YET AGAIN, our National Theatre is the subject of speculation about its future location. Finding a new home for the Abbey has been like some comedy of errors that the author keeps rewriting but never comes up with a denouement.
The latest suggestion, though not entirely new, to relocate the theatre to the GPO site in O’Connell Street has more of an imaginative spark to it than all previous plans and proposals. It seems perfect for a multiplicity of reasons, not least the creation of a space in which the stories of 21st-century Ireland can be enacted on the spot where a vision of a society that cherishes “all the children of the nation equally” was first proclaimed by poets and writers. A century later it is the duty of contemporary drama to confront the failure to deliver fully on that aspiration and the work on the stage of the National Theatre should reflect and be part of that inquiry.
A move to O’Connell Street keeps the theatre in the heart of the city, close to its 1904 roots. Importantly, it would provide a stimulus for revitalisation of the city’s main and still mostly shabby thoroughfare which, despite the excellent remedial work of Dublin City Council, has little to recommend it. If it were to have the “transfiguring impact” that Senator David Norris predicts that would be a welcome added benefit.
This historic and iconic building, with its resonant association with key events in Irish history and its links to the act that prefigured the foundation of the State, has the potential to provide the National Theatre with a new start that doesn’t altogether bury its rich heritage. The proposal to move the Abbey to the city’s docklands was never the most attractive option and it now appears the proposed space in George’s Dock is one with “enormous technical problems”, according to some reports.
While the GPO as a possible new venue is now part of the Programme for Government, and a full feasibility study is promised, the pace of movement so far in bringing this saga to a conclusion, does not encourage hope that this will be achieved in time for the 1916 centenary celebrations. Nor indeed does the current state of the public finances – with pending cuts in arts funding – offer confidence of an immediate green light for the project.
Nonetheless the sheer creativity of the idea – combining a solution to the Abbey’s problems and marking such a significant historic occasion by transforming this symbolic site – demands that it be fully explored and opened to debate.