Artscape: Peacock Theatre director Ali Curran is moving on and away from Ireland to take up a role in Scottish theatre. This week she was appointed chief executive officer of the highly regarded Tron Theatre in Glasgow.
Curran, who has been Peacock director since 2001, will take up her new role in mid-May. In the meantime, she will continue her involvement with the delivery of the Peacock's next production, Tom MacIntyre's new play What Happened Bridgie Cleary, which opens on April 26th, writes Gerry Smyth.
Curran sees her new appointment as "the perfect next step" in her career, but it must also come as a timely opportunity to put behind her the recent atmosphere of crisis at the national theatre, during which the future of her own role was put in some doubt when staff were informed last autumn that the institution's survival plan included a one-third cut in the staff.
Speaking about her move to Glasgow, Curran this week said she was delighted to move into such a well-established and creative organisation and that she was looking forward to the challenge of establishing herself there, "while retaining my vital connections with the theatre community in Ireland".
Curran's departure is due - and only coincidentally - around the same time Fiach MacConghail will arrive as the new director of the national theatre to succeed the incumbent, Ben Barnes. As MacConghaill is expected to operate more as a producer - unlike Barnes, who took on directorial responsibilities - it is likely that Curran will not be replaced in the Peacock, but that the new director will take full charge of what appears on both the Abbey and Peacock stages, particularly the development of more innovative work for the smaller venue. She says her great regret about leaving now is that she will not share what she sees as an "exciting path" ahead for the theatre under MacConghail.
The Tron Theatre was established in 1979, and has associations with a number of leading players including Alan Cumming, Forbes Masson, Peter Mullan, Craig Ferguson and Siobhán Redmond. Peter Lawson, chairman of the theatre, said: "I am confident this appointment will enable us to continue providing our audiences with programmes of quality and great interest."
Looking back on her tenure's highlights, Curran recalls Eugene O'Brien's play Eden, Mark O'Rowe's version of Henry IV, the Canadian play The Drawer Boy with John Mahoney in the cast and last year's production Defender of the Father by Stuart Carolan. She is especially proud of bringing Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon to the Project with their post- 9/11 stage text. One of her last projects will not take shape until the autumn but it is one she has long harboured ambitions for - a co-production between Belfast's Lyric Theatre and the Abbey. This production, Hamlet directed by Conall Morrison, will mark the first time the two companies have worked together.
Name the Irish player
It would make a good musical quiz question, writes Michael Dervan. Which Irish musician performed twice at Arnold Schoenberg's famous Society for the Private Performance of Music in 1921, played in the premiere of Béla Bartók's First Violin Sonata with Eduard Steuermann in 1922, and gave a cycle of the Beethoven violin sonatas at the Konzerthaus in Vienna in 1923?
The answer: Mary Dickenson-Auner, who did all of the above, was born in Dublin in 1880 and studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (which her grandfather, Hercules MacDonnell, had helped to found), at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and under Otakar Sevcik in Prague, which led to a debut with the Czech Philharmonic in 1905. She later turned to composition, completing six symphonies, four operas and two oratorios, among other works. She remains almost unknown in her native land, and acknowledgment of her achievement has hitherto largely been confined to German-speaking countries.
Her Irish Symphony, Opus 16, of 1941 has been issued on the Thorofon label and Margarethe Engelhardt-Krajanek's biography of her was included in a German-language study of three women violinists.
Engelhardt-Krajanek is coming to Dublin to spread the word on one of the city's least appreciated musical daughters. Her lecture is at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (tel: 01-6764412) on Monday at 8pm.
Shakespeare afloat
The France-based travelling theatre company, Footsbarn, enthralled Dublin audiences some years ago with a magical and memorable production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The company is set to return this summer with two further Shakespeare productions that will take place on water - literally - in Dublin's Docklands this June, writes Gerry Smyth.
For a six-week run, the travelling company will perform Perchance to Dream and The Tempest in a 500-seater marquee theatre afloat in George's Dock in the IFSC. Speaking at the announcement of the project this week, one of the promoters, Harry Crosbie, couldn't resist a reference to putting Shakespeare "in the dock".
Footsbarn, which was originally founded in Cornwall in 1971, has travelled through six continents with the two productions it is bringing to Dublin. The company's founding director, John Kilby, says the company has great memories of visits to Ireland and is looking forward to spending the summer in Dublin.
Footsbarn's repertoire also includes Beckett, Plautus, Gogol and Homer.
Perchance to Dream will preview on June 14th and 15th, running for three weeks until July 3rd. The Tempest will preview on July 6th and 7th and will run for three weeks until July 24th. Perchance to Dream is a show based on five Shakespeare plays woven into one story that, according to the company, "takes as its base the four seasons and the seven stages of man. The travelling theatre group has performed all five plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet".
On-site at the Hugh Lane
Many would-be visitors were disappointed when the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, closed its doors last year to enable work to proceed on its new extension wing, writes Aidan Dunne. Coming into this year, it looked as if Charlemont House might not open again until March 2006, when the extension, plus the spruced-up original galleries, will be officially launched with a major Patrick Ireland retrospective. The gallery, meanwhile, inaugurated its Off-Site programme, a series of events designed to maintain and broaden the Hugh Lane's presence in the city. A major section of its permanent collection was installed in the National Gallery of Ireland - where it looks very well - for the duration.
Now the Hugh Lane has announced a temporary reopening this year, from April 15th to the end of October. It will not be business as usual. Rather, the gallery will host a series of temporary exhibitions, beginning with an innovative project, Clarke and McDevitt Present, curated by Declan Clarke and Paul McDevitt.
They have enlisted a number of artists, none of whom has shown in Ireland before, to make works with the gallery spaces specifically in mind. The artists involved are Björn Dahlem, who will make an installation incorporating a video using works from the permanent collection; Sophie von Hellermann, who will make a number of large-scale acrylic paintings; Ian Kiaer, a creator of architectonic sculptural pieces, who will make a work in response to a Lavery painting; Cornelius Quabeck, who will make a set of huge charcoal drawings in homage to Rory Gallagher, and Matt Calderwood, whose video installation will see the enclosing space as an obstacle.
Stand-up at the opera
Opera Ireland had a close shave with its production of Zemlinsky's Eine florentinische Tragödie. An infection caused tenor Paul McNamara to pull out at just over 24 hours' notice, on a Saturday afternoon, when artists' agents are particularly difficult to contact, writes Michael Dervan. Before the Sunday performance, the company's artistic director Dieter Kaegi made the public announcement of a change of performer from the stage of the Gaiety Theatre and managed to turn the events that led to the presence in Dublin of McNamara's very able replacement, Burkhard Fritz, into an entertaining shaggy-dog story.
Some years ago, Rodney Milnes of the London Times panned a Kaegi production of Verdi's Don Carlos, calling it the funniest he had seen "which may surprise those who have hitherto failed to recognise the work as an uproarious comedy". But even Milnes would have had to agree that, on stage, in person last Sunday, Kaegi handled himself with the timing skills and spur-of-the-moment responsiveness of a true stand-up comic.