Dancing at Lughnasa in Transylvania? It's looking likely. Patrick Mason has been invited to the Romanian city of Kluj to direct an Irish modern classic, and Lughnasa is the text most likely to make it. Gabor Tompa, of the city's Hungarian theatre, thinks there would be an ease of identification with the play. A Hungarian theatre in Romania? Yes, indeed. Tompa's theatre caters for the Hungarian-speaking minority in Kluj, negotiating its cultural status with care and subtlety. When you consider that the peoples share no common linguistic heritage, it makes you wonder what our problem is in the North.
This would be the first time that Mason has directed Lughnasa outside an English language environment, but while he agrees that he "wouldn't have the same instinctive response to the language", he adds: "You start communicating in other ways, which can be quite interesting." He has directed opera in a foreign language before - but no-one understands opera. "Yes," he says, "it's known as the form in which you can be misunderstood in at least five languages". Lughnasa is the odds-on favourite to make it to Kluj, but Mason has also been discussing writers like Tom Murphy and Frank McGuinness with Tompa.
A lot depends on Mason's availability. He has several other projects competing for his time, once he has left the Abbey at the end of next year. The Abbey hopes to appoint an artistic director-designate at the beginning of next year, so that there is a long period of over-lap: "We don't want work to get lost in-between, as has happened in the past," says Mason.
Mason has just published another Abbey policy statement Art & Culture, which underlines the success of the Society in the areas of archive, outreach and education, because the last Arts Council apparently queried its "appropriateness". The Society has allocated some funding and has moved to appoint an Education Officer, Sharon Murphy, anyway, with support from the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Department of Education: "It now looks," writes Mason, "to the new Council to urgently consider its position in regard to the education initiative in particular, and to the development of the Society's outreach programme in general."
