Is it curtains for young actors?

With the impending closure of TCD's acting course, where will theatre and film find their future stars, asks Arminta Wallace.

Christiane O'Mahony had just warmed up for her 9am dance class last week when there was a knock at the door. O'Mahony and her fellow second-year students at Trinity College Dublin's Bachelor in Acting Studies (BAS) course thought it was somebody having a laugh.

Instead, it turned out to be a delegation of high-level university staff members - and they weren't smiling.

"They came to tell us that the course is being discontinued; that no new students are being admitted next year," says O'Mahony. "Everyone was very civilised about it. But I think what really shocked us was that they presented it as a decision which had already been made. They didn't come and say, 'Listen, we're in trouble and we need to talk about this'. . ."

A spokeswoman for the university, which has recently undertaken an extensive restructuring process, told The Irish Times last week that TCD is "refocusing practice-based training in drama" by expanding its BA degree in drama and theatre studies to include more emphasis on performance, and introducing a new one-year post-graduate course in acting.

The students insist that neither option even comes close to a three-year acting studies course, which is totally focused on practical training and which - crucially - is available for free under current third-level fee legislation. The proposed post-graduate qualification would, by contrast, be a fee-paying course.

ANDREA AINSWORTH, the Abbey theatre's voice coach, who has been a tutor on the acting studies course for more than a decade, shares her students' sense of outrage. "I feel very passionately about it," she says. "The course has produced some very fine young actors, and I would be dismayed and shocked if it were to close."

Can she explain the rationale behind the university's decision to discontinue it? "I haven't had a lot of communication about this, but my understanding is that it's primarily a financial decision," she says. "The course is expensive to run because there are small numbers of students and a high staff-to-student ratio. Small numbers, however, are important for actor training, so that you can give people individual attention."

In some 20 years, the acting course has - as Trinity's website points out - produced a string of successful actors and directors, among them Brian F O'Byrne, Alison McKenna, Jason Barry, Pauline Hutton, Fiona Glascott, Eileen Walsh, Ruth Negga and Aaron Monaghan. Padraic Delaney, who graduated in 2001, has been nominated for two Irish Film and Television Awards for his role as Teddy in the Ken Loach film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and is about to collect a Shooting Star 2007 award from the Berlin Film Festival.

"The course gave me incredible focus," he says. "It gave me energy and taught me how to study. It's a wonderful course staffed by wonderful people who, over the years, have selflessly given their time and expertise for very little pay. It seems incredible that it would be cut at a time of such prosperity in the country.

"It must be making Samuel Beckett turn in his grave," he adds, "all this going on in and around a centre that's named after him. Pity he isn't still alive - he might write a play about it."

Another graduate, Derbhle Crotty - nominated in the best actress category in this year's Irish Times Theatre Awards - is about to begin rehearsals as Lady Macbeth in Conall Morrison's new production of the Scottish play for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford.

"When I began the course I had already done a law degree and been very involved in Trinity Dramsoc," she says, "but I didn't feel I had the right to say 'I want to go out and act'. Committing myself to the course legitimised that aim, in a way. It also dispelled every notion that acting would be a cakewalk when you got out there. Working from 8.30am every morning until 6pm every evening, we didn't see much of life on campus - but we got a real sense of the give and take of an ensemble and a grounding in proper theatrical priorities."

"I only got into the course in Trinity because you didn't have to have a particularly good Leaving Cert," says the artistic director of Loose Canon theatre company, Jason Byrne, who is currently rehearsing a new production of Julius Caesar at the Abbey Theatre. "Now they're talking about having a post-grad course - which would rule me out, obviously. One of the reasons I became a director was that I got a chance to work with professional directors from this country and from the UK during those two years. I also learned about various theories of acting, and started to think about process and other aspects of theatre which I wouldn't have had much knowledge about. There's no formal training for directors in Ireland as it is, and practical knowledge is very hard to come by. We could do with more drama schools, not less."

The director of the Gaiety School of Acting, Patrick Sutton, agrees. "I think it's a crime," he says. "We need well-trained, well-qualified actors - and good training requires good competition. Trinity and ourselves have always been in healthy competition with each other. The fact that they're being taken off the page, or off the stage, as it were, leaves a vacuum - and it's not simply a question of us being able to fill that vacuum, because the competition is at the heart of it."

Nevertheless, the Gaiety is about to develop its own three-year honours degree programme with Dublin City University.

Students at the Gaiety School of Acting pay fees of approximately €5,000 a year, though there is, according to Sutton, a quiet tradition of sponsorship from the business community of talented students who get into serious financial difficulties. As for the possibility that the new course will eventually face the same problem as Trinity's, he says the Gaiety's lucrative part-time courses subsidise the full-time actor training programme at present, and will continue to do so.

"But we're also going into conversation with the Higher Education Authority to ensure State support - which will be an interesting argument at this point in time, with the Trinity programme coming to an end as we're coming to a beginning."

There are, of course, other programmes available to aspiring young theatre professionals in this country, including courses in theatre and drama studies at University College Cork and the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Shane Carr, chairman of Dublin Youth Theatre, is a graduate of the latter. "It's a much broader course than Trinity's, which is very focused on producing actors," he says. "Everybody in this country has seen actors produced by the Trinity course, whether in the theatre or on television or in a movie. So in a way, we all get some value out of it."

Carr is concerned about the message the axing of the course will send to young actors,, especially those in their late teens who are working with youth theatre groups and may be trying to decide whether to take things a step further. "It sends a signal that being involved in theatre isn't a viable career, or that it's less worthwhile than any other job they might take or course they might do," he says. "People talk about the whole Celtic Tiger thing and the kind of Ireland they want to live in. They want it to be a creative and stimulating artistic environment. But for that, we need artists and we need philosophy students. Thirty people a year no longer studying acting at Trinity may be just small potatoes in the greater scheme of things - but it sends a signal that being involved in any kind of cultural enterprise is a waste of time."

It certainly seems to be a very different message to the one given by Trinity's Strategic Plan 2006, which sees the college pledging to "help Ireland to be the most creative and productive place to invent, work and learn, and the most civilised place to live and contribute to local and global society".

It also appears to be at odds with the provost John Hegarty's insistence - in an interview with The Irish Times last November - that "there is a compelling case to be made for greater emphasis on the arts, humanities and social sciences at the national level, and for increased public investment at undergraduate and graduate levels."

MEANWHILE, THE Arts Council, which says it's "deeply concerned" about the decision, has requested a meeting with Dr Hegarty and will be "recommending that the decision be reconsidered as soon as possible". And O'Mahony and her fellow BAS students are taking on some new roles as they make a last-ditch attempt to save the course. "We've produced an e-mail which sets out the issues, to try to raise consciousness within the college and outside it," she says . "We're just students; but suddenly we have to try to find out how Trinity works, in order to put our case coherently."

Ainsworth has written a letter to this newspaper, signed by a number of people in the theatre community. "I don't know what the answer is," she says. "I don't know where the money needs to come from - the Department of the Arts, Sports and Tourism? Or the Department of Education and Science? - but I do feel that there must be one. It must be possible to put this course on a stronger funding basis so that it doesn't have to close down."

The omens, it must be said, aren't good. In response to a request from The Irish Times for further information, Trinity's press office repeated that the "strategic decision" to discontinue the course had been made "by the School of Drama, Film and Music". Professor Kevin Rockett, head of the school, was unavailable to discuss it, but wrote a letter to this newspaper, which was published yesterday.

The Irish Timesasked whether the decision might be reconsidered and if so, under what circumstances. "As outlined above, this is a strategic decision by the School of Drama, Film and Music," was the distinctly chilly reply.