ArtScape It's been a big week at DCU's the Helix, where Nick Reed has resigned as artistic director and Una Carmody has returned from the UK to take over, writes Shane Hegarty.
Reed steps aside only three years into his seven-year contract, having been responsible not only for the artistic direction of the venue but its day-to-day management. He will continue to work there until April.
The Birmingham-born Reed joined the Helix in January 2002, having previously managed performance venues at North Wales Theatre, but this week said that "personal and professional circumstances" had dictated his move out of DCU. However, there is much grumbling from within the university over the continuing cost of the venue, with the paucity of public funding a major problem. The Arts Council has given only €30,000 to the venue, which has also received a small amount of local authority funding.
While Reed will not expand on his press release, the parting comments contained in it hinted at the problems.
"It is my parting wish that the Helix will go on to achieve public financial support appropriate to its universally acclaimed position on the Irish performing arts landscape," he said.
The Helix originally cost €35 million, with most of that money coming from private benefactors, particularly the American donor, Chuck Feeney, and Tim Mahony, chairman of Toyota Ireland. There is a fear that without increased public funding the venue will have to rely increasingly on private functions and conferences as a source of income, rather than the riskier artistic events.
Una Carmody will take over from Reed, but as chief executive officer of UAC Management Ltd, the operating company behind the Helix. Having previously worked on projects with the Abbey Theatre, Temple Bar Properties and the National Aquatic Centre, Carmody left Ireland for a two-year stint promoting Stratford-Upon-Avon and its most famous son on behalf of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Now on a three-year contract at the Helix, she takes over a critical time, with some staff expressing discontent over pay and conditions and the venue having to come to terms with self-sufficiency for the immediate future.
Settling in this week, Carmody told Artscape that the job title change was "more accurately reflecting the breadth of the job Nick had to do". She added that the challenge of balancing commercial and artistic needs at the Helix is no different from those facing other venues, although she believes the flexibility of the various spaces within the Helix should help it cope. She also noted that it has the advantage of not carrying any debt from its construction.
All not well at Hawk's Well
What's been happening at the Hawk's Well Theatre in Sligo lately? Last year, the report of an independent consultant made a number of recommendations as to the future running of the theatre. Chief among them was a recommendation that the theatre's board be dissolved, writes Rosita Boland.
When made aware of these proposals, earlier this month, the Arts Council took the highly unusual step of issuing the theatre's board with an ultimatum. It notified the theatre that unless its entire board resigned en masse, no Arts Council funding would be made available for 2005. Some, but not all, of its members agreed to step down.
The Minister of Arts, John O'Donoghue, was then asked by letter to intervene in the impasse by local production groups in Sligo, which feared that if the board did not resign and funding was not freed up, the theatre would close.
The entire board finally did resign, although several members complained vocally and publicly about having to do so, including the Mayor of Sligo, Declan Bree.
Once the board had resigned, the Arts Council announced that the Hawk's Well would receive €170,000 for 2005. This is an increase of €100,000 on the theatre's 2004 funding, and brings it back to what it received in 2003.
At present, there is no board in place. Michael Keoghane, bookseller and former chairman of the Hawk's Well for several years, although not of its most recent board, said this week: "Nobody knows how the next board will be elected."
This week, the Arts Council confirmed that an interim board of three will be put in place temporarily. There will be one representative each from the Arts Council. North West Tourism and Sligo Borough Council. The interim board's first and most pressing task will be to formally accept the offer of funding from the Arts Council.
The Hawk's Well is also to advertise for a new artistic director for the centre, a post which has been vacant in recent years and which seems to have been one of the problems contributing to the recent controversy.
Traditional arts advice
The Arts Council has announced the appointment of a traditional arts specialist, Liz Doherty, who will take up the new consulting role in early March. The appointment was recommended in the report of the Traditional Arts Committee, presented to the council last September. She joins the arts policy team and will be responsible for providing advice on traditional arts and for developmental work in this area.
Doherty, who is from Buncrana, Co Donegal, is a musician, teacher, researcher and consultant. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Limerick for a dissertation on the fiddle music tradition of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. A lecturer in the Music Department, NUI, Cork, from 1994 to 2001, she now lectures in the School of Media and Performing Arts and the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster. She established Roscommon Traditional Arts Forum and, as a fiddle player, has performed as a solo artist, with a number of recordings to her credit.
'Plough' divides critics
Ben Barnes has had a mixed press for some other Abbey centenary productions, notably his Playboy, which underwhelmed American critics, writes Rosita Boland.
His production of The Plough and the Stars has now divided critics in England, with the majority of them enthusing wildly about the production and some others panning it. The show opened in the Barbican last week, with a cast that includes Eamon Morrissey, John Kavanagh, Catherine Byrne, Olwen Fouéré and Cathy Belton.
Michael Billington, of the Guardian, loved it, and gave it four stars, seeing it as an example of "how public events shadow private lives". He compared Ireland's 1916 to Britain's role in the first World War: "By the end, Dublin has become a flame-lit hell evoking the carnage simultaneously taking place in Flanders."
There were four stars also from Benedict Nightingale, of the Times. "In 2005 the play is institutionalised as a classic, so much so that the Abbey company can bring it to the ancestral foe's capital city with anyone dreaming of accusing them of pandering to English prejudice," he wrote.
Like Billington, Suzi Feay, of the Independent on Sunday, saw parallels in the other conflicts of the era, which would have particular resonance for a British audience. Writing of the set, she noted: "All around, metaphorically circling Dublin, is a wall of detritus and mud, recalling the trenches of the war - the Great War - that is never far from people's minds."
Nicholas de Jongh, in the Evening Standard, called it "superlatively acted" and said it was "a seriously rewarding occasion".
John Gross, in the Sunday Telegraph, wrote: "The production . . . is one of those occasions when you feel the only real way to do justice to the actors would be to reprint the entire cast-list. Even the smaller parts make a big contribution."
Those critics who disliked the play were equally forthright. Paul Taylor, in the Independent, gave it two stars, commenting: "I wish I could say that Barnes's production of The Plough and the Stars demonstrates that reports about the artistic health of the Abbey have been unduly alarmist. But this staging is remarkable only for the extraordinary way in which it manages to take a drama that is bursting with unregenerate humanity and turn it into a resolutely unengaging and chilly experience."
Susannah Clapp, in the Observer, was even more direct, declaring that "Ben Barnes's production is not so much a revival as an act of taxidermy . . . the cast caper like comic cut-outs".