As the Abbey Theatre's financial performance falls under the spotlight again this week, its former artistic director, Ben Barnes, gives his assessment of the behind-the-scenes drama in which he played a leading role.
What I have lived by in the last year is the advice of my late mother who often said that while others are shouting the loudest the wisest thing to do is "to sing dumb like Sweeney's linnet". Noting that my voice has not been heard in all the sturm und drang surrounding the Abbey in the past year, The Irish Times invited me to write this piece to put my point of view. As I have been so widely misrepresented I now welcome this opportunity after the event and without editorial dilution, to state the facts as I see them. I regard the ensuing article not as an opening salvo but as a closing statement. Or, let's be honest, a parting shot.
In pure and simple terms the public perception of the latest twist in the drama of the national theatre might be summarised thus: the Abbey commits to an ambitious centenary programme but fails to raise the funds necessary to finance it; panicked in mid-year the theatre rolls out an ill-timed redundancy plan without the benefit of an artistic context or a strategic rationale and triggers a series of events which includes: a vote of no confidence in its artistic director; an Arts Council bail-out with stringent conditions attached; a commitment to a root-and-branch reform of the organisation; the eventual resignation of the managing director and the stepping aside of the artistic director with some months still to run on his contract.
All of this makes gleeful copy for the Abbey watchers in the print media, but as Oscar Wilde once remarked, the truth is rarely pure and never simple. It is also, by and large, much more prosaic.
LONG BEFORE THE 2004 centenary programme was dreamt up the Abbey's financial position was far from stable.
The two major contributory factors were as follows:
An €800,000 debt carried from 1998 when members of the permanent acting company were made redundant. There was always a hope (more than an expectation) that the tab for this would be picked up by the Arts Council or the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands (as it was then called) but this never materialised. This was a significant liability going into 2000 and gives the lie to the much-quoted assertion that I inherited a theatre in credit.
The second significant factor in the Abbey's finances was that coming into the period in which I presided as artistic director and during my directorship the Arts Council funding to the Abbey substantially declined (by as much as 25 per cent) in real terms.
These two factors were the key contributors to financial instability at the Abbey and not the box office figures which were foregrounded by a media eager to point the finger of blame.
During AbbeyOneHundred the main whipping boy in the blame game would turn out to be The Shaughraun and the charge that it seriously exceeded its budget. To my mind this exposes the weakness of applying formulaic, generic budgets to all mainstage productions regardless of complexity, scale and the intended mise-en-scène. Of course a production like this will seem costly when insufficient cognisance is taken of the ridiculously low budgeting benchmark against which those costs are judged.
The Shaughraun was a flagship, big stage showpiece of AbbeyOneHundred and not a standard small cast, one-set Abbey play. However, the "overrun" on this brazenly low-brow production should also be seen in the context that the accumulated number of performances was circa 24 weeks, which is four times the length of a normal run for an Abbey play. In running for this length of time it absorbed the costs of at least one other new production. At time of writing it is also returning modest royalties to the Abbey from its West End run and achieved high box office returns for its various outings in Lower Abbey Street.
Not that I can claim that I was always happy with the box office performance of the theatre but when your brief runs from Iphigenia at Aulis to The Shaughraun and everything in between you learn to become sanguine about audience attendance figures.
The truth of the matter is that theatre has become a minority art form unless you devise the most popular programme and shamelessly play to the lowest common denominator. To do this brings down the odium of the media art police but not to do it risks the wrath of boards and finance committees with their focus on the bottom line. Some time in the mid 1990s, in acknowledgment of this dilemma, a tripartite forum comprising the Abbey, the Arts Council and the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands decided that a golden box office mean for art-led theatre resided somewhere around 52 per cent of cash capacity.
I should explain that the cash capacity figure (ie the amount people pay against the value of the house at full price) in no way reflects the number of people who come through the turnstiles. As a national theatre the Abbey operates generous concessions as a matter of public policy so that a 60 per cent attendance, for instance, might only show up as 40 per cent of cash capacity or less. The selective quoting of cash capacity figures as if they were attendance figures became widespread in the media in 2004 and was very damaging to the Abbey's reputation at home and abroad.
So, well before 2004 the Abbey was caught in that classic dilemma of a deficit with diminishing funding and an intractable and increasingly costly overhead. Not unlike other larger semi-state companies, the Abbey was spancelled by outmoded work practices, inflexible rostering and intransigent union house agreements. The catch-22 for the Abbey, however, was that its underlying financial position was so weak that the costly tackling of these systemic problems was never going to be an option.
As a retrogressive work culture became more embedded, the finances of the theatre deteriorated further and were exacerbated by the implementation of successive national wage agreements and of the European working time directive. As artistic director I took the view that we should continue to programme a full playbill of work in both theatres in order, through productivity, to make some sense of a punitive overhead. I argued that there was only one thing more absurd than the tail wagging the dog and that was the tail wagging fresh air.
So, with all that as background you might legitimately ask what possessed us to programme a centenary with 100 events and 30 openings on three continents?
It was argued that the centenary of the theatre was a unique opportunity nationally and internationally to showcase the best of the Abbey past and present. It was further argued that AbbeyOneHundred could create the much-needed fundraising platform for increasing private donation to the Abbey and particularly in the establishment of a foundation in the US.
It was also felt that an aggressive centenary programme might shift an already delayed building project out of the realm of political whimsy or atrophy (depending on who you spoke or listened to) into which it had fallen. Nevertheless, when it became clear that a loosely estimated additional €3 million would be required to deliver this programme (it would later rise to €3.3 million) I offered to make a more modest proposal. The board of the theatre, however, insisted that we should implement the full programme and explicitly undertook to raise the necessary additional funding.
At the same time, and in a spirit of looking to the future I agreed, at the request of the board, to draft a radical proposal to address the underlying problems of the theatre and suggest a new operating paradigm for the post-2004 period. This led to a provocative 40-page document entitled Act 2. In it I argued, among other things: that the Abbey should move to a seasonal rather than an all-year-round performance model; that this model would allow it to operate with a small core staff and a larger flexible contract staff employed on a seasonal basis; that this arrangement would allow for the engagement of a seasonal acting ensemble with all the artistic benefits that would flow from this; and that the defined season would facilitatethe development of a limited audience subscription base which would help stabilise the fluctuations in attendance at Abbey productions.
I argued for the establishment of a research and development studio to interrogate ways of making theatre which do not rely exclusively on the text and the spoken word. I believe that the over-reliance of Irish theatre on drama of the spoken word will seriously hamper its future development as it seeks to attract young audiences who are multi-media literate but not literate in the sense that people of my generation understand that term. This is not to say that I wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater and, as the media hysteria of last September would have it, dismantle the Abbey as a writer's theatre.
I argued that the Abbey is over-reliant on a diminishing State subsidy and that through subscription, through maximising its income from an unashamedly tourist-focused summer season (which would reside outside its core season proper), and through the establishment of partnerships with business and its American foundation the theatre could finally insulate itself against the kind of kamikaze financial fluctuations with which it has become all too familiar.
Act 2 was debated and re-drafted and again debated and re-drafted. As a blue skies document it was important that it be costed and tested, and following that process it was our intention to take it to our major stakeholders, the Arts Council and the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism. If we could achieve broad agreement in those forums then we would take the proposal to our staff and unions. The envisaged implementation time from the end of the centenary year was 24 months.
Unfortunately events overtook the best-laid plans.
My extended contract as artistic director was due to expire at the end of 2005 and in the spring of 2004 I offered to remain for an extra year to the end of 2006 in order to advance and, hopefully, implement the Act 2 strategy. This proposal was supported by the McColgan/O'Mahony wing of the board who were enthusiastic about the vision and radicalism of Act 2. The proposal was opposed by the Healy/Downes faction who, as far as I could see, were also enthusiastic about Act 2 but were, at that time, much more focused on the short-term financial difficulties which, now that AbbeyOneHundred was in full swing, were crystallising around the fundraising shortfall of close on €1 million. Perceptually at least these difficulties were exacerbated by the low box office performance of some of the more rarified works within the Abbey and Europe season. The Healy/Downes faction prevailed (a six/three vote For was overturned in a matter of 24 hours) and I believe that the signal that was being sent to me was that while the board might approve the message it seemed to be time to shoot the messenger.
The swift volte face on this issue was but one indication of how fickle and directionless the board had become. It was now clear to me that Act 2 was going nowhere fast and while I do not mark this as the beginning of my difficulties with the board of the theatre (those began much earlier) the deterioration in our relations from that point were rapid and marked and finally led to the sensational and personally distressing events of last autumn.
In a vain attempt to square the financial circle caused by the fundraising shortfall I was prevailed upon to cancel two productions from the end of the year programme and as time went on my capacity to speak on behalf of the theatre was seriously constrained to the point where a press statement of mine on these programme changes was suppressed by the chairman, Eithne Healy. As the board and the finance committee assumed more and more control of the organisation my influence became further marginalised and successive attempts on my part to have any proposed redundancies linked to the Act 2 strategy were ignored.
In September 2004 I travelled to Australia where the Abbey production of The Gigli Concert by Tom Murphy, which I had directed, was scheduled to open the Energex Brisbane Festival. I had considerable foreboding about the timing of any "headcount review" (a euphemism for redundancies) while I was out of the country and voiced these concerns to several directors, reminding them that my obligation and commitment to accompany this tour was known, and agreed to, for well over a year prior to these events. Again, my concerns were ignored.
Therefore, for all the reasons cited above, when the advisory council of the theatre put down a motion of no confidence in my artistic directorship I believe that the board had a moral responsibility to demand that it be withdrawn. The motion was tabled by a trio of council members who appeared to me to be permanently disgruntled, and while there may have been justifiable anger among the wider body of the membership at the way the already infamous "headcount review" had been rolled out and the circumstances which had given rise to it, it was the board who were wholly responsible for the timing and manner of that unfortunate announcement. I made it clear to the chairman that in circumstances where I had consistently drawn attention to the dangers of proceeding with a centenary programme without all the funding in place and everything which followed from that, I was not now about to fall on my sword to deflect the blame from others.
On my return from Australia I was travelling from the airport into the city and the taxi driver, recognising me from all the media coverage commented "that was a classic". When I warily asked him to explain he shot back: "They done you while you were out of the country."
Done, perhaps, but not yet dusted. I was informed that the Government had instructed its nominees on the advisory council to vote against the motion of no confidence but I had little faith that the board would intervene to have the motion withdrawn before I was forced to defend myself against it. I believed this because the polarisation within the board was now acute and there appeared to me to be a faction which saw an opportunity in my difficulty to curb, or even unseat, those elements of the board whom they saw as out of their depth and who, as representatives of a less than sedate national cultural institution, were regarded as too close for comfort to the politicians and mandarins in Kildare Street. The calculation went that if my head rolled it might not be the only one.
An eleventh-hour attempt by the chairman to get board unanimity around the proposal to ask for the motion of no confidence to be withdrawn failed (by three votes) and when I walked into that room to face the assembled board and advisory council I knew I was on my own. I believe I prevailed because I was fired up by the sense of injustice I felt and because of the acuity of advisory council member Des Geraghty who could see that this motion was wide of the mark and found a mechanism to diffuse it.
The e-mail was a mistake.
Even as a confirmed Luddite in technical matters I should have known that a private e-mail sent by me in such charged circumstances would not stay private for long; that there would be one "friend and colleague" who would act in neither a friendly nor a collegiate fashion (I know who you are by the way). I subsequently apologised to the board for the fact of the e-mail but I told them they would have to fire me before I withdrew the criticism contained in it. The fact of the e-mail was misjudged and its contents emotional, but there was nothing in it that I had not already said in my defence of the no-confidence motion and I was not prepared to compromise myself and be seen to hang on to my job at all costs. This would indeed amount to the sort of craven behaviour I would subsequently be accused of anyway in a brace of shamefully opportunistic articles in a national newspaper.
After much discussion, a formula of words was agreed. The salient phrase was that "he no longer needs to maintain his criticism" which decoded means that criticism was legitimately held but following a clearing of the air no longer needed to be maintained. To the casual reader this may seem Jesuitical but without that formula of words, and what they implied, I was prepared to walk away.
The final act in this drama came in May of this year when it was discovered that a systems error camouflaged an additional €900,000 debt. In addressing the staff on my last day in office I had to admit sharing their mystification as to how this came about. Given that the international tour posted a profit of €278,000 and the national tour achieved good box office results and operated on guarantees, I fail to see how they could be substantially to blame for this additional loss as was widely reported at the time. In the circumstances I think that Brian Jackson - the managing director - did the honourable thing in resigning; and my offer to step aside to allow for an accelerated transition to the new management, already in situ in a designate capacity, seemed like a pragmatic decision and one which I had independently arrived at before the latest twist of events. Long handover periods are regarded as "best practice" or some such nonsense but when your day is done it's done.
It would be easy looking back at my five-and-a-half years at the helm of the Abbey to write them off as troubled and controversial. We were hardly out of the frying-pan of Grand Canal Harbour than we were into the fire of Barbaric Comedies and Hinterland and the respite was short before the night of the long knives which seems to lie in wait for any artistic director who has the temerity to wait around long enough to provoke it.
"Great hatred", wrote Yeats, "little room". However, when you consider the 80-plus productions mounted in my five-and-a-half years, the 35 new plays we brought to the stage and published, the international directors and designers who have worked our stages, the international tours, the professional development initiatives, the Tom Murphy Season, the fact that we moved everybody's thinking away from a disastrously limited vision for the new building, the AbbeyOneHundred programme and much more; and when you consider all that against the backdrop of serious funding cuts, a latterly hostile board, a consistently hostile media, a clapped-out building and an intractable and costly overhead, then maybe, amidst the well publicised failures, there was also some small success.
There is a tradition at the Abbey that the outgoing director leaves a note on the desk for the incoming director. Among other things, mine to Fiach Mac Conghail said that "with all its woes this great theatre can still occasionally persuade us to rejoice". I wish the Abbey and its new director many occasions for rejoicing and every success in the years ahead.
As for me, well, when work becomes so all-consuming, as mine did at the Abbey, you struggle to keep the perspective that it is all only a dance. You are more likely to convince yourself that it is the only dance. Already in the month or so since I have left the Abbey I begin to be persuaded that there is another world out there and my dance card, if a little frayed at the edges, may not yet be full.