiaopens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday

Mason moments: Significant productions

1983 The Great Hunger, by Tom MacIntyre. Mason brought vivid physical life to MacIntyre's rich image-based text.

1985 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness. Mason's sensitive handling of controversial nationalist and homosexual themes gave McGuinness's play its definitive production.

1990 Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel. Mason won a Tony Award after the production secured a Broadway run in 1992.

1997 The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde,by Thomas Kilroy. Inventive staging, in which puppets and gesture complemented Kilroy's literary depth.

2002 Gates of Gold, by Frank McGuinness. Another important pairing of writer and director for an intimate stage biography of the Gate Theatre's infamous founders.

2009 The Burial at Thebes, by Seamus Heaney. Mason's spare, intense reinterpretation reclaimed Heaney's version of Antigone from its earlier critical ignominy.