ArtScape: At last there's news about the long-term future of the former Viking Adventure Centre in Temple Bar.
After a gap of 345 years there is to be a 220-seat theatre on the site of Dublin's first theatre, Smock Alley in Temple Bar, at a cost of €5.2 million.
The possibilities for the building have jumped from Billy to Jack over the past few years since it was vacated by the Viking centre, and it has now been confirmed that it is to be developed by the Gaiety School of Acting and Temple Bar Properties.
The ambitious plan includes a 100-seater studio rehearsal/performance space for use by a variety of theatre companies, as well as the Gaiety School. The Arts Council, Dublin City Council and others are also discussing a possible involvement in the project.
The Gaiety School of Acting, which was set up in 1986 by Joe Dowling and has been located in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar since 1994, celebrates its 20th anniversary next year, and director Patrick Sutton says the school is looking to establish a three-year intensive actor training degree in association with Dublin City University, as well as developing Smock Alley.
The target opening date for Smock Alley Theatre is late 2007. In the meantime the premises continues as an ad hoc rehearsal space and fringe venue.
Wexford orchestra pitch
The Wexford Festival's new artistic director, David Agler, is already showing his colours in unexpected ways, writes Michael Dervan. One of the most outspoken critics of the festival's failures in terms of employing Irish talent has been Lindsay Armstrong, manager of the independent Orchestra of St Cecilia (OSC).
The two men met when Agler attended a concert in the OSC's marathon Bach cantata series in Dublin. Agler is a conductor by profession and shortly afterwards he accepted Armstrong's invitation to conduct a programme for the orchestra at St Ann's church, Dawson Street, on Monday, June 20th. The festival has been seeking quotations for an orchestra for 2006 - the Krakow Philharmonic has once again been contracted for 2005.
There can hardly be a better way for Agler to deepen his assessment of the OSC (which has so far not been asked for a quotation) than by working with them himself. His June debut will see him conduct Barber's Adagio, Haydn's C Major Cello Concerto (with Gerald Peregrine), Mozart's Exsultate, jubilate (with soprano Sylvia O'Brien) and Mozart's Symphony No 29 in A.
Meanwhile, the standoff between the festival and the Arts Council continues. The festival has been offered a 2005 grant of €950,000, up €150,000 from last year, but is unhappy with the conditions which are attached.
Those conditions are believed to involve a carrot (the extra money) and a stick (the employment of Irish talent) as a result of which Wexford has so far refused to sign its acceptance.
The negotiations are now into extra time, and the indications are that the issue is one about which the Arts Council (of which, by embarrassing coincidence, Wexford chief executive, Jerome Hynes, is vice-chairman) is prepared to play hardball.
Help and happiness
Good to see TV director Declan Lowney back on our screens - or, more accurately, behind the screen - with Help on BBC2 on Sunday nights.
Lowney - from Co Wexford and living in Brighton, whose first high-profile UK gig was as director of Father Ted - directs the six-part series. It began last weekend and includes a great performance from Paul Whitehouse, whose previous series was the delicately balanced and superb Happiness, a dark, midlife-crisis comedy drama which Lowney also directed. Whitehouse gives several performances in Help - he plays a string of individuals who visit psychotherapist Peter (played by Chris Langham, Whitehouse's co-writer and producer). The first show was well worth seeing; catch it tomorrow night. (See TV review, back page.)
Savouring Bewley's
The ghost of Bewley's Café Theatre still lives on, e'en without its venue. It took two plays to the flourishing new Glasgow venue, Oran Mor, and on the strength of the success of his comedy Buridan's Ass, SR Plant (former Druid set builder and production manager) was commissioned to write a new play for the spring season. The result is the historical fantasy Casanova's Limp, which has been running all this week in Glasgow, presented by Oran Mor Lunchtime Theatre and Bewley's Café Theatre. It stars Amelia Crowley and Marion O'Dwyer, and is directed by Michael James Ford.
Synge-ing praises
Farther afield, "In her interpretation of Synge's best-known work [ The Playboy of the Western World], Druid director Garry Hynes masterfully fuses the tragic and comic elements", wrote Pip Christmass in the Western Australian this week. "The acting is virtually flawless, the comic timing beautiful (especially in scenes involving Marie Mullen's Widow Quin, who is consistently hilarious) and Aaron Monaghan invests Christy with the physical energy and eloquence of a man whose ego rapidly elevates him, in his own mind, from a simple peasant to an almost-mythic hero."
An event that combines poetry and music takes place in Poetry Ireland on St Stephen's Green next Thursday at 7pm when a CD based on a collaboration between poet Macdara Woods and composer/guitarist Benjamin Dwyer will be launched. In The Ranelagh Gardens includes a suite of 12 new poems (all set in the Dublin city park of that name), with musical responses to the written word. As part of Thursday's launch, poets and musicians will read and perform their contributions to the CD. They have previously performed together in the Mainly Modern series in the National Gallery in Dublin and at the Yeats Festival in Sligo last year. In the current issue of the Journal of Irish Music, Woods explains that a request from Dwyer for some poetry to work against was the spark that led to the creation of poems "about this urban village I've lived in now for more than 30 years". Thursday's performance is free to the public.
"I think it was the playwright Brian Friel who summed me and my chosen vocation up when he insisted that I was stage-struck! Yes - I think he had the rights of it - I was, and in my twilight years still am, magically and unashamedly stage struck. A stage curtain rising and in due time descending, will ever and always hold me enthralled by the magical world in between. I always wanted a part in that magical world," said Tomás Mac Anna this week at a private ceremony hosted by the Arts Council to acknowledge his contribution to the National Theatre and theatre in Ireland over many years. "So much that happened to me was so unexpected and surprising, as I never regarded myself as anything more than an eager jobbing director of plays in Irish and English - as one of Shakespeare's 'rude mechanicals' out of A Midsummer Night's Dream."
Whether at the National Concert Hall or otherwise, many performance organisations could do with a medium-scale performance space in Dublin city centre. Opera Theatre Company, for example, is currently touring La Bohème and filling houses all over (it's on its way to Dundalk, Galway, Ennis, Cork, Kilkenny and Tralee), and is close to selling out Bohème at the Helix at DCU (March 16th-20th).
While upstairs at the National Theatre there has been much shaughrauning and now frequenting, downstairs at the Peacock Shelagh Stephenson's new play Enlightenment, directed by Ben Barnes, opens next week. The Peacock has been dark for some time, with the only activity being Open House, the theatre's Facing Forward initiative to develop new work. Following on from that development work, on March 14th the Abbey and Theatre Forum will present Tested Under Laboratory Conditions, at which the head of the Studio at the Royal National Lucy Davis will discuss ways of developing new work and what can be learnt from the Studio's approach. A discussion follows with some of those involved in Open House and the Dublin Fringe Festival's Thread workshop - the two Irish efforts at a studio model. Contact Theatre Forum attel: 01-8746582 or theatreforum@ireland.com