OPINION: Move the Abbey to the GPO? A capital idea! Let's do it asap... writes DAVID NORRIS
THE ADVANTAGES of the GPO on Dublin’s O’Connell Street as the new home for the Abbey Theatre are manifest and inarguable.
First of all it is owned by the State and due shortly to be vacated as a postal facility. There is therefore no acquisition cost. Moreover, it has historical associations with theatre. For many years it was the headquarters of Radio Éireann and all major radio drama was broadcast from there.
Second, the existing Abbey site could either be sold or used as collateral to raise funds for the building work. This should help to make the entire transaction exchequer-neutral. In any case in the event of a budgetary shortfall I have no doubt whatever that for so significant a national cultural project, EU support would be available.
Failing that, I am certain that the mystical combination of Yeats’s Abbey and Pearse’s GPO would lead to a positive queue of Irish American sponsors.
Then there is the question of spatial compatibility. I was told initially the site was too small. I discovered this to be quite untrue.
The idea of having the Abbey where the GPO now is came to me more than three years ago while discussing the future of the theatre with an old friend, Cormac Rabbitt.
I approached Prof James Horan and Noel Brady from DIT’s faculty of architecture. As a result of their helpful co-operation, the idea became the subject for their fourth-year architectural students. This culminated in a series of brilliant and imaginative proposals by the students.
Even more importantly it emerged from their researches that the site is more than adequate and indeed exemplary from the angle of spatial dimension and flies, backstage areas, scene docks, deliveries, as well as double auditoria and rehearsal space.
Moreover, as a result of the shelling from the gunboat Helgain 1916, the only remaining original element of the building is the magnificent portico and entrance facing O'Connell Street. The rest is effectively an empty shell awaiting imaginative redevelopment.
And what could better stir the artistic imagination than this iconic combination? The relationship between the Rising and the literary renaissance, between Pearse and Yeats, already exists. Recalling the audience response to his wonderfully stirring curtain line in The Countess Kathleen, Yeats wrote: Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot.
Culture provided the imaginative spark that formed the catalyst for the armed revolution. It was, after all, an insurrection of poets.
Moreover, the location is very much in tune with the egalitarian aspirations of the revolution. It is the one building whose location is instantly and universally known to every citizen throughout the State.
It is easily accessible by every means of transport – train, tram, taxi, Luas, bus, proposed metro, car, bicycle, rickshaw and even shank’s mare. It will be both of the people and for the people.
Moreover, let’s face it: despite the heroic efforts of Dublin Corporation, O’Connell Street is still pitiful as the main thoroughfare of a major European city. Paris has the Opera, London, Covent Garden, Milan, La Scala, and New York, the Met. Are we going to dump our national theatre in a duck pond – George’s Dock in the IFSC, championed in Government by only, it seems, the Minister of State for the Arts Martin Mansergh – merely because it is the easy and unimaginative thing to do?
Have we not yet had a surfeit of mediocrity? What a transfiguring impact the arrival of the Abbey would have on O’Connell Street and on the whole sorely neglected north side of the city! Dublin would at last become what it claims to be – a proud European capital.
How well it would gel with the idea of a new cultural hub, including the city council’s splendid plan for the redevelopment of Parnell Square, the flourishing Gate Theatre, the relocation of the central city library to the Ambassador cinema and of course the heroic James Joyce Centre in North Great George’s Street.
There may even be further positive knock-on effects. The surrounding areas – particularly that blighted and neglected axis of Parnell Street from the Parnell monument to Gardiner Street, which forms such a degraded link between North Great George’s Street and O’Connell Street – might at last be refurbished.
I believe strongly this idea would have widespread, if not universal, public support. My only caution in promoting it has come from my fear that attempting to get the establishment to change course might afford some sly elements in the Department of Finance an opportunity to shelve the whole Abbey Theatre redevelopment initiative.
This must not be allowed to happen.
In these grim times the whole nation needs a boost, a bit of visionary oomph to raise our spirits.
Redeveloping the Abbey Theatre in the GPO would demonstrate our national pride at a very reasonable cost, if any, and if we start now it will be ready by 2016.
For me now the gloves are off. The idea is in play. Picture it! 2016 O'Connell Street. Easter Week – the Abbey Theatre reopening in the GPO with a revival of Seán O'Casey's great Dublin trilogy including The Plough and the Stars, in which Pearse himself appeared as a character, a red carpet issuing from that heroic portico as European heads of state arrive.
Well? Why the hell not?
This is an edited version of an article by Senator Norris written for the Autumn edition of The Property Valuer, the journal of the Irish Auctioneers Valuers Institute. The full article may be read on its website, www.iavi.ie