The Abbey plays it safe

Fiach Mac Conghail took over a debt-ridden national theatre and stabilised its finances. But the Abbey's programme for early 2012 is a disappointing triumph of conservatism over creativity, writes PETER CRAWLEY

EACH TIME the Abbey Theatre announces its forthcoming programme, critics – and often the public – descend upon its details, pick apart its significance, search it for patterns and rush to a summary verdict on a season that has barely begun rehearsals. It seems that the Abbey Theatre just can’t win.

Programmes are essentially prospectuses: who knew that last summer's Pygmalion, the National Theatre's first staging of George Bernard Shaw's social satire, directed by Annabelle Comyn in her Abbey debut, would be a critical and commercial success? Or that Paul Mercier's two plays, The Passingand East Pier, staged together in rotation, would not?

But the announcement this week of the first half of its 2012 programme suggests, at first glance, that the coming year at the Abbey is likely to be deeply conservative and largely risk-averse, offsetting any adventurous decisions with proven bankers. The new works in the programme were not commissioned by the Abbey, there are two large-scale revivals of quite recent successes, and just two small-scale productions by independent companies have been bought in for the Peacock.

It’s hard not to construe this as a consequence of economic circumstances. In 2005, following a wildly aspirational centenary programme and financial mismanagement that led to “hidden losses”, the Abbey found itself shouldering a debt of €3.4 million.

The discovery of a previously undetected million-euro deficit prompted the exit of the then artistic director, Ben Barnes, and the early takeover of Fiach Mac Conghail, who moved swiftly and deftly to put the theatre back on safer ground. Securing a bailout grant of more than €4 million from the then minister for arts, John O’Donoghue, Mac Conghail ensured a clean slate. He modernised the theatre’s corporate structure (replacing a 21-person council with a trimmer nine-person board), obtained the theatre’s biggest-ever Arts Council grant (€25.7 million over three years) and, for good measure, radically improved the Abbey’s previously unloved auditorium two years later.

One consequence of such success, which Mac Conghail has not been shy to admit, is the Abbey will never again be rescued from debt. In 2009, when the theatre's funding began to shrink in line with the nation's dwindling financial health (between 2008 and 2011 its annual funding fell from €10 million to €7.1 million), the Abbey instituted a wave of staff redundancies and pay cuts, even though it still had an operating surplus of €3 million. This led to the loss of nearly 30 staff positions and the closing of the Abbey's workshop. The theatre's sets are now made abroad: The Government Inspector's impressive construction, for example, was the work of Liverpool's Scenic Workshop Ltd.

By the end of 2010 the surplus had been whittled down to €670,180 but the theatre had weathered the storm. The Abbey has made valiant efforts to access other forms of income through fundraising at home and abroad, through international co-production, and through canny initiatives, such as the costume department renting out its wares.

But such financial conservatism has had inevitable consequences for the programme, which has featured prominent revivals of previous successes, productions imported from other companies and conspicuously thinner programmes at the Peacock. If that means the Abbey can’t seem to win, it is because the Abbey’s box office, as Mac Conghail safeguards it, cannot afford to lose.

Admittedly, some of the thunder of the 2012 programme had been stolen. Its most arresting inclusion, a new musical – the Abbey's first in more than 20 years – was announced earlier this year. It is a coup for Thisispopbaby, which commissioned Phillip McMahon and Raymond Scannell's deliciously comic transposition of Lewis Carroll's most famous fantasy to contemporary Dublin. Staged as a work in progress at the beginning of this year at Project Arts Centre, Alice in Funderlandretains its director, Wayne Jordan (the Abbey's associate artist and director of The Plough and the Stars), and the cast that was assembled for the workshop. Alice in Funderlandis an Abbey production, but not everyone will see it that way. In inspiration, impetus, aesthetic and development, it is quite distinct from anything else on the Abbey stage, and its giddying promise finds a lacklustre counterbalance in the revival of Bernard Farrell's 2010 comedy, Bookworms.

A bourgeois farce set in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, Bookwormsmay have been a box-office success, but it hardly broke new ground for either the writer or the theatre. Its engagement with the national narrative, meanwhile, might have resembled its sales pitch, summed up by the line: "Recession or no recession, we are contented and happy – and this evening is going to be fun."

Mac Conghail has defined the Abbey's mission as reflecting and engaging Irish society, and this has often been attempted in stridently political terms. He has spoken with revolutionary zeal of bringing the Abbey "back to the barricades", of addressing his audience as "citizens". This approach has given some productions an urgent charge: the theatre's response to the Ryan report, a short season of works entitled The Darkest Corner, yielded Mary Raftery's affecting docudrama No Escapein 2010, while, in Outsiders, David McWilliams offered a staged economics lecture that tried to explain the mechanics behind the Irish financial meltdown and, less persuasively, to offer remedies.

Often, though, Mac Conghail's approach has led the programme and its playwrights towards a less illuminating bluntness. Tom Murphy's The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant,an adaptation of the Russian novel The Golovlyov Family, by Shchedrin, might have been a salient response to a story of moral corrosion, religious hypocrisy and material tyranny without a character yelping out the delirious line, "Property, land, money!", as though it were a feverish plot synopsis. The tendency towards relevance fetishism has led other accomplished playwrights to perform social postmortems with a truncheon where a scalpel might have done.

Roddy Doyle's current adaptation of Gogol's The Government Inspectorlays its contemporary references on so thick – from "brown envelopes" and "principal residences" to "austerity" measures and an assurance that a bribe is "a dig-out, not a bailout" – it feels less like satire than observational comedy, asking its audience to laugh sourly or raise a loose fist. When even Shakespeare is adapted to ram the point home, with Macbeth's porter delivering rewritten barbs to castigate priests, politicians and Anglo Irish Bank, it is clear the Abbey's front-on reflection of the nation's travails can lead it in directions more leaden than imaginative, more a matter of recapitulation than provocation.

Lately, though, investment in the literary department has been bearing fresher fruit. Paul Mercier's two plays, The Passingand East Pier, similarly heavy with property concerns and recession references, seemed to over-extend the writer-director and proved a tough sell for audiences (though new plays are never an easy sell).

But four new plays by female playwrights, traditionally under-represented on the professional stage, came in quick succession: Nancy Harris's No Romance, Stacey Gregg's Perve, Marina Carr's 16 Possible Glimpses, and a return visit from Carmel Winters's B For Baby, winner of The Irish TimesTheatre Awards prize for best new play, which the Abbey toured around the country.

Much of the Abbey literary department’s work is valuable but not entirely visible: many more plays are commissioned than are staged, and the New Playwrights Programme, now in its third year, has mentored several emerging writers.

It is disappointing, then, that the programme announced so far for 2012 does not appear to build on that momentum. Phillip McMahon has a long association with the Abbey, for which he was the writer in association in 2009-2010. He wrote the short play Investment Potentialfor the 20:Love season in 2008, but Alice in Funderlandwas not an Abbey commission. Both Amy Conroy's I (Heart) Alice (Heart) Iand Pat Kinevane's Silentwill gain a richly deserved National Theatre platform when they appear next year at the Peacock, but having been produced and toured by two independent theatre companies – HotForTheatre and Fishamble, respectively – it is hard to decide whether the companies or the Abbey will benefit more from the association.

This raises the vexed issue of the Peacock, the 127-seat studio theatre that has averaged about 22 weeks of programming a year since 2010 and has spent the remainder of its time dark. A venue long associated with new work and experimentation, it is also a notorious money-loser. At a time when five weeks counts as a lengthy run, one estimate suggests a Peacock production would have to run for eight weeks to full houses before turning a profit.

An effort last year to reduce the fees of actors at the Peacock significantly was successfully resisted, but the studio’s business model still seems tentative. Between Kinevane’s one-man show and HotForTheatre’s two-hander, just three actors are currently scheduled to grace its stage in the next six months, which makes it look like a budget liability.

New plays are expected to be scheduled for later in the year and further programming may yet fill the gaps, but the success of the generally large-scale work on the Abbey stage tends to subsidise the Peacock’s programme. Suddenly the revival of a copper-bottomed crowd-pleaser, such as Bookworms, or a sell-out production, such as Wayne Jordan’s The Plough and the Stars, makes a lot more sense.

Theatre is always a risky business and the Abbey's most significant recent achievements may not be its starry co-production of Juno and the Paycock(a play about a bankrupt family and a divided country) with the UK's National Theatre or the New York success of the even starrier John Gabriel Borkman(a play about a disgraced banker) this year, but the opportunities it has given to fresh blood, such as the directors Wayne Jordan and Annabelle Comyn, the latter of whom revitalised Shaw's Pygmalionfor the Abbey this year and will next direct Tom Murphy's The House.

Speaking recently at the launch of DruidMurphy, Druid Theatre Company's international touring project of three Murphy plays, which overlaps with The Houseat the Abbey, the director Garry Hynes said of the Druid undertaking, involving an ensemble of 19 performers: "It's an ambitious one, in every respect, at times when the temptation and perhaps the wiser counsel is to be conservative. But I think that is exactly what we shouldn't be in the arts at the moment."

You could say the same about Alice in Funderlandbut certainly not about the economics of Bookworms, the politics of The Government Inspectoror the vacant weeks at the Peacock. The Abbey is clearly not inclined to take big gambles. It is an approach that has steered Mac Conghail's programmes firmly away from disaster, kept attendances consistent and mitigated financial loss.

But we still wait for it to deliver a sensation.