Toasting the keeper of the Gate

CULTURE SHOCK:Under Michael Colgan, the Gate has taken a low-risk, high-quality approach that has proved an enduring success, writes Fintan O'Toole

IT IS PROBABLY fair to say that, in the early years of what is now Michael Colgan's 25-year reign at the Gate, I was one of the few people who didn't think he could walk on water. After the slow decline of the Edwards-MacLiammóir era and an awkward interregnum in which the theatre's future was highly uncertain, Colgan's appointment was obviously welcome.

He came from the Dublin Theatre Festival, where he had been highly innovative and open to risks. He had also worked with - and been heavily influenced by - the great Eamon Kelly who, in his own utterly distinctive and subtle way, was a genuine theatre radical. But the expectations created by this background were thwarted.

I believed back then that the Gate needed to rediscover its roots as an edgy presence in Irish culture. It needed to be formally innovative and to acknowledge its physical presence in one of western Europe's most deprived urban areas. Michael Colgan clearly didn't believe either of these things. He set about saving the theatre by making it an essential part of the Dublin social scene and a beachhead for the middle classes on the dreaded Northside.

The formula was a large chunk of 19th-century and early 20th-century drawing room comedy (Shaw, Wilde, Coward, Chekhov) leavened with a few local versions of international hits and a small sprinkling of new Irish plays. All of it was superbly marketed and very classily packaged: the Gate became the first Irish theatre in my experience where audiences applauded the set before the play began. The feel of the theatre was carefully unthreatening - it was comfortable in both the physical and the intellectual sense.

If my view of Michael Colgan's work at the Gate has changed since those early years, it is not because any of this has been radically altered. The Gate is emphatically not a formally experimental theatre in the mode of its great founders. It does not afflict the comfortable - it is notable that the list of donors for the theatre's superb new annexe includes a few who have starred in the alternative theatre of the Dublin Castle tribunals. It does not take risks with new writers. I can't remember a single playwrighting debut in all of Colgan's 25 years. Apart from Brian Friel and Conor McPherson, the theatre hasn't had a long-term relationship with any Irish writer and some, most notably Tom Murphy, have been entirely ignored.

There have been some new Irish plays (Frank McGuinness's Innocence, The Bread Manand Gates of Gold, Mark O'Rowe's Crestfall, Friel's Performancesand The Home Place), but it is notable that none of them was chosen for inclusion in the 25 play extracts performed last weekend to mark the anniversary. To be fair, the Gate has never been funded to take risks with new writers, and Colgan's plans for a second space in which he could do so were frustrated by lack of support. The fact remains, though, that the Abbey has done most of the heavy lifting in supporting new writers over recent decades.

SO, IF COLGAN has succeeded at the Gate within very narrow parameters, why is it also reasonable to suggest that he is one of the best theatre producers in the world?

The answer, to use an analogy that will not be out of kilter with his self-esteem, is that at his birth some magi gave him a highly unusual combination of three gifts. The first is an excess of self-confidence. This is a crucial quality in a business that relies on confidence tricks (telling Star A that Star B has already agreed to do play X, and vice versa) and on acts of blind faith. Colgan has it in spades - this, after all, is the man who when offered the job of artistic director of the Abbey agreed to take it on one condition - that he would keep running the Gate as well.

The second gift is good taste. Within the bounds of his own preferences, Colgan knows good theatre when he sees it, and he particularly knows good actors. He may be fond of marquee names from film and TV (Ralph Fiennes, Michael Gambon, Frances McDormand, Ian McDiarmid, Christopher Meloni, Tom Baker, Tom Courtenay, Ian Holm) for obvious box-office reasons, but almost all of them have been superbly cast. And he has also brought to the Irish stage many truly great actors who are not, in that sense, stars - among them Lia Williams, David Bradley and Penelope Wilton. So what if he has looked so often across the Irish Sea? The results are their own justification, and there's a logic to seeing the Gate, founded by two Englishmen, as belonging to English-speaking theatre rather than specifically to Ireland.

The third gift is, oddly enough, innocence. Colgan has enough cynicism in his make-up to blag his way through what can be a vicious little world and to balance the books with harmless crowd-pleasers when he has to. But the hard-bitten persona is no more than a carapace that shields a besotted enthusiasm. The range of work that really turns him on may be narrow (it revolves around the mastery of verbal dramatics), but within it he is an abject devotee. His knowledge of Beckett or Pinter or Friel is genuinely deep and for all his unabashed ego, he becomes, in the face of this work, a willing servant.

When these gifts come together, they create a potent cocktail of ambition, judgment and enthusiasm. The various Beckett festivals (and this year's consummately executed 32-county tour of Waiting for Godot) have been stunningly achieved. The decision - completely mad and vastly over-ambitious - essentially to brand Harold Pinter as a Gate writer, produced not just the two great Pinter celebrations, but, in the production of No Man's Landcurrently on the West End, one of the best single pieces of theatre of the past decade. Brilliantly engineered casting (John Kavanagh and Donal McCann in Juno and the Paycock; Rosaleen Linehan as Feste in Twelfth Night; the three Cusack sisters with their father in Three Sisters) have produced, not just the "wow" factor for the box office, but electrifying moments of drama.

The real test of Colgan's stewardship is that, after 25 years, it ought to be tired but isn't. Much of his best work has been in the most recent years of his reign, and the Godottour, for example, shows an appetite for the challenge that is keener than ever. He goes on doing what he does best, completely unconcerned about criticism of what he doesn't do.