Onwards or upwards for the new Abbey?

Monica Frawley, stage designer, whose most recent design for the Abbey was The Tempest

"My strongest memories of going to work in The Abbey in the late 1970s are of the awful darkness. It was like entering a mausoleum. It is a dull and airless place to work. The big problem is the main stage itself and how it relates to the theatre. At the moment the safety curtain is very far back and there's a gap like an orchestra pit between the play area and the auditorium. Everything feels very distant. The stage has no depth, so as a designer, you have to create the illusion of depth. And the rehearsal room has no height. We need a huge rehearsal room, with lots of light and air, and the rehearsal space should be in the middle of things, not hidden down a dark corridor.

"The change to the building should be radical. We want a national theatre that belongs to Dublin and Ireland. It's tucked away where it is. It should extend so that it fronts onto the Liffey and holds a dominant position on the quays. The building should also extend upwards, with room for a canteen and green room where everyone mixes, the technicians and performers, like at London's National Theatre. Seeing people in costume, on rehearsal breaks, creates a sense of company; people feel excited to be part of something.

"The building should be a public amenity, with access to archives, a good theatre bookshop, coffee shops and restaurants, so that the whole place is a whirl of activity. Actors would mix with members of the public, having a drink and generating a buzz about theatre. The Peacock and Abbey should share a foyer."

Eddie Conroy, architect with South Dublin County Council, also designed Tallaght's Civic Theatre

"The key problem is the dimension of the site. Everything has to be stacked vertically. The lack of width when it was built meant that there couldn't be a three-dimensional auditorium. What's wonderful about going to theatres like the Gaiety and Olympia is the curved sides, with the boxes. Looking at other people watching the stage magnifies the enjoyment for audiences and provides communal interaction, a sense of community. In the Abbey, you could be at the cinema; we're all in straight rows, it's very flat.

"Also, the stage has a fixed arrangement. The relationship between stage and audience needs to be flexible. Sometimes you will want to have the Brechtian picture frame, but all kinds of arrangements should be possible, with the provision of greater technical resources.

"The black box concept allows for everything while suggesting nothing. What's needed is a beautiful public room for theatre, a civic space. The building needs more presence overall. It should forge its way down to the quays. Staying on that site is not crucial. Of course you could build upwards, but why not extend? Adjoining sites could be bought, and then the theatre activity could spill out onto a plaza outside, reaching out to the streets of the city, like the loggia at the opera house in Vienna. The proposed new footbridge over the river could feed the plaza. This would emphasise the Abbey's outreach and education programme. With £50 million, the change needs to be major."

Brian Brady, theatre director, whose most recent production was Mrs Warren's Profession at the Peacock

"I'd say knock it down and start again, metaphorically and practically. It needs to start from scratch. I'm not attached to the historic site - there are probably more bad vibes, bad aesthetics and bad memories associated with that site than good. It should be redesigned like a honeycomb or beehive with the rehearsal rooms wrapped around the main auditorium. There should be total freedom of movement between the performance spaces, and the public should enter the same, shared foyer for both theatres. The foyer should be a really beautiful public space with a good theatre bookshop, a music shop, a small coffee shop. It should all be simple, elegant, open and bright, with lots of wood.

"It would be great to have three theatres: the main stage, with greater intimacy between audience and stage and an option for theatre in the round. The Peacock should be a black box with mobile seating, favouring presentation in the round and in traverse. Then, there should be a really tiny studio, a 50-seater, for small-scale directorial and literary exploration - a small theatre laboratory.

"In general there should be much more space for actors. At the moment the dressing rooms are small and uncomfortable and there's no quiet space for actors to prepare or to rest. It's also important that there should be more daylight, which you could get by building upwards. A decent subsidised restaurant for cast and crew - and a creche - would help foster a sense of community, with people buzzing around in a cauldron of activity. Finally, it would be great to put the Peacock at the very top of the building so that it opens out to the roof. Just imagine open-air roof-top performances of Shakespeare on the roof in the summer."

Valerie Mulvin, architect with McCullough Mulvin Architects, which designed a feasibility scheme for the Abbey in the mid-1990s

"Staying on the existing site is very important. There is a link with the past there, and lots of resonances for playwrights and actors. That's where the Abbey has always been, and that continuity is important to our sense of the city. A redesigned theatre could be a catalyst for change in the area. The difficulty is the constraint of the site. You could certainly look at expanding and acquiring property behind it, but that would be very expensive. Building upwards is a real option, however.

"The building as designed by Michael Scott is a black box, and that was a romantic idea at the time, conveying a sense of mystery about what went on inside. That black box idea could be turned inside out, so that you keep the magic, mysterious black box of the auditorium, but wrap everything else around it. The whole facade could be an open, visible statement to the city, with people themselves as the theatre.

"It's important that audiences for both theatres enter at the same place. There should be a spirit of excitement in the public spaces with different bars at different levels. We want to feel that we're participating in a great event and that it's an inclusive experience. So the whole inside could be taken out, like coring an apple, and then you could build upwards, creating huge rehearsal rooms. Consultation with staff and the company would have to be enormously important.

"This is a huge opportunity. It has the potential to be such an exciting building. The worst case would be if there was just a bit of tinkering and improving. It needs a radical overhaul, and if we think that theatre is important - and we do - we've got to spend money on it and open it up to every potential facility that it can offer."

Ali Curran, director of the Dublin Fringe Festival

"If they're going to gut the building, I don't see why the facade shouldn't go as well. I don't see anything of value in it. The building looks inaccessible and forbidding and it has dated badly. A national theatre should allow people a sense of ownership - it should invite people in, to have lunch, look at the art on the walls, have a drink. It should be a celebration of Irish live arts. There are lots of interesting outreach initiatives at the theatre currently, but the building sends out contrary messages to its public.

"The Peacock isn't working at all. I'd gut the place. It's a total disaster to have a raised stage and proscenium arch in a space that is dedicated to staging new writing, or takes new approaches to classic texts. It needs to be turned into a multi-configurational space. In the main auditorium it's very difficult to engage with what's on stage. The design is cold, it's uncomfortable and the acoustics are a major problem.

"I am a bit sentimental about the Abbey Street site - I like its historical links. But if the restrictions there are such that real improvements can't be made, then I'd say don't compromise, move. It's too important to get wrong."

Felim Dunne, architect and designer, with Robinson Keefe Devane, of Temple Bar's Designyard

"Staying awake at an Abbey performance tends to be difficult. At the very least all the technical problems - poor air conditioning, acoustics, etc - need to be sorted out. Crucially, the actors hate it, and that's a shame. But one can understand why. It's not working, from either the audience's or the actors' point of view. Maybe they should just level it and start all over again.

"Moving away from that highly constrained site seems like a good idea. Why not? The link with Abbey Street was broken anyway when the present inward-looking building was made. It has no relationship with the street. The theatre could move anywhere now - although that could open up a can of worms.

"The theatre needs to establish a dialogue with its users, and that could include projecting onto the area outside. At present, the public spaces are so bad. With a sky-scraper theatre, you could start from the top down, creating light-filled dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces. It could become a 24-hour place with lots going on all day for children and schools. But I'm worried that the site is just too limiting. They're going to have to do something really dramatic, or else move."