CULTURE SHOCK:THE REVELATION by Ireland's finest theatre director, Garry Hynes, that she would find it very difficult to work in the Abbey now, has to be seen as a serious problem, writes Fintan O'Toole.
It is easy to dismiss the sharp attack on the Abbey Theatre made by Garry Hynes in an Irish Times interview this week as an example of the "great hatred, little room" syndrome of the arts in Ireland. But Hynes is the most distinguished theatre director currently working in Ireland. Leaving aside her work with Druid, which is undoubtedly the core of her career, some of the best productions at the Abbey itself over the last 20 years have been hers. The first time I saw her work was her own play Island Protected By A Bridge of Glass - a Druid production staged at the Peacock.
As a visiting director at the Abbey, she created a stunning production of Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, and a luminous reassessment of Eugene McCabe's unjustly neglected King of the Castle, which were both among the highlights of the national theatre's work in the 1980s. As artistic director of the Abbey itself, she directed what is in my view (an admittedly biased one, since I worked with her at the time as literary adviser and had some direct involvement in the production) the only really interesting reimagining of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars.
With productions such as John McGahern's The Power of Darkness, and Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan, she gave the Abbey a theatrical and emotional edge that had been often more conspicuous by its absence. She is, apart from everything else, a very important part of the Abbey's own recent history. In that context, her revelation that she'd now "find it very difficult to work" in the Abbey has to be seen as a serious problem. If, for whatever reason, the national theatre cannot accommodate the nation's finest theatre director at a time when there are still very few Irish directors who can inhabit the Abbey's main stage, there is clearly something amiss.
The immediate cause of the dispute is clear enough. Druid's next big project was to be a package, along the lines of the outstanding DruidSynge, of Sean O'Casey's four Dublin plays. It fell through after a good deal of complicated work because the Abbey renewed rights it had from the O'Casey estate to The Plough and the Stars and took out rights late last year to Juno and the Paycock. This made the Druid project, which had already been highlighted in the public domain, impossible. Garry Hynes sees this as "gazumping". The Abbey director, Fiach Mac Conghail, sees it as a perfectly normal aspect of the Abbey's planning in relation to a writer who is, unquestionably, a staple part of its repertoire.
But the real issue here is surely what happened before things got to the point where a potentially major Irish theatrical project was derailed and relations between Ireland's best director and its national theatre soured so badly. Both sides agree that Druid approached the Abbey in 2006 with the idea of doing the whole O'Casey project as a co-production between the two companies. The proposal, as I understand it, included a willingness to open some of the individual plays in the Abbey rather than in Galway.
It would also, ironically, have built on the working relationship that Hynes and Mac Conghail had established through DruidSynge, on which he worked as an adviser. But the Druid proposal met with a flat rejection.
It is very difficult to see anything in this proposal that made less than complete sense. National theatres elsewhere generally don't feel threatened by the idea of co-production, but rather see it as part of what makes them "national", adding to their geographical and stylistic reach. The British National Theatre, for example, has done co-productions in recent years with companies in Bristol, Coventry, Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool and Scarborough, as well as with Shared Experience, Théâtre de Complicité, Alley Theatre, Houston, Out of Joint, Kneehigh and Tara Arts. It also, interestingly enough, did a co-production with the Abbey itself - on Sebastian Barry's controversial Hinterland in 2002.
Which raises an obvious question: if it's okay for the Abbey to co-produce a play about contemporary Irish politics with a foreign national theatre, why is it not okay for the Abbey to co-produce a major project on historic Irish politics with an Irish company? If anything, this kind of relationship makes even more sense in Ireland than in England.
Aside from great new plays, which of their nature are few and far between, Irish theatre is likely to make a big international impression with large-scale projects. There have been four of those in recent years - Michael Colgan's brilliant Beckett and Pinter seasons at the Gate and Leenane Trilogy and DruidSynge from Druid. They are immensely difficult to do, requiring artistic, financial, planning and organisational resources that stretch every Irish company to its very limits. There is an overwhelming argument for a pooling of resources on such projects and for the Abbey, as both the national theatre and the best-financed institution, to see them as a key part of its remit.
This doesn't mean that the Abbey shouldn't have a distinctive repertoire or that its director shouldn't look first to the interests of his own theatre. But it does mean that the Abbey has to see itself as part of a symbiotic network of relationships in which it gains from the ideas and energies of other companies and they gain from it muscle, prestige and national standing.