Madam, – O dear, the “Whither the Abbey?” roadshow is back in town.
There are many reasons why the proposal to move the theatre to the GPO is a flawed idea.
Locating the Abbey in the very crucible of Irish nationalism would only serve to strengthen the links between the theatre, the 1916 Rising and the foundation of the State. These are links which created a potent relevancy for the Abbey in the early decades of the last century but are ones which have hampered its project ever since. It has done much to distance itself from these associations in the past 20 years or so as it attempts to reflect modern concerns and eschew the idea that somehow its status as a “sacred cow” makes it more like a museum than a living theatre.
As I have recently discovered, with the restoration of the Theatre Royal in Waterford, converting old spaces to new purposes is infinitely more costly, complex and time consuming than building something new on a “greenfield”site and following on from this point is the very considerable sums of money required to turn a post office into a state-of-the-art theatre, sums of money that the hard pressed taxpayer would, to put it mildly, be none too thrilled to see spent as the Government slashes and burns its way through the public finances.
You suspect that the Abbey in its waters knows all this and with its recent improvements to that awful bunker is preparing to sit tight for the long haul. It is noticeable that no senior Ministers, or the Taoiseach have anything to say on this latest idea, nor indeed has the Arts Council. And one can feel the reluctance emanating from the Department of Arts.
The surest sign that this is yet another kite being flown to nowhere is the fact that – as Dr Martin Mansergh informs us – the OPW has been asked to do a feasibility study. In my Abbey days the formation of an expert group or the rumour of a feasibility study could be decoded as – let’s kick this as far as we can into the long grass and hope it gets lost there.
A perfectly serviceable Strategic Brief for Development was scoped out by the Abbey and the OPW in the summer of 2002 with plenty of consultation and the involvement of the likes of Sean Benton, the commissioner Clare McGrath and the OPW architect, Klaus Unger. In this new era of efficiencies and belt tightening in the public service, the OPW would do well to dust off the old reports before they go to the expense of commissioning new ones.
There have been at least six serious proposals regarding the future location of the Abbey in the past 15 years. The best of those was the one which would have seen the Abbey re-locate to Grand Canal Harbour and the Abbey Street premises retained as a 400- seat theatre for established metropolitan companies such as Rough Magic, Fishamble, Opera Theatre Company, Bedrock, the Corn Exchange and Coiscéim, and as a centre city location for companies visiting from outside the capital.
Now, seven years later, that idea, shorn of the unhelpful politics, the difficult personalities (myself included) and the hysterical media brouhaha, merits re-examination. The scaled down Abbey is, arguably, ideally suited for the well-established but homeless companies across all the performing arts disciplines and the new theatre complex at Grand Canal Harbour would stand a much better chance of success as a home for the Abbey and the National Concert Hall than setting itself up in competition with the 02 and Harry Crosbie, especially now that – as we are being constantly told – our spending power has been spancelled for a generation.
The advantage to the public finances and the crucified taxpayer is that with the Abbey already scaled down and the GCH complex built, very little further investment would be required. Contrary to those who claimed a move to “Misery Hill” would place the Abbey in an urban wilderness, the new bridge, shiny public transport and high end “mixed use” development makes GCH a perfect fit for two indispensable national cultural institutions.
Whatever the future holds for the Abbey, the emergence of yet another ill thought out and emotive proposal only serves to set it back another five years and is a painful illustration of the fact that while putative locations for the Abbey may fill column inches, while away the time of consultants and civil servants and fuel dinner table conversations among the chattering classes, it has always failed to resonate in the only corridors that really matter, those of executive power. If that power remained unmoved in the years of plenty it is likely to be positively obdurate in the face of shrinking resources and so a creative, cost- effective action that provides a solution to a whole set of inter-related problems is, I believe, one which again merits some serious thought and examination. – Yours, etc,