Enterprising ensemble

Frustrated by a lack of touring drama, seven theatres have got together to set up an experimental network, writes Peter Crawley

The word just happened to be on the tip of her tongue. When Katie Verling, the artistic director of Glór Irish Music Centre in Ennis, needed a name for a new association of seven Irish venues brought together by a shared frustration with the lack of touring productions, she reached for something simple - Nasc. The Irish word for link or knot seemed more imaginative than "Network", although because Verling tends to write it in capitals (NASC) it's easily mistaken for an acronym. "We could make it one," she told me earlier this year. "Network of ArtS Centres. There you go."

This is typical of Verling, who meets challenges head on and without hesitation. This year her determination to rejuvenate Glór saw the venue's Arts Council funding increase threefold, from €40,000 to €120,000. Her response to the deficit of Irish touring productions at home (the recent establishment of Culture Ireland has made international tours seem easier to facilitate) was similarly energetic.

"When I made the phone calls last year [to the heads of The Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire; Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise; An Grianán, Letterkenny; Siamsa Tíre, Tralee; Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge; and Backstage Theatre, Longford], I said, 'There are enough of us in venues hunting for programming. Why don't we get together and try and set up a touring network?' It always had that sense of experiment."

It was an experiment that Irish theatre had been crying out for. Since 1995, when the Arts Council abandoned direct touring support, travelling productions have been thin on the ground. This, coupled with the explosion of new arts centres in the country, many of which sprang up with EU funding, has meant that there have never been so many venues with such little product.

It's not difficult to see why theatre companies are so hesitant to undertake national tours. Last year, when the Arts Council was slowly determining the form of its Arts Strategy (which replaced the Arts Plan 2002-2006), the organisation commissioned a report from the experienced practitioner Jane Daly, co-producer of the Irish Theatre Institute.

Daly's paper spelled out the problems: touring was a prohibitively expensive enterprise; few companies could expect to recoup their costs; established actors, aware of the grim realities of life on the road, were often unwilling to be uprooted; and many of the companies that could tour understandably restricted themselves to large commercial venues which could guarantee against loss.

When, in 2004, the Abbey Theatre's hidden losses of almost €1 million were revealed, the national tour (significantly, not the international tour) of The Playboy of The Western World was seen as the culprit for the bulk of the shortfall. National touring, in short, looked like a one-way ticket to financial oblivion. Daly's paper advised long-term strategising, building up associations between venues, production companies and audiences, while outlining various possible funding approaches. "There is no 'quick-fix' solution to touring issues," she wrote.

Indeed, the Arts Council, which barely addressed the points of Daly's paper in its original draft of the Strategy, waited until last month to announce a touring policy. Entitled the Touring Experiment, with all the caution that entails, the two-year scheme will disburse €2 million in funding to applicants, developing, as director Mary Cloake put it, "a systematic way of ensuring that at least some of these shows can be seen by people in all corners of Ireland".

Nasc, created during the Arts Council's touring policy vacuum, was funded to the relatively modest amount of €16,000 for each venue. As the Council considered viable models of touring, Nasc might have represented a test case.

"At the time," recalls Verling, "the Arts Council didn't have a touring policy, so we said, anything we learn about this we'll tell you about it - whether you use it or not. We find it fascinating, so we're going to bore you with it."

FIRST, HOWEVER, NASC had to find a production that suited not only the tastes and considerations of each venue manager, but one which could also adapt to the vastly different scales of their houses. The venues involved range from fewer than 200 seats to an auditorium that fits 500. "If we had been strategic when we started, we might have chosen venues of a similar size," confesses Verling. "But we couldn't have made it more difficult for ourselves. We're spread right across the country, north to south, east to west. To get a show that will tour to all of those venues, and that can do a 200-seater or a 500-seater, is a huge challenge."

The consortium had further stipulations: the production would have to be audience-driven; it would have to be delivered by a reputable company and director; and that company would have to have a reputation for touring - if not currently then in the past. They might as well have written the words Druid's Year of the Hiker on a cocktail napkin and saved themselves some time.

"We had made a choice that we wanted really high quality theatre," says Verling. "We didn't want to co-produce something new. We wanted something that we knew was good. Investing money in a new production was a risk - if it wasn't good on the first night out we'd all be stuck with a seven-week tour which we knew was a glugger. You would have killed the idea of touring theatre, you would have done damage to your audiences. You would have done damage to the network. Revivals are a better use of touring funds, generally, than [ commissioning] new ones."

Whether The Year of The Hiker held an instant appeal for all regional venues is hard to gauge. Kerry, for instance, where Nasc's tour began last week at Siamsa Tíre, hardly suffers from a John B Keane drought. Furthermore, it is a hugely expensive undertaking for company and venues alike - something Druid has been able to make feasible by performing for a week in the Cork Opera House, which can offer a guarantee, but for which Nasc's funding offers little safeguard. Glór, for example, will have injected €39,000 beyond its Nasc allotment to facilitate the transfer.With an auditorium of 500, there is a chance the box office can make up the shortfall, but it's a slim one. For a 200-seat venue, there's none.

"This is the reality of touring quality theatre," says an ever-sanguine Verling. "This is the bullet we have had to bite, and the bullet that has to be bitten by everybody . . . If you really want to test the model for touring, and you have a commitment to giving audiences access to the best that's out there, wherever they are in the country, it's going to cost. We're not saying the whole thing should be underwritten by the Arts Council. The venue should be under pressure. Venues do have to make a decision as to whether we all go with loss-leaders - shows we have in our programme that we know will lose money, but which we want because of the quality and diversity of the work."

In some ways, Nasc is less about the work though than the strength of the network. Verling speaks eagerly of how the venues are pooling information, sharing tips on producing, presenting, marketing and co-ordinating with an openness unfamiliar to venue managers.

"As a venue manager," she says, "you end up being quite isolated a lot of the time, because you're just responding to the varied and diverse problems that throw themselves at you all day, every day." With Nasc, however, "it's fantastic to be able to pick up the phone and say to somebody, 'What do you think?'"

The new condition for touring theatre in Ireland could well be the rise of such venue consortiums. The Association of Regional Theatres in Northern Ireland, for example, has been an influential model, binding five venues together in 2003 to share the costs of producing theatre and transferring it between venues against otherwise impoverished circumstances for touring.

More recently, eight venues in the North Midlands came together under the banner NOMAD to form a regional theatre network that facilitates professional tours. Working first with Livin Dred, Padraic McIntyre's company based in the Ramor Theatre, Co Cavan, the group will host a tour next year of Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming, the start of an initiative that, in time, hopes to attract international productions to the small-scale venues.

MARY HANLEY OF the Ramor has a similarly pragmatic and active view of touring. "I think touring as we know it is no longer valid," she says. "I don't think that companies, most of whom are based in Dublin, are interested in touring up to venues like ours. That's just the reality of life. I think venues themselves need to be more than just receiving houses . . . If you're positive about something and you're working together, rather than against the grain, we can all create a greater profile and generate a greater audience." In other words, there is strength in numbers.

As for Nasc, which recently added the Everyman in Cork to its membership, it's hard to guess what future productions the expanding association might agree on following the Druid tour. "I cannot think of any other play at the moment we could commit that kind of money to," says Verling. "Even if Druid were to offer me Playboy of the Western World with George Clooney in it."

She is more optimistic about the future now that the Arts Council has put domestic touring back on the cultural agenda. €2 million, of course, can only go so far, and it may fall to venues to strengthen their links. Nasc will continue however not just because it wants to, but because it has to.

"When a production is excellent," says Verling, "when it captures the zeitgeist, we want our people to see it. That's why we run venues. Because we want to share our excitement with others."

• Druid's production of The Year of the Hiker continues at the Cork Opera House until Nov 11 and then transfers to Glór (Nov 13-18), An Grianán (Nov 20-25), Pavilion Theatre (Nov 27-Dec 2) Backstage Theatre (Dec 4-6), Riverbank Arts Centre, (Dec 8-9) and Dunamaise Arts Centre (Dec 11-18)