The compact office of the director of the Abbey Theatre, an L-shaped room on the building’s top corridor, shows all the signs of new occupancy. Once a private sanctuary, the space is now dominated by a long table set up for group discussions. At the rear of the room, a bookshelf is steadily accumulating volumes of plays, histories and collections on theatre design.
Beneath it, a cluster of good-luck cards stands next to Waking the Feminist memorabilia, which seems like an encouraging advance or a wry caution. "WTF" sprang up in reaction to the Abbey Theatre's last programme. Today the new Abbey directors, Neil Murray and Graham McLaren, reveal their own. So, no pressure?
“We really agonised over this programme,” says Murray, good-naturedly, towards the end of our conversation. “We still do.” A deep, dry chuckle joins us by speakerphone: McLaren is in Glasgow, developing a new Irish-Scottish themed piece for the National Theatre of Scotland, with which he and Murray previously worked.
“It isn’t just one vision,” McLaren says of their first programme together. “It feels genuinely collaborative, because we’re responding to other artists, other companies – their needs, wants and desires – as well as our own. It should feel like a porous programme with lots of access points, not only for artists, but for audiences to engage.”
That programme, announced with the tagline “What happens next is this”, immediately strikes you as bigger, brisker and surprisingly familiar. The Abbey is now a space of both accommodation and origination, hosting existing works by other companies and creating its own.
There will be 15 productions on the Abbey stage next year, presented in rapid succession (a surge in turnover compared to a previous average of seven), while the Peacock’s schedule is to be announced in January.
“We were really clear from the beginning that our first year – and this was pragmatic but it’s also philosophical – would be an opening up of the Abbey,” says Murray. “We kind of wanted to do, in some ways, a ‘greatest hits’ – shows we really liked and companies we really liked.”
First comes Landmark and Galway International Arts Festival's productions of Enda Walsh's plays Ballyturk and Arlington; then Corn Exchange's 2004 work Dublin By Lamplight; Rough Magic's 2015 musical The Train and Druid's masterful production of Waiting For Godot, staged this summer.
Three shows visit from abroad: dance performances Sunny and Deep Dish, as part of Dublin Dance Festival, and Lisa Dwan's latest Beckett performance No's Knife, adapted from prose pieces, in a co-production with the Old Vic.
New work at the Abbey tends to favour adaptation: Emma Donoghue turns her novel Room (already filmed) into a play for the Abbey's co-production with London's Theatre Royal Stratford East and NTS; McLaren directs an adaptation of Ken Loach's film Jimmy's Hall (to open in Leitrim, its setting); Roddy Doyle turns his ubiquitous Two Pints dialogues into a cohesive new play (to be staged, cheeringly, in pubs around Ireland); and the NTS's hugely successful adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist's vampire fantasy Let The Right One In, directed by wunderkind John Tiffany, will be staged with a new Irish cast.
Elsewhere is a new production of Dermot Bolger's adaptation of Ulysses, a new staging of Katie Roche by the long-neglected, recently re-evaluated playwright Teresa Deevy, and a one-off event, Our Open House, a marathon 12-hour political performance of song and spoken word.
It is possible to discern something of a joint signature in Murray and McLaren’s first programme – fluidly collaborative, with a canny audience appeal, ensuring a dynamic space. However they have also had to contend with two resources in short supply, namely time and money. Appointed in July 2015, they had, as Murray describes it, “a long hello”, meeting widely with artists and industry, while seeing work, but barely a five-month handover period to assemble a programme – and this at an institution whose State subsidy has dwindled from €10 million in 2008 to just €6.2 million for 2017. How representative is this programme in terms of their plans for the National Theatre?
“This is year one, so it’s a direction of travel rather than trying to achieve everything at once,” says McLaren, “but it’s also about engaging with the artists and their ideas, the passion they have for their work. There are two aspects to this: one is we are here to run the National Theatre; the other is that we are here to create a resource for the nation’s theatre.”
That represents a certain shift in emphasis, from both the Abbey's identity as an originator more than receiver, and from Murray and McLaren's experience at the NTS, "a theatre without walls", which partnered with artists to produce around various spaces in Scotland. If the NTS was centrifugal, radiating its creative force outwards, the new Abbey seems more centripetal, drawing energies inwards. "We have a responsibility to keep this theatre working," Murray explains, although he points out that both Jimmy's Hall and Two Pints represent "a toe in the water in terms of getting us outside of Dublin".
Murray is confident that Walsh's Arlington and Druid's Godot, both premiered in Galway, will be new to Dublin audiences. For those who consider the lifeblood of the theatre to be entirely new plays, there are fewer options. "That is something we're digging into very quickly," says Murray, anticipating more new writing on the Abbey stage "from 2018 onwards".
In the meantime, the Peacock is intended to work as a space for a younger generation of artists, encouraged to develop and present new performances in the space, “so it is animated all year round”. The entrance to the Peacock announces itself as “the engine room of Irish theatre”, which can send mixed messages when barred by a red rope that bears the sign, “No Access”. “That sign has got to come down,” laughs Murray.
Since their appointment, accessibility has been the mantra of the Abbey's new directors. "Regardless of your gender, your race, your accent, your physical abilities or the money in your pocket, the Abbey is your national theatre," Murray said at the recent meeting of Waking the Feminists. "We are here to tell your stories."
Those stories, and the methods used to engage audiences, should begin to change conspicuously. The writers are still predominantly male, although the directors, Murray and McLaren recognise, are mainly female (all visiting companies and all but one of their co-producers are headed by women). Room, directed by Cora Bissett, will feature a black cast, better corresponding with the diversity of the nation. "We need to change how the Abbey looks," says Murray. A planned series of free preview performances (first come, first served) is intended to broaden the profile of the audience, based on successful practice at the NTS.
When McLaren enthuses about the political urgency of Jimmy's Hall, based on Jimmy Gralton's construction of "a civic and social space for his community to express ideas", it is clear that this is how they see the Abbey's mission during concerning political times. "One of the last places we can do it as well, it seems," adds Murray.
I wondered, finally, about their own collaborative spirit. How is their working relationship? “Terrible,” Murray deadpans.
“I’ve had to leave the country,” McLaren’s voice adds.
Do they reach consensus quickly? “Generally, yeah?” muses Murray.
“No,” says McLaren, loud enough to echo.
“But we do get there,” Murray concludes. “We have got there.”
Arlington and Ballyturk: "I just felt he was a big omission," Murray says of Enda Walsh, whose original works have not appeared at the Abbey. In both, Walsh explores confinement and connection in surreal, dreamlike spaces, assisted by stellar casts.
Waiting For Godot: Chosen for performance by its superb cast, director Garry Hynes's recent work on Beckett's masterpiece was attentive and revelatory, creating the funniest, most affecting and deeply profound interpretation of the play since – perhaps ever. In tandem with Lisa Dwan's No's Knife, Beckett is belatedly embraced by the Abbey.
Dublin By Lamplight: First staged in 2004, during the Abbey's fateful centenary, Corn Exchange's sly reimagining of its history – devised by the ensemble, scripted by Michael West and directed by Annie Ryan – found a precious playwright and his muse seeking work for the new "Irish national theatre of Ireland". Sound like anyone we know?
Room: Loosely inspired by the horrific Elisabeth Fritzl case, Emma Donoghue's 2010 book imagined the claustrophic world of Room from a five-year old's perspective. Its space opens up intriguingly for this co-production with Theatre Royal Stratford East. director Cora Bissett is expected to work with a black cast as the trapped mother and son.
Katie Roche: Teresa Deevy's ground-breaking play follows a spirited young woman, submerging her "wild" nature in a loveless marriage. Deevy, abandoned by the Abbey, has received increased interest in recent years. Restoring her to the Abbey stage may count as righting a wrong.
