Last year the acting impressed more than the writing, the judges tell Rosita Boland
Trends in the theatre come and go. "I predicted at the beginning of the year that we wouldn't see old fellas in a pub telling stories - and we didn't," says Nicholas Grene, one of the judges in this year's Irish Times Theatre Awards. Grene is professor of English at Trinity College Dublin and his co-judges are Maureen Kennelly, director of the Mermaid Arts Centre in Co Wicklow, and Sinéad Mac Aodha, director of the Ireland Literature Exchange.
So if The Weir's influence on Irish theatre has waned, what replaced it this year?
"Child abuse," the three judges reply simultaneously, with a slight collective shiver.
"There were five shows about child abuse," Mac Aodha says.
In 2006, the judges saw some 140 shows. They split the Dublin Fringe Festival between them, with an agreement that they would text or e-mail each other if they came across a show which they considered deserved a second viewing and opinion.
"Even though the Fringe was only two weeks this year, as opposed to three weeks, it had a big impact on the city," Kennelly says. "It was really well marketed this year. Every bus stop had a poster. You definitely knew something was happening in the city."
"It's very noticeable that the Fringe attracts young audiences. It wasn't the same at the Belfast Theatre Festival, though," Grene says. "The audiences were very poor and there was far less excitement being generated."
"And the Beckett Festival brought out a lot of younger people," Kennelly adds. "This year was the year of the Beckett Festival."
They felt in general that audience numbers were reasonably healthy in Dublin, although noticeably less so in the regions. "There are so many new community arts centres, but a lot of them had very poor audiences. Half a dozen people on a Saturday night? That's a poor audience by any standards," Grene says.
The big surprise of the year for them all was the excellence of the acting. "That has been a very difficult category to judge. It's fiercely competitive," Kennelly says.
They also noticed an increased use of multimedia and more inventive staging, in a move away from the tradition of purely narrative-driven drama. "It was obviously a case of 'if you can't beat it, join it'," says Grene. "In some cases, there was almost an overreaction to the voice, and that one set of techniques was benefiting at the expense of another."
All the judges were disappointed with the paucity of new writing. "There definitely wasn't as much new writing as we would have liked to have seen," Kennelly says.
"There seem to be quite a few playwrights at the beginning of their careers. Sometimes the quality of the writing in the shows we saw just didn't match the often outstanding qualities of production, lighting, design and acting," says Grene. "We also noticed a shift to a lot of ensemble-based work, where the writing tends to get a bit lost."
"There was a proliferation of work that was under-rehearsed," Mac Aodha says firmly.
"People kept saying to me over the year: 'Are you not bored with seeing so many shows?'" Grene says. "But I can honestly say I very rarely was. But there were times when I was not bored, but furious, when I saw highly skilled actors being made to perform in terrible shows."
So what were the lowlights of the year? Grene and Mac Aodha exchange glances.
"There was one show done by a hugely reputable company, where the two of us looked at each other repeatedly and wondered if it was ever, ever going to end. Oh, the waste, the waste of all that talent!" Mac Aodha says.
Apart from the formal spaces of theatres, where else have the three judges seen performances this past year?
"The Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers Society" . . . "The Pigeon House" . . . "A pub in Galway" . . . "On a train - the train from Cork to Cobh, where there was a performance en route."
"There were a lot of novelty venues five, six years ago, where the venue was a novelty and expected to do some of the work of the show, which can give way to laziness, but now there is some really good site-specific work," Kennelly says. "Site-specific work is definitely becoming more central in the wider sphere of Irish theatre."
Did they notice novelty venues or site-specific shows attracting a wider and more varied audience?
"Those shows can usually only accommodate quite small audiences," Grene says. "So I don't think they engage a wider audience. But they enable an audience to view a site in a different way, when the work is done well."
Recalling one venue she attended during the year, Mac Aodha says: "It was a clothes shop in Temple Bar. There was a sign on the wall saying that rat poison had been laid down. I looked at it, and I wasn't quite sure if that was part of the set or not."