Operatic action heading to a conclusion?

IT'S THE END of an era. Opera Ireland's spring season, which opens at the Gaiety Theatre on Saturday 27th and features a new production of Gounod's Roméo et Juliettedirected by Annelies Miskimmon and concert performances of Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, looks like being the company's last, writes Michael Dervan.

OI (founded in 1941), along with Opera Theatre Company (founded in 1986), is due to be subsumed into the new national opera company that the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Martin Cullen, is in the process of creating. It is his hope that the next opera production in the Gaiety will be undertaken by that new company.

In a written answer to a question from Fine Gael TD Brian Hayes on December 17th, well in advance of the Arts Council making its 2010 funding decisions, the Minister explained that “The technical funding of opera will remain unchanged in 2010. This means the opera companies will receive their allocations from the Arts Council as they did in 2009. For the September 2010/September 2011 season, my Department will fund the new National Opera Company.” The formation of the new company is currently being driven by the Department of Arts, with the support of the chief executives of the two companies and the director of the Arts Council, Mary Cloake.

When I contacted her in December, Cloake declined to make any comment on the minister’s operatic plans, which differ radically from the Arts Council’s so-called Shannon Plan. This would have brought about a national opera company based in Wexford that, from 2011, would have had responsibility for opera in Dublin, touring opera, and the Wexford festival.

There have been persistent rumours that some of the council executives remain reluctant to abandon the council’s own plan in favour of the Minister’s. And when the council eventually provided a response earlier this week, it came not from the executive, but from the chair, Pat Moylan, who said, “I’m delighted and encouraged by the Minister’s enthusiasm for opera, and he has our full support in developing his plans for a national opera company.”

The new national company has also been welcomed by OTC and OI. OI has issued the most comprehensive statement on the issue. “The lack of a designated National Opera Company,” it says, “has long been an obstacle to securely planned provision for Irish opera audiences, to the development of valuable cultural tourism, and to the development of opportunities for Irish opera professionals.

“The Minister’s initiative addresses the extraordinary anomaly that Ireland is the only European country without a national company. In doing so it also addresses the more local anomaly that in spite of Ireland’s rich operatic tradition, and in a context of excellent national companies and institutions in other major arts and cultural fields, this major gap in national cultural infrastructure has never been addressed in any comprehensive way until now.”

OI is unequivocal about the Dublin location. “The Minister’s decision to base the new company in the capital city, close to the largest local audience and largest supply of local artistic and technical contributors to the process of making opera, proposes the logical and most cost-efficient model, one which will deliver best value for public investment.”

As in the case of the Arts Council, the Wexford Festival took until last week to reply to a December request for a response to the Minister’s plans. The festival’s new chair, Peter Scallan, explained he felt it would have been inappropriate to respond in December, as he was then still in negotiation with the Department and the Arts Council. However, given that the Minister had announced the new Dublin-based company months earlier, it’s not clear what the negotiations between the Arts Council-funded festival and the Department might have been about.

This week, however, Wexford got off the fence, and Scallan said that, while the festival was initially engaged with the Arts Council regarding the formation of a national opera company, he could now “confirm that it remains an independent organisation supported by the Arts Council”. He also expressed the hope that the new national opera company “will be in a position to maintain and increase the level of opera provision, particularly in the area of nationwide touring, and wish it well”.

What’s not yet clear is who will feature on the board of the new company, what it will actually be called – Irish National Opera seems to be the front runner – or how successful it will be in drawing a line in the sand with the past, and securing the leap in artistic standards and funding that opera lovers will want to see from the new enterprise. If the Minister meets his target for announcing the board by early April, the picture will become a lot clearer then.

- Cuts in ArtsCouncil funding, and the unfortunate manner that the bad news was communicated, continues to distress. The creation of some work on home ground may be under threat, but the success of Irish work abroad continues. Irish companies at Edinburgh have to date won seven Fringe First awards, two Herald Angels and in 2009, Gúna Nua won the top Fringe prize, the Carol Tambor Award for Elaine Murphy's Little Gem. In 2007 and 2008, the New York Timeschose Irish productions as their favourite shows of the festival; both shows later toured in the US, UK and Australia as a direct result of Edinburgh. Culture Ireland hopes to have a strong programme of work in Edinburgh this year, with two prominent Irish theatre companies currently negotiating to bring Irish plays to the Traverse and a curated dance programme at Dance Base. It has also issued an open call (deadline March 19) to emerging companies and artists hoping to present work there. Details from cultureireland.gov.ie/grants/

- While skulls andbones are still being hoisted into the light of day as archaeological excavations continue at its new annex at Christ Church, Cork's Triskel Arts Centre has sealed an agreement with Corcadorca for a unique tenancy arrangement, writes Mary Leland. This will apply to Triskel's existing auditorium, where Corcadorca, looking for a development rather than a performance space, takes up a three-year residency from August. Both organisations see this rent-free collaboration as an innovative pooling of scarce resources. For Corcadorca's director, Pat Kiernan, it means almost exclusive use of a policy-driven, well-equipped reading, rehearsal and performance area in Cork city centre. Management of the auditorium, apart from the weeks of the jazz, film and midsummer festivals, will be controlled by Corcadorca while the galleries, offices and café are retained by Triskel. That organisation is itself dislodged to allow for the expansion into the restored Christ Church.

Triskel’s director Tony Sheehan explains because the centre is about to quadruple in size he has to find ways it can be used more effectively. The license agreement is “a simple but effective partnership for us both” that allows both organisations to work together and gives the city a space dedicated to the development of professional theatrical productions. Corcadorca will share the facility with other professionals.

While not a formal tenant, the company pays the overheads and Sheehan sees the agreement as typical of Triskel’s ability to offer new ways of using new resources. Kiernan is working on four separate projects, beginning with a reading of a new play by Peter Gowen, featuring Frankie McCafferty and designer Deirdre Dwyer. “This is like a production unit, and shows in microcosm how things will be at Triskel,” he says.

- Good to seethe artists' tax exemption and the delay in new guidelines being kept alive in the Dáil, where Fine Gael arts spokeswoman Olivia Mitchell brought it up on Wednesday, pressing the Minister, Martin Cullen, about what the Revenue Commissioners consider "cultural merit". "By no stretch of the imagination could [Bertie Ahern's book] be considered a work that is cultural and certainly it could not be considered artistic, where the bar is even higher . . . It goes against the spirit of the legislation, which was to help new struggling, emerging artists. God knows, Deputy Bertie Ahern is not one of them."

The Minister deflected from the Bertie book and said “ The issue is subjective and that is the difficulty here. The Arts Council has a view . . . I do not want to say that it takes a narrow focus but it takes one that is very much on the artistic side, if I could put it that way. For example, a large number of books are written relating to sport. Some of them are very good and some are complete rubbish but who am I to decide what is rubbish or good? What is good for one person is not necessarily of interest to others. Given that we live in a world of technology, it is amazing that young kids are ever introduced to reading.”

- It's Thomas Kilroy'sweek. The world premiere of his engaging play Christ Deliver Us!, is surely his timely artistic statement on what Ireland is and has come from, and which he has been building towards. And Kilroy has also just been appointed, along with producer Moya Doherty, to the Abbey board, replacing Olwen Fouéré and Eugene O'Brien.