Let's not throw it all away

Last month, when the Abbey's financial crisis came to light, one report pointed out that the theatre is doing "only 44 per cent cash business" in its centennial year. "It is €1.8m in the red and will be €2.6m in debt by the end" of 2004, writes Adrian Frazier

The Abbey has too many people on its payroll, it said, and will need to scrap "arcane practices". The only arcane practice the article identified was that of reading and evaluating unsolicited manuscripts. "On average one a year makes it onto the stage at the Peacock," the newspaper reported, calling it a poor return.

The main thing for the theatre to do, evidently, was what any business in trouble should do: restructure, meaning cut staff - already, a decision has been taken not to renew the contract of Jocelyn Clarke, head of the literary department - reduce overheads, increase sales and stop asking the Government for money.

As so often in articles about the Abbey, ever-present woes were thrown into relief by allusion to the glory days of 1904, when the Abbey was, it is often said, founded by W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. But was it really so different in 1904?

First of all it is necessary to correct an error: the Abbey was not founded by Yeats and Gregory 100 years ago. In fact there is more than one error in that statement. The Abbey Street building that formerly housed the Mechanics Institute was bought by Annie Elizabeth Horniman in 1903. An English heiress who admired Yeats in every sense of the word, she gave free use of her theatre to the Irish National Theatre Society because it had been staging Yeats's one-act plays in rented venues around Dublin.

The building opened under the new name of the Abbey Theatre in December 1904, with Yeats's On Baile's Strand acted by the Irish National Theatre Society. The society was founded by Yeats and Gregory no more than the Abbey was owned by them. Frank and W. G. Fay, along with eight other actors, organised the theatre company in April 1902 and elected Yeats as a figurehead president in August of that year, although, given the figure Yeats was, and with Horniman's capital behind him, he became the masterful head of the movement in little more than 12 months.

Surely, you will be saying, Gregory and Yeats founded something. Was it the Irish Literary Theatre? In the summer of 1897, as reported in Gregory's somewhat self-serving Our Irish Theatre, from 1913, Yeats spoke to Gregory when visiting Duras House, in Co Clare, of his desire for a Celtic - Welsh, Scottish, Irish - theatre in Dublin. She rallied her neighbour Edward Martyn to the cause; a wealthy landlord and playwright, he underwrote the first performances in May 1899, which included his own play, written with George Moore, The Heather Field. Martyn and Yeats were the founding directors of this movement, and they asked George Moore, the novelist, to join them, but they did not ask Gregory. She nonetheless deepened her involvement through the second and third seasons (February 1900, October 1901) until even the other members of the board regarded her as officially of their number.

This is not to diminish the importance of Gregory, much less Yeats, to the Irish dramatic revival but to describe it correctly. Although they neither founded the Irish Literary Theatre or the Irish National Theatre Society nor owned the Abbey at its founding, they became, with J. M. Synge, the directors of the Irish National Theatre Society by 1904.

While also contributing plays to it, Yeats, Synge and Gregory served the theatre somewhat as the current Abbey board does, somewhat as its literary department and somewhat as joint artistic directors. Like the Abbey board, they hired and fired the stage managers, as directors were known at the time. Like the literary department, they read new scripts and, when those scripts were promising, offered detailed advice on improvement, sometimes on successive drafts. Indeed, Yeats was a brilliantly practical mentor to playwrights, even if he was not especially competent as a playwright. Like the artistic director in our time, the three author-directors had a role in casting, set design and programming. Gregory and Yeats continued in this capacity until the ends of their lives. This was the heroic part of their service to the theatre: they kept at it, sometimes with only one another to rely on.

The present supposedly stale yet turbulent times at the Abbey are often contrasted with the stable yet exciting days when Yeats and Gregory were at the helm. Yet in the Abbey's first decade stage managers came and went often enough. W. G. Fay, its first manager, was in charge until January 1907. With his brother Frank (who gave voice lessons) he had been chiefly responsible for whatever distinctive style the actors had, perhaps summed up under the headings of "teamwork", "naturalness" and "no unnecessary gestures". Horniman detested Fay for his insubordination, temper and flirtation with an actress, Brigid O'Dempsey (whom he married soon after). But then she hated all Irishmen except Yeats. Horniman insisted that Fay be fired or, at least, put in his place. In spite of Gregory and Synge's protests, Fay was demoted.

Just at the time of The Playboy Of The Western World's first, riotous performance, a 26-year-old grammar-school-educated Englishman called Ben Iden Payne was brought in, at many times Fay's salary, to take over. Payne found himself at sea, however, and with shipmates who did not really speak his language. He took some lead roles himself, cast his wife in others and fitted oddly into the ensemble of Irish actors, who, nice young man though he was, paid him little respect. He resigned in June 1907, after less than six months. Fay retook his position, but it was not in triumph. He was never again to enjoy the confidence of the directors or the actors, and he quit in 1908.

Norreys Connell (Conall O'Riordan), a playwright and novelist, took over for a few months, resigning in July 1908 under attack from Horniman for allowing an actress to sing at a political meeting. He had not properly understood how strictly the proprietor enforced her ban on Abbey actors getting involved in politics. Private sponsorship, you see, has its problems too. Connell was replaced by Lennox Robinson, then a 23-year-old playwright from Cork.

Robinson was sent to train under Harley Granville-Barker at the Court Theatre in London, where Shaw's plays débuted. By May 1910 Horniman was also pushing his head onto the chopping block, for failing to close the Abbey when King Edward VII died suddenly. With support from Yeats he was able to stay on - only to lose his job a few years later, when Gregory was unhappy with his management of an Abbey tour of the US.

In its first 10 years the Abbey had six directors. None left happily.

How were sales going during the theatre's glorious dawn? Take as a yardstick the 44 per cent of seats sold - disastrously, apparently - this year. Between December 1904 and February 1907 the Abbey sold only about 30 per cent. After the Playboy controversy, in February 1907, when the theatre was boycotted by Sinn Féin and much of the Gaelic League, the figure dropped to 20 per cent.

This is not to say that the mostly empty theatre was useless. The Abbey had produced original work by Yeats, Gregory, Synge and Shaw, as well as the first plays of Robinson, George Fitzmaurice, Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse, T. C. Murray and others. If poorly attended, the performances had an often life-changing impact on creative young people such as Daniel Corkery, who said: "To get the quintessence of the Abbey, you must go to a matinée; there is nothing like it to be had in any city in the world outside Dublin: but this Dublin does not seem to know. There might be thirty people present on some occasions, or twenty, or less - but what you felt about the authors, the actors, the orchestra, about everything was: how very kind of them."

The image of such Saturday-afternoon desolation, of course, would make a business-minded manager despair. How was it that the Abbey did not go into debt and, ultimately, out of business long before its first 10 years were up, not to speak of its first 100? There are three reasons. First, the Abbey actors were paid very little. Some held full-time day jobs, others part-time jobs; the rest made do on what they had, poor folks in a city of even poorer folks. Second, the Abbey directors were playwrights-in-residence, providing exclusive performance rights. Third, the Abbey did not make money: it was dependent on its large subsidy from Horniman, which paid for the artistic director and the actors. The Abbey could therefore get by with very small audiences.

When Horniman withdrew her subsidy in 1910, following Edward VII's death, the theatre was forced to leave Abbey Street and go on the road. It toured the US for six months a year, three years running. Then, in 1914, the first World War - more precisely, German U-boats - put a stop to theatre companies touring transatlantically. Once the war ended the company took another long tour, to Australia.

One might innocently assume that, during its first decade, the Abbey received favourable notices in the national press, as both worked for an independent Ireland. That too would be incorrect. The Abbey under Yeats's guidance worked only for great literature. It might not often have achieved it, but integrity depended on literary and dramatic quality being its aims. Any benefits to Ireland were indirect and, therefore, insignificant. The theatre was savaged for years. Eleven months after the première of The Playboy Of The Western World Sinn Féin's weekly journal still felt strongly enough to describe the Abbey as a "plague house whose pestilential disease-laden atmosphere must be avoided at all costs by those who cherish a lingering regard for their health".

Such greasy vituperation is unique to journalism about the Abbey. From the start a self-styled national theatre, it effectively put itself forward as a scapegoat for the nation itself. Objecting to the Abbey is a way of showing dissatisfaction with oneself, like complaining about one's father. The cry from the crowd at Playboy was: "That's not the west!" In short: that is not us. But the theatre, claiming always to be a mirror of its audience, whispered back: oh yes it is, it's exactly you. Great art, as Yeats remarked, is always unlike a people's idea of itself. And that is precisely its value: it shows us as we have not seen ourselves before.

But at least the early Abbey, if not a commercial or political success, left a legacy of classics of the stage - didn't it? One might ask those who planned the programme for the Abbey centenary why they did not put more plays from the first decade on the main stage.

Put yourself in their shoes: which play of that period by Yeats, Gregory, Synge or Robinson is likely to reflect glory on the institution, excite the actors and do 50 - or even 20 - per cent business? The Playboy Of The Western World. So the Abbey is doing it. And in addition to that classic? Although I love some of the plays Yeats wrote after 1914, his plays have never drawn crowds and probably never will. Although Gregory's comedies once pleased audiences as curtain raisers for longer plays, after her death they ceased to be regularly programmed, then fell out of the repertoire entirely.

Today curtain raisers are obsolete: an acceptable play is 80 to 90 minutes long, with an interval a bit more than halfway through. Frankly, Playboy is the only full-length classic play from the Abbey repertoire in its first 10 years. But one world classic is equal to a lot of national classics. Were the Abbey never again to have seen a play approaching it in quality the whole adventure would still have been culturally justified. But the theatre has seen more great dramatists emerge on its stage: O'Casey, Friel, Kilroy, Murphy,Carr. The Abbey is properly associated with a great tradition of literary drama.

The distinctive aspect of the Abbey - and Yeats deserves the credit for this - was that it would be an author-centred theatre company, putting on shows about Irish people for Irish people. It was, essentially, a theatre of new writing and a school in which cultural self-examination would be taught by demonstration.

To say that the literary department of the Abbey is involved in an arcane practice that must be dropped to restructure the theatre along more businesslike lines is breathtakingly ignorant of all that distinguishes the Abbey and Ireland in the history of world drama. The distinction of the Abbey is in its relation to playwriting in Ireland. The Abbey has served as a free school for writers since the beginning of the 20th century. It was a good school when Yeats, Synge, Gregory and Robinson were reading and responding to unsolicited manuscripts. It was a very bad school during the long period when Ernest Blythe was doing so.

In recent years the approach to developing playwrights (rather than just evaluating submitted manuscripts) seems reasonable, but it is hard - perhaps impossible - to assess. US universities have spent five decades trying to teach creative writing, but the success or failure of the enterprise cannot convincingly be demonstrated on the evidence of contemporary US literature. Certainly, however, as far as theatre in Ireland is concerned, if the Abbey is not a major port of call for a young and ambitious writer - indeed, if its door is not open for any new writer - Ireland will begin to lose its name as a vital centre of playwriting.

Joe Dowling, director of the Abbey in the 1980s and now of the Guthrie Theater, in Minneapolis, recommends a change of direction: more spectaculars, more Annie Hornimans on the board, less dependence on the Arts Council and a new conceptualisation of the Abbey as a theatre like any other, not particularly national. But the Guthrie's mission is to perform classics, and so it has not nurtured or developed new playwrights.

As a national institution, rather like the National University or National Library of Ireland, the Abbey's sense of a larger aesthetic and educational responsibility has served its writers very well. One playwright a year making a début at the Peacock is hardly a poor return: it is the rich reward of the theatre's subsidy and the Abbey's distinctive heritage.

Adrian Frazier is director of the MA in drama and theatre studies and the MA in writing at NUI Galway