Helping theatre take to the road

ArtScape: The dearth of Irish theatre and visual art touring here may at last be tackled, with the announcement this week of the Arts Council's long-awaited touring strategy. The two-year programme, called The Touring Experiment, will have €2 million in funding to support touring across all art forms over the next two years.

There has been some comment recently - including in this newspaper - about how little theatre is performed in the many venues throughout Ireland, many of which have sprung up in recent years. But despite often excellent infrastructure, the high cost of touring has meant that it's too expensive for lots of theatre work to travel within Ireland (though, ironically, Irish work has been prominent abroad of late).

There has been no Arts Council support specifically for touring since 1998, when £86,000 was allotted, so the new funds are a huge, and welcome, jump.

"The costs and logistics of bringing a 'show on the road' have militated against a consistent flow of artistic work to and from centres across the country," said Arts Council director Mary Cloake. "There are many companies who have worked hard over the past 10 years, touring and building audiences for their work. These committed companies have shown it can be done. But the fact remains that there are brilliant shows in the performing and visual arts which can only be seen by people who live near at hand, or who can travel to Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Portlaoise, Manorhamilton or Virginia. The Touring Experiment will develop a systematic way of ensuring that at least some of these shows can be seen by people in all corners of Ireland."

The Arts Council will invite touring proposals in December this year and February and May next year (and possibly in the following autumn as well). It will seek to support a cross-section of touring projects as well as looking at the needs of presenters, venues, festivals, artists, producers and audiences to establish the most effective way of supporting touring from 2008 onwards.

"The welfare of artists on the road" is key, said Cloake, adding that the council wants to ensure that the travel, living and working conditions of artists are acceptable, as well as making sure that venues have the necessary technical facilities and personnel.

The council plans to work with partners, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Irish Theatre Institute and Temple Bar Cultural Trust, on its touring programme. The strategy is being announced now to allow applicants a chance to develop their ideas before the closing dates for the "experimental fund" (December 20th 2006 and February 23rd 2007, with further 2007 closing dates to be announced early in the New Year). Application details will be available from the Arts Council website from October 31st.

London's Irish invasion

Some of our most significant playwrights continue to bypass the option of staging their new works here in favour of first seeing their names outside London theatres, writes Gerry Smyth. It's a trend that says something either about an unsatisfactory relationship between companies and writers here, or about the position the British capital continues to hold in world theatre.

Following the premiere last year of Tom Murphy's Alice Trilogy at the Royal Court (the Abbey's production opens in the Peacock on Tuesday as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival) and last June's production of Marina Carr's new play, Woman and Scarecrow, at the same venue, Conor McPherson's latest work opened last week in London's Royal National Theatre. London audiences will also have the first opportunity to see Frank McGuinness's new play, There Came a Gypsy Riding, when it premieres in the Almeida next January.

The Seafarer is McPherson's first play for the National and has picked up some very good reviews. The Observer gave it a more prominent position than London's current hot ticket, Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, which has restored the fortunes of the Old Vic under the leadership of Kevin Spacey, who gives the performance of a lifetime in a terrific production of one of O'Neill's more prolix plays. McPherson's "daring and memorable" play - according to Susannah Clapp in the Observer - seems likely to produce another London success for the writer, with a four-star review in the Guardian from Michael Billington, who sees the playwright as "an acute analyst of melancholy Irish manhood".

McPherson's latest work returns to a familiar theme - the supernatural - and a familiar format, a soul-searching drinking session by an all-male group. So we have inner demons and the demon drink. But into this group enters a stranger who happens to be the capo de tutti capi of demons: Mephistopheles himself. Billington makes the point that only a "rotter would reveal the outcome", and with the denouement McPherson yet again springs a surprise.

Benedict Nightingale, in the London Times, praised both the "fine writing" and an "excellent cast", which includes Jim Norton, surely one of our finest actors and too rarely seen on the Irish stage. With McPherson as the Abbey's current writer-in-residence, it seems likely that we will eventually see a production of The Seafarer in our own National Theatre - and presumably also his next new work.

Apart from McPherson, there is a strong Irish presence in several other quarters of London's theatreland. Colm Meaney - when was he last seen on an Irish stage? - puts in a fine performance with Spacey in the Old Vic production and Sinead Cusack is magnificent in one of the finest pieces of playwrighting of the past few years, Tom Stoppard's Rock'N'Roll.

Festival ferment

On home ground, the Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF) is in mid-flow. David Soul is to join the cast of The Exonorated from tonight at Liberty Hall. The well-structured, not-strictly-theatre production is attracting good audiences. It tells the stories of six wrongly convicted death-row survivors. But it is interesting that the stories told are all about innocent people. In arguing against the death penalty, the stories of those correctly found guilty are also valid, a point made strongly on RTÉ1's The View this week.

To coincide with the DTF production, Amnesty International's Irish section and the Irish Centre for Human Rights are co-hosting a seminar on the death penalty, at Dublin's Liberty Hall Theatre today at 4.30pm, between the matinee and the evening performance. Taking part are leading international campaigners against the death penalty, including Prof William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway; Saul Lehrfreund and Parvais Jabbar, London-based solicitors who act on behalf of capital defendants and death-row inmates; and Peter Hodgkinson, director of the Centre for Capital Punishment Studies at Westminster University Law School.

• Gas also to see a bit of theatre controversy on Liveline this week, where callers rang in to complain about the bad language in Stuart Carolan's Empress of India (Druid's production at the Abbey) rather than, for example, the characters' questioning of God's existence.

• EXTR.acts, the theatre design exhibition at City Hall, is free to the public. Curated by set and lighting designer and TV director John Comiskey, it features Irish work by more than 40 theatre designers, from 80 productions and 50 companies, and brings together an array of designs for stage, costume, make-up, lighting and sound, from 2002 to 2006. The exhibition, managed by the Irish Theatre Institute, is in advance of Ireland's participation next year in the Prague Quadrennial of Theatre Scenography and Theatre Architecture.

EXTR.acts runs until October 14th, 10am-5.15pm, Monday to Saturday and 2pm-5pm on Sunday.

• Tomorrow young people will cast a critical eye over two festival shows, Empress of India and La Tempête, and present their views to the public at the National Association of Youth Drama (NAYD) Young Critics' Forum. About 20 young people will work with theatre critic Karen Fricker to review and assess the shows.

The forum will be followed by readings of scenes by five budding playwrights who took part in the NAYD Young Playwrights Programme, where they were mentored and tutored by director Thomas Conway of Druid Theatre Company. The forum is open to the public at Project Theatre, Dublin, tomorrow at 12.30pm.