Restoration drama

This week sees Ben Barnes's ambitious plan for Waterford's Theatre Royal come to fruition. Yet when his troubled tenure at the Abbey ended in acrimony in 2005, the idea of running another theatre in Ireland was the last thing on his mind, he tells PETER CRAWLEY

ON A BRIGHT morning in Waterford, Ben Barnes walks unhurried and contentedly through the freshly redeveloped complex of the Theatre Royal, a venue that first opened its doors in 1785. He stops to point out various restored or rescued features of the oldest Irish theatre in continuous operation. Here, a series of tall, bright windows which had been concealed by the auditorium wall for 150 years, now illuminating a corridor between the theatre and Waterford City Hall. There, a more recent staircase hidden from public view, which he dismisses as “brutalised 1960s functionalism”.

He pauses longer in the large City Hall foyer, which it shares with the theatre, to observe the newly installed municipal art collection, including works by Evie Hone and Jack B Yeats. Two elderly gentlemen approach him.

“Are you doing a snagging list?” they ask. Barnes waits until he enters the next room before letting out a wail of mock- exasperation. This is a theatre with many stakeholders. In the 1950s, the local amateur artistic community quashed an attempt to convert the theatre into office spaces. Since then it has been known as “the people’s theatre”.

“That works to your advantage,” says Barnes, “and to your disadvantage, as we’ve found out.”

Restoring a theatre, much like rebuilding a reputation, is not a project without snags. Both begin with broad horizons of possibility and endless expectations. Both can become tarnished by time, pressure or neglect. When faced with the effort of stripping away the mistakes of the past, reappraising structural integrity and beginning the long task of renovation, it can often seem easier to start over again somewhere else. Both Barnes and the Theatre Royal appear to be doing nicely though.

Having come to the Theatre Royal in 2006, a year after his infamously troubled tenure as artistic director of the Abbey – one marked by media storms, leaked e-mails and finally an accumulated deficit of €3.4 million and his early departure – Barnes has been quietly working to expand the capacities of Theatre Royal, not only improving the building, but also its governance, its finances and its remit. With a newly refurbished building comes new opportunities and while Theatre Royal has long functioned as a receiving house for a wide variety of events, from touring productions to psychic readings, Barnes’s plans for the theatre sound uncommonly ambitious.

Mentioning the writers whose work he would like to see staged here – Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh and Jim Nolan – he immediately floats the idea of international co-productions. Speaking of his long association with theatre companies in the US and Canada, he hopes “to produce something there that we could bring here as a jumping-off point for festivals in Europe, maybe going to Edinburgh or Dublin”.

Barnes doesn’t want to overplay his hand – “It sounds very grandiose to say we want to put the Theatre Royal on the map as a major producing house,” he clarifies, conceding that there isn’t a local producing infrastructure to rival that of bigger cities – but he will not apologise for thinking big.

When Barnes took the job with the Theatre Royal (he continues to direct on a freelance basis as well), it was on condition that the board commit to a major capital redevelopment. Having secured €3 million for the project from Waterford City Council and the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism, and having commissioned local architect Ken Wigham and London-based consultants Arts Team to design it, he is not slowing down now that the theatre has reopened after a year of being closed for redevelopment. In “phase two” of the project, which is already being discussed, he hopes to develop an adjoining building as part of the theatre. It’s a surprise then, to hear that he was initially reluctant to take the job.

“To be honest with you,” he says, “I wasn’t particularly looking to run another theatre. I was happily doing freelance work in the US and Canada. Irrespective of the way things finished for me at the Abbey, I genuinely felt burnt out in terms of what I could subsequently offer the theatre in Dublin.”

After a period of perpetual crises, political tussles, the occasional attempted defenestration, sundry paranoias and, of course, the Sisyphean ordeal of planning to relocate the Abbey, he relocated instead to Wexford with his family. “The only thing I needed Dublin for was the airport.”

BARNES HAS ALWAYSbeen a careful, measured speaker, to the point of seeming guarded, usually approaching the media with a wary scepticism. (Initially, for example, he asked to do this interview by e-mail.) Climbing the vertiginous heights of the Theatre Royal's gantry to peer down on the back wall of the space, or merrily revealing that 1950s fig leaves and brassieres were retro-fitted to a 19th-century panorama that once trimmed the top of the stage, he seems genial, relaxed, even recharged.

The Theatre Royal’s identity has altered so frequently through the centuries that it reveals its history in layers, like folds of sedimentary rock. The shell of the building is Georgian, the auditorium Victorian, its feel Edwardian. At the front of the building stands a glass-panelled entrance built in the early 1990s; outside it stands the remnants of the 13th-century city wall. At the rear of the theatre lurk medieval undercrofts, and you can understand why the refurbishment was monitored by an archaeologist.

“I was very conflicted because my degree is in medieval history,” says Barnes. “So I was fascinated with everything that was coming out. But with my other hat on I was praying, ‘please don’t let them find bodies’.”

On the stage, two men strip away new packaging to reveal a faux 19th-century clock, and time itself seems to be in slippage. It is a prop for Bernard Farrell's Wallace, Balfe and Mr Bunn, a music-hall divertissement which reopens the theatre, and everything seems to become equally authentic and ersatz, the new technology and the force of nostalgia conspiring to render everything a theatrical effect.

“It’s not a highly ambitious drama,” Barnes says of Farrell’s play, which he is directing. “It’s basically a docudrama about the lives of composers Wallace and Balfe as seen though the character of Bunn, whose name is lost to history. Bernard has quite a bit of fun on the basis of that. In a way, the play’s an excuse for us to introduce and present some of the great arias and choruses from their operas.”

With a cast of five actors, three soloists, a chorus of 16 and an orchestra of 17, the show does not seem to want for ambition (it will have just 13 performances) and it is clearly designed to show off the new theatre space, from its revamped orchestra pit to its local context.

A statue of William Wallace stands outside the theatre, testament to the son of Waterford, and Barnes understands the need to programme work that will sell.

“The Theatre Royal is basically a popular and quite populist theatre,” he says. “But there’s also an audience who are looking for something more challenging. What I’m hoping to do, over time, is pepper enough things through the programme to entice that audience. You have to encourage that constituency so people don’t feel the Theatre Royal is a variety house.”

Whether there is enough work to go round is the vexed question of regional receiving theatres, one that has prompted the recent emergence of venue-led touring networks such as Nomad and Nasc, who combine their resources to share or produce touring productions. Barnes is keen to initiate something similar in the south-east, to get better mileage for his work. Two years ago his production of Jim Nolan’s Sky Road ran at the theatre for an unsatisfyingly brief period.

“It doesn’t seem to me that it’s maximising your investment if you’re only performing something for 10 performances . . . There are enough dedicated people here to produce a nucleus of work,” he says of Waterford’s theatre infrastructure. “Producing work here in regional centres does decentralise the arts, moving it beyond the Dublin area. That always seemed to me to be something that should happen. I’m much more aware of that now that I’m based here.”

WHEN BARNES TALKSabout the rejuvenation of the Theatre Royal, he can often sound as though he is talking about himself. "It sort of feels, with the publication of the Abbey diaries [his memoir of his turbulent tenure, Plays and Controversies: Abbey Theatre Diaries 2000-2005, Carysfort Press] and the reopening of this theatre, that I'm entering a new phase now," he says. "Quite what that will bring, I don't know. But I'm hoping it will be a mixture of international work and trying to regenerate the business of this theatre and to locate it in the national grid of theatres."

The Abbey may be behind him, but it has informed his approach in Waterford. Some may even construe his efforts to alter the governance of the Theatre Royal from a “friendly society” to a modern corporate structure, or his clearing of the theatre’s debt, as lessons learned the hard way. He can also reflect soberly on the latest instalment of the Abbey’s relocation saga as the Theatre Royal irons out its snag list.

“I think a lot of unhelpful politics got in the way in relation to the Abbey, together with difficult personalities, myself included,” he says. He doesn’t consider the much-discussed GPO project likely, either economically or politically. “What this place has taught me is that adapting an existing building, with all the complexities that it involves, is much more time-consuming and expensive than building on a green-field site.”

Besides, “once you hear ‘feasibility study’,” he adds, “you can decode it as ‘we’re kicking this into the long grass in the hope it stays there’.” The Abbey, he says, with weary good humour, is no longer his problem. “Someone else can negotiate those rapids. We won’t go there. It’s all done and dusted.” The Theatre Royal, on the other hand, is open for business again.

Bernard Farrell's Wallace, Balfe and Mr Bunnruns until Nov 14