Theatre 'blood suckers' attacked

Moving the Abbey Theatre to O'Connell Street would be like putting Clonmacnoise into the centre of Croke Park, Ulick O'Connor said yesterday.

Addressing students at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, the writer and former board member of the Abbey pondered the dedication of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory and how their legacy was being treated by the "vampiric creatures" currently "sucking the blood" of the national theatre.

The possible relocation of the Abbey was only one aspect of the theatre's more recent history troubling Mr O'Connor.

"You may well ask what is the difference between the Abbey, the Gaiety and the Olympia," he said. The difference, he believes, is the millions of euros the Abbey gets from the taxpayer.

After he had waxed lyrical about a recent Belfast production of one of Yeats's last plays, The Heron's Egg, and said the summer school always ignored Yeats's drama, Mr O'Connor was introduced to a member of his audience, actor Sam McCready.

Mr McCready was the star of The Heron's Egg in Belfast and is leading a drama workshop at the summer school, coaching students who will stage Yeats's Dreaming of the Bones at the Hawk's Well theatre on Friday.

Mr O'Connor was also told that the Sligo-based Blue Raincoat Theatre Company was staging Yeats's The Cat and the Moon all this week in the Factory Performance Space in the town.

This production features actor and writer Michael Harding, one of a number of contemporary playwrights saluted by O' Connor yesterday as he bemoaned the loss of the Abbey repertory.

Mr O'Connor went on to recommend putting a sign over the door saying "no academics". "Letting them loose in a Yeats play would be like letting a dipsomaniac loose in a brewery," he said.