Madam, – Garry Hynes in her letter (June 11th) points out that people should have access to good quality professional theatre without having to travel long distances. She goes on to highlight the inertia of the Arts Council in putting a policy in place to address this deficit.
The truth is that since the touring days of the actor/man-agers back in the middle decades of the last century there has not been an adequate amount of professional theatre on the road to cater for audiences throughout the regions. In the 1970s, the national touring vehicle, the Irish Theatre Company was regarded as too costly for what it could deliver and was replaced by a national touring agency which had some limited success in co-ordinating professional touring throughout the country. In the last 20 years or so there has been a sporadic and scatter-gun approach which has been of little benefit to anyone.
In the current economic circumstances things do not look set to improve any time soon. I say this for three reasons. 1. As I discovered at the Gaiety and subsequently at the Abbey, touring out of Dublin is prohibitively expensive and one of the many logistical difficulties associated with it is that actors, who often depend on film days and voice-overs to supplement their income, can often be reluctant to commit to touring out of the capital. 2. The Arts Council pot has significantly shrunk and the likelihood is that “core” activity will once again take precedence over good regional representation for the theatre in Ireland. 3. Even if a robust touring policy were put in place tomorrow, the proliferation of theatres and performance venues throughout the country during the boom years – with little thought for how they would be managed or what would go into them – ensures that whatever is done now will seem to be too little spread too thinly.
In 2005 I suggested to the Arts Council that it should fund regional companies or venues to produce their own work which they would then tour in their own region. In this way professional productions would be rehearsed and opened in a regional city or town and then tour economically within a manageable radius which would allow for the performing company to return to “base” each evening.
Production resource would be built up in cities or towns outside of Dublin and through regular visits to its constituent venues a regional company could build up its brand and its following in a way which the occasional, or sometimes tokenistic, tour from the well-established Dublin based company can never hope to do. This idea, taken with the Nasc and NOMAD style network of venues, referred to by Ms Hynes, might go some way to injecting a regional balance into the provision of professional theatre in Ireland.
In 2007, prior to closing the Theatre Royal for a major restoration (soon to be completed) we produced the premiere of Jim Nolan’s play Sky Road with well-known actors including Marian O’Dwyer, Barry McGovern, Judith Roddy and Keith McErlean which went on to sell out its 10 performances at the Royal. It did not cost us any less than it would have done to produce it at, say, the Peacock but because it played for significantly fewer performances than it would have at the Abbey, it was commensurately less than good value for the money spent. Now if that production had the resources to go on and play in say New Ross, Wexford, Thurles, Clonmel, Kilkenny and Dungarvan then, I would argue, the theatre-goers of the south east would be seeing some better return on their arts tax euros and the Arts Council would be getting a better bang for its buck. – Yours, etc,