Putting writers centre stage

Commissioning, writing and producing new plays takes time, and while some Irish plays have premiered abroad recently, the Abbey is playing a long game in its relationship with writers, reports Peter Crawley.

The long, drab hall on the highest floor of the Abbey Theatre (known as the "top corridor") was never designed to inspire. Its weary hues seem to drain the life out of the early summer sunlight, somehow drawing the eye towards a gloomy painting outside the director's office. It is a portrait of Ernest Blythe, who, from 1941 to 1967, was the theatre's notorious managing director. Among the many great plays rejected during Blythe's tenure, generally considered the Abbey's artistic nadir, was Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, the writer's first full-length play. Blythe denounced it, informing Murphy that his savage Irish characters "did not exist".

This month, however, the top corridor became an unlikely stage for what Fiach Mac Conghail considers one of the greatest moments of an already buoyantly eventful directorship. There Brian Friel encountered Tom Murphy and the two writers stopped to embrace each other. Mac Conghail looked on with pride. There was nothing Blythe could do to stop them.

It was also a significant moment in the artistic policy of the restructured and financially revitalised theatre. Friel was emerging from rehearsals for the Abbey's new production of his adaptation of A Month in the Country, which opens tonight. Murphy had arrived to discuss a new commission for the theatre. With Marina Carr, Paul Mercier, Tom MacIntyre and Mark O'Rowe all currently under commission as well, the top corridor is seeing a lot of encouraging traffic.

Commissioning, writing and producing plays takes time, of course; which is one of the reasons that the fruits of Aideen Howard's six or seven commissions this year as the Abbey's new literary director will not be harvested imminently. (In total, the theatre has about 15 writers under commission, from established dramatists to emerging playwrights.)

"It's a long game," says Howard. "The writing that is happening now will not necessarily be manifest in the next short while." For the same reason, current productions can often reflect previous circumstances. It has hardly escaped notice, for instance, that writers long associated with the Abbey - such as Murphy or Marina Carr - are now premiering their work in London. Carr's The Woman and the Scarecrow, opening next month at the Royal Court, is her first opening overseas, while Murphy's London premiere of Alice Trilogy was his first there since Blythe's A Whistle in the Dark in 1961. "I have tried to start practically everything with the Abbey," Murphy admitted last year. "This time I wanted to submit it to London and it would get back to the Abbey." Following its tremendous success abroad, we still await confirmation on Alice Trilogy's return.

Brian Friel, though, is a different story. Beginning in 1964 with Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards's production of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, his theatrical career has been shared (not always happily) between the Abbey, Field Day, the Gate and Broadway. It has reached such high water marks as 1979's Faith Healer (which premiered on Broadway and was later produced to the Abbey) and 1990's Dancing at Lughnasa (which premiered at the Abbey and later transferred to Broadway). Since 2001, however, the Gate has secured the premiere of each of Friel's new works, culminating in this year's transcendental - and now Tony Award nominated - revival of Faith Healer (which has transferred to Broadway). Friel clearly doesn't belong to "a" theatre; he belongs to "the" theatre. But any company benefits by association with such a writer, and most theatres would be interested in a timeshare in Ballybeg.

Sitting in Mac Conghail's handsomely furnished office, the first director and literary director of the Abbey Theatre Limited - which replaced the Irish National Theatre Society this year - considers the place of a literary theatre within the Abbey's new structure.

"I think the writer is, and shall remain, the heart of the Abbey Theatre," says Mac Conghail. "The living writer, past writers and also international writers. That's very important. But also our perception is that we should look at other ways of theatre-making and ways of reimagining text." Howard, similarly, prefers to speak of a writer's theatre than a literary theatre. "For me, in terms of the kind of work we're doing with new writers," she says, "it's incredibly important that we show the work of three generations of writers, at least, in this theatre over our two stages."

If writers with a track record at the Abbey choose to stage their work elsewhere, however, Mac Conghail doesn't see why this should attract attention. "There's a perception, maybe, that a theatre has ownership over a particular writer," he says. "I don't know where that perception came from.

"The notion that the Abbey or the Gate or Project loses out when the work [ is] being premiered somewhere else - often that might not be the case. And that notion is only a minority of industry types who might talk about "getting them back". In terms of the audiences, when a Marina Carr play or a Tom Murphy play comes back [ to Ireland], there's no sense that they're getting something second-hand."

Rather, Mac Conghail believes that if Irish work premiered abroad eventually gets back to the Abbey, as is Tom Murphy's hope for Alice Trilogy, it would allow for a new approach, one that better suits "our audiences, our actors and our creative teams, and that makes for a different production or a different interpretation. So you're assuming there's a competition going on, when essentially our view is that we have to respect the writer's wishes and we're happy to do that."

Theatres may not have ownership of playwrights, but they do have strong associations. With the Abbey's annual writer in association award, for instance, in which €11,000 is bestowed on the recipient with no requirements to produce a play for the theatre, that association becomes more tangible.

This year the AIB-sponsored award went to Conor McPherson, a writer who had long felt snubbed by the Abbey. McPherson's new play, The Seafarer, opens in the National Theatre this September. The Abbey are in negotiations about bringing it to Dublin.

Whether or not this represents a softly, softly approach towards enticing the nation's most prominent writers back into the fold of the Abbey is not something Mac Conghail expresses. But, in bringing the brutal and fetid poetry of Mark O'Rowe's Howie the Rookie to the Peacock, the Abbey repertoire has absorbed work that originated elsewhere. "Howie the Rookie was not a part of what you might call the Abbey's literary tradition," says Mac Conghail, "but we wanted to acknowledge a very important piece of writing, a very important play from the 1990s with which the Abbey had nothing to do." The Abbey, he says, will not be burdened by tradition or inflexible affiliations.

"In terms of our responsibilities to our audiences that was a ground-breaking decision." With O'Rowe's Terminus, scheduled to be premiered at the Abbey next year and described as "a vivid and experimental three-hander" for two women and one man, the decision to engage with a writer's previous work may also lead to future dividends.

Regardless of its merits, Jason Byrne's production of A Month in The Country is unlikely to do the same thing for Ivan Turgenev, but it does build on the theatre's relationship with Friel. Next year the theatre will produce Friel's Molly Sweeney, another play that began life outside the Abbey.

"And all the writers care about the Abbey," says Mac Conghail. "Conor McPherson, Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Paul Mercier, Marina Carr - they all care. All of them have generously given us advice, information, they gave out to us, and that's very important."

Even Aaron Sorkin, the writer of A Few Good Men and the watchable seasons of The West Wing, seems to care. When MacConghail decided the Abbey did not have the resources to co-produce his new play The Farnsworth Convention (commissioned by the former head of the literary department, Jocelyn Clarke, during the Abbey's previous regime), Sorkin made a significant donation to the theatre towards the development of new writing in Ireland.

"My responsibility at the moment is to re-engage with Irish playwrights, to re-engage with Irish theatre artists, and to engage with Irish audiences and I need to develop that carefully," says Mac Conghail. "We aspire to be on the world stage, but at the moment our responsibility is to audiences and artists working here. When that is comfortably within our radar, then we can start moving on. It's very important that we hold our nerve - and I'm hoping that Irish audiences hold their nerve too - because it's going to be an exploratory journey over the next three to five years . . . All bets are off." Now that the literary director is an executive role at the theatre, or a "top corridor" position as Mac Conghail refers to it, the place of the writer is becoming clearer to the Abbey.

"I think the notion of a literary theatre is limiting," says Howard, considering the theatre's legacy.

"I think it's more useful to think of the writer as being a central part of the theatre. If that is the literary tradition that we're inheriting, then there's no question that we're embracing that." On the top corridor of the Abbey, there hangs a cautionary example of ignoring that tradition; bearing witness to each new literary embrace.

A Month in the Country opens tonight and runs until July 1st at the Abbey