Abbey 100 Part 2: Home sweet home: The national theatre's attempts to get a new building have turned into a saga of implausible twists and turns. What hope is there of success, asks Fintan O'Toole

If the saga of the Abbey's attempts to get a new building were a play, the theatre would reject it. It has gone on too long. It has too many implausible twists. It repeats scenes over and over, continually ending up back where it began. It mixes incompatible styles: dirty realism and theatre of the absurd. And the long-promised happy ending - a new home for the national theatre in its centenary year - is going to require a deus ex machina.

The Abbey has always had trouble with its building. The original design of the theatre that opened in 1904 had no scene dock or workshop, and some stables at the back of the building had to be bought to provide these basic facilities. The actors, if they were required to exit stage left and re-enter from stage right, had to run out of the building and along a public lane. And between 1951, when the original theatre burned down, and 1966, when the new building was finally opened, the Abbey endured its "Babylonian exile" at the old Queen's music hall.

Even then, the current building was never adequate. Michael Scott's stark modernist exterior is peculiarly forbidding for a landmark civic building that needs to invite the public in. Rehearsal facilities are poor. The scene dock and storage facilities are hopelessly inadequate, so much so that most scene construction has to be done in another building, on Annesley Place, and long-term storage of scenery and costumes is scattered between buildings in Dublin and Galway. The fly tower is too narrow. The Peacock, disgracefully, is virtually inaccessible to patrons, staff and performers with disabilities. Perhaps most seriously of all, the main Abbey stage is a nightmare - far too wide for intimacy with the audience but not deep enough for contemporary production styles.

On top of these long-term problems, the Abbey's capital grant has never been large enough to allow for proper maintenance and upgrading of the theatre's fabric. The plant and machinery have been wearing out. As long ago as 1995, a study by McCullough Mulvin Architects concluded that "the building is rapidly and inevitably becoming a genuine health and safety hazard". In spite of some running repairs, an Office of Public Works report in 2002 concluded that the building was still "operating at the limits of safety".

It has long been known that if anyone were to push for a full safety review, there would be a real risk of the theatre being shut down. A background briefing note prepared by his civil servants for the Minister for Arts, John O'Donoghue, in October 2002 noted that "failure to take action will lead to the closure of the theatre in the short to medium term on health and safety grounds". Although the Abbey has been reluctant to stress this for fear of scaring its customers away, the stark reality is that one of Ireland's most prestigious cultural institutions is potentially dangerous to its staff and patrons.

Starting in 1995, the Abbey board faced three options. The existing building and plant could be repaired or replaced, but it made little sense to spend perhaps €25 million just to keep a bad building going, and the OPW concluded that this would "essentially be a waste of money". The Abbey could rebuild on a greenfield site. Or the building could be torn down and replaced with a more adequate structure on the existing site, with the possible addition of some adjacent properties. Given the cost and difficulty of starting from scratch, the latter option was the sensible one, and the Abbey adopted it.

Outline drawings and models were prepared by McCullough Mulvin, with an initial costing of €38 million. The plan was by no means extravagant, and the new Abbey would not have been a theatrical wonderland. But there would be an attractive frontage, a new auditorium with a more intimate feel, significantly upgraded technical facilities and space for public facilities such as a restaurant and an archive and library.

By March 2000, when the Abbey finally got to meet the Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance and the then Minister for Arts, Síle de Valera, to put its case, the projected cost had risen to €63.5 million. But the price tag was reasonable, the Exchequer was flush and the project got the green light. Given the Abbey's low place on the list of government priorities, it was a significant victory for the theatre. By December 2004, when its centenary would fall, the Abbey would have a new home for the next century.

Victory went to the Abbey's head. Within four months of getting the Taoiseach to agree to the proposals it had put forward, the Abbey changed its mind. No fewer than three greenfield sites had been offered by developers who saw the national theatre as a way to add prestige to their portfolios. Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) offered a free site for a new theatre. The Spencer Dock developers then offered a choice of two sites in their area. By February 2001, the Abbey had decided that it now wanted to accept the DDDA offer.

This decision was, in political terms, rather naive. The nose of the Department of Arts was put out of joint, as it suddenly discovered that another State agency, the DDDA, was taking on a significant cultural role. As Michael Grant, the assistant secretary, put it in an internal memo, "this department was seriously concerned that the DDDA seemed to see itself free to make solo runs relating to . . . cultural institutions under our aegis". Dublin City Council, whose goodwill was of some importance, was enraged by a proposal that went against its plans to revitalise the O'Connell Street area.

More importantly, the Taoiseach, whose personal interest in the Abbey is minimal, now found that, having agreed to give the theatre what it asked for, he was being told not only that there had been a change of mind but also that it was proposed to move a national institution out of his constituency. Whatever the merits of the docklands idea, it essentially threw away in a matter of days a momentum that had taken five years to establish.

The political damage is evident in the tetchy tone of contact between the Abbey and the Department. The Abbey's public pressure for a formal government decision went down especially badly. On February 12th, 2002, de Valera wrote to James Hickey, who was then the Abbey's chairman, complaining that "premature airing of the issues in the public domain, however well intentioned, is not helpful to the decision-making process". Three days later, the secretary general of the Department, Phil Furlong, spoke to Hickey; according to a note of the conversation, "I told him the Minister was most disappointed at the public statements being made regarding the new building, particularly by the artistic director . . . . I pointed out that if the Abbey had stuck with its original proposal, the workmen would be on the site at Abbey Street right now."

On February 19th, 2002, the Cabinet decided to support the redevelopment of the Abbey on its present site, brushing aside the docklands idea. Even this decision did not really bring much clarity to the question, however. The Cabinet also decided that "the project should be procured through a public private partnership". What this actually meant was entirely unclear: there was no obvious reason why any private investor would put money into a theatre that required large public subsidies to stay open.

An expert group, made up of representatives of the Department, the OPW and the Abbey, was established, not least to contemplate what a PPP might actually mean. When Ben Barnes, the Abbey's artistic director, wrote to the Department, seeking to include in the terms of reference of the expert group the possibility that the existing site might be expanded by acquiring additional properties, his suggestion was regarded by some of the civil servants as an attempt to undermine the Government's decision.

In an internal memo, Michael Grant, the assistant secretary, revealed the continuing official resentment of the Abbey's behaviour: "I find the letter from the artistic director of the Abbey very disquieting. It is difficult not to conclude that he does not accept the government decision in relation to the redevelopment of the Abbey on its existing site and is seeking to move away from it. References to the 'centrality of the Abbey in the cultural life of the nation' etc indicate an unwillingness to accept that the State will not be giving the Abbey a blank cheque. They will have to revise their expectations downwards in line with what is likely to be achievable."

By April 2002, however, the Abbey had formally backed down and informed the Department that it was willing to participate in the expert group and accept that its brief was to develop proposals for the existing site only. Yet when it reported back in August 2002 the expert group concluded that the Abbey's position was essentially right. It found that the existing site, even with the addition of a few adjoining properties, would be inadequate to "satisfactorily address the problems identified as far back as 1966". It also concluded that "the attractiveness of a PPP arrangement within the constraints of the existing site is questionable". The group's findings essentially meant that the Government's decision of February 2002 was meaningless. Neither of its two components - the redevelopment of the existing site and the use of a PPP - was judged to be workable. Effectively, seven years on from the start of the process in 1995, there was still no concrete and realistic proposal on the table.

What the group did recommend was that the OPW be asked to prepare a new report on the feasibility of acquiring enough property around the present site to both meet the Abbey's needs and make part of the site attractive to a private developer. Before this report was completed, however, the Government, in January last year, went ahead and announced that it was seeking a private partner to join with the Abbey in acquiring sites "in and/or around the vicinity of the site of the existing theatre". In his press release announcing the decision, O'Donoghue stressed that "it will fall to the relevant private sector developer to assess the feasibility and financial implications of the property acquisition required, planning issues likely to arise etc". This was a rather confusing suggestion, given that the OPW was already engaged in precisely that process.

What seems to be emerging from the OPW's work, which is expected to be finished shortly, is that the process of acquiring enough additional property could take, in the words of one insider, "a lot of money and a lot of time". With myriad title deeds, and the knowledge that any one property owner could hold the entire process to ransom, the whole notion is likely to be judged more trouble than it is worth.

With the prospect of reaching December's centenary with no concrete plan for a new building and the current one liable to be closed down as a safety hazard, the one thing the Abbey has on its side is the scale of the national embarrassment. The political imperative to come up with something is causing eyes to turn again to an idea that has been around for a few years without being seriously examined.

The Carlton cinema site near the top of O'Connell Street has obvious attractions. The presence of the national theatre, in close proximity to the Gate, would create a theatre quarter at the problematic north end of what is supposed to be the country's main thoroughfare.

The site is large enough for a PPP to work. The relatively limited frontage onto O'Connell Street means that a decent design need not cost a fortune. And, if a High Court challenge to a compulsory-purchase order by Dublin City Council is seen off in the coming months, the site would come into public ownership at just about the time the OPW concludes that the present Abbey site cannot be expanded.

Given the tortuous nature of the plot so far, nobody could confidently predict a happy ending, but by the time its 200th anniversary comes around the Abbey may be finally established on O'Connell Street.