After last autumn's crisis, the Abbey Theatre has been turned inside out, writes Deirdre Falvey, Arts Editor.
"There was no way the resolution would fail - everyone understood that there was a gun to our heads," said playwright and Abbey advisory-council member Jimmy Murphy of Saturday's historic meeting where the council voted in favour of its own dissolution.
Murphy continues the analogy, saying that the Arts Council had threatened to pull the trigger and the theatre would have had to close, but a part of him "would have liked to walk that line to see if they would have done that". In the heel of the hunt, "the only sourness about the dissolution is that there was no choice in the matter".
The meeting lasted several hours and was described as passionate, with a "good debate about art and theatre and vision, and less about bureaucracy".
There was a genuine concern that the board would not be "stuffed with accountants", as chairwoman Eithne Healy later assured it wouldn't be, or "done in by the civil service and entrepreneurs", as Ulick O'Connor believes it was.
Tomás MacAnna, advisory council member and a former Abbey artistic director, welcomed incoming director Fiach MacConghail in English, Irish and in Latin, "Moraturi te salutante" (We who are about to die salute you), the phrase gladiators used when speaking to Caesar.
Mr MacConghail commented yesterday that the meeting was very productive and said there was encouraging debate "about art and the stewardship of theatre, which is great".
Des Geraghty was pleased the meeting "went exactly as we wanted it", so that the theatre can move on. The memorandum and articles of association are being finalised and it is expected that the new company and board could be in place by the end of September.
But there was unanimous concern at Saturday's meeting about the lack of a playwright or an actor in the "skills matrix" of the new board, with a comment from one member that the issue could have been "a deal-breaker".
There was concern about the way the board will be appointed. Murphy said yesterday he felt the board is unbalanced, with too many either direct or indirect ministerial appointments.
MacAnna is concerned, too, about what he sees as a less democratic, "more autocratic" board-selection process, and he was forceful about the need for a cultural representative, rather than "just financiers and entrepreneurs".
Apparently at one stage there were "a lot of nods and winks and pieces of paper being passed around", then John O'Donoghue's representative left briefly, presumably to telephone the Minister - later it was clarified that nine board members was not a number written in stone, but could be 11, possibly to accommodate artistic representatives.
"We weren't being like spoilt kids," says Murphy, but there had to be an acknowledgement of the skills that theatre people could bring to a board, as well as business acumen.
At the moment "we're picking up the wreckage of boards from the past five to 10 years", said Murphy, who last autumn proposed a vote of no confidence in former artistic director Ben Barnes. "The board failed and Ben failed, and we were faced with the responsibility to end what Yeats had set up." But he and the other council members acknowledge the Abbey structure had to change, and the vote went 25-1 in favour, with Ulick O'Connor voting against.
"We need the Ulicks of this world," commented Murphy. "He's an honourable man, and he spoke very eloquently about the theatre in the 1950s and 1960s. It's a lonely place to be, to put the only hand up for No."
Less than one year after last autumn's crisis, the Abbey has been turned inside out. The present changes are part of an ongoing "change process" where work practices are altering and MacConghail is putting a new senior management and artistic team in place.
Directors of finance and public affairs, and a financial controller, have been advertised; the current financial controller is due to leave this autumn and an assistant accountant has been appointed; three associate artists are also being appointed.
MacConghail said yesterday the theatre is "reconfiguring departments and staff, introducing new work practices and ways of supporting better theatre and making the core activity of the Abbey more efficient".
He said the theatre needs to "re-engage with what is going on in Irish society".
An audit is being conducted into the first half of 2005, which is not likely to yield good news. And discussion is taking place about how much money is necessary to pay for a national theatre; the Abbey has been underfunded for years.
As one advisory council member said: "We've done our bit of the deal - the Abbey can't go on with the money they're on. If we're going to have great national theatre, we have to pay for it."
The Arts Council has acknowledged that the theatre needs an increase but that it is dependent on its own funding. And decisions about the location and the funding of a new Abbey building seem well down the line in importance compared to getting everything else right.