ArtScape: A posse - what's the collective noun for playwrights? - of shortlisted writers gathered nervously in the Abbey Theatre on Tuesday for the announcement of this year's Stewart Parker Trust Awards for new playwrights.
The winners didn't know in advance, though one award-winner confided that a mysterious cheque had arrived in the post the previous day with nothing indicating what it was for - so the BBC payments department must have got ahead of itself.
The awards are a practical as well as a psychological boost for the many emerging playwrights who have benefited, and a fitting tribute to the late Belfast playwright, Stewart Parker. The €11,000 new playwright bursary - the main award - went to Gerald Murphy, whose striking first full-length play about a dysfunctional Dublin family, Take Me Away, was produced by Rough Magic and went to London and Edinburgh as well as Dublin. This month, translations of the play were performed in Rome and Vienna. Rough Magic director Lynne Parker, niece of Stewart and trustee, had to keep at arm's length from proceedings as the judging took place.
Actor, former comic and playwright Mark Doherty won the BBC Northern Ireland Radio Drama Award for Trad, a Galway Arts Festival production in 2004. He and festival director Rose Parkinson were delighted with the award, and with the news that the production will be going on in the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Fringe in August.
For his work as a producer, director and actor, as well as a playwright, Darach Mac Con Iomaire won the BBC Northern Ireland Irish Language Drama Award. Mac Con Iomaire has an impressive back-catalogue and has raised the profile and standard of work in Irish.
Later on Tuesday, the Theatre Shop launched the second phase of Irish Playography at the Gate Theatre. The online archive now goes back as far as 1950 and is a comprehensive catalogue of new plays produced professionally in Ireland north and south. An impressive undertaking, it defines the Irish theatrical repertoire for the first time, and is also intended to revitalise that repertoire by reintroducing lost scripts and locating and clearing rights to all existing scripts.
The www.irishplayography.com party was hosted by Theatre Shop producer Jane Daly and Playography director Caroline Williams, with special guest Joan O'Hara, a member of the Abbey company from the late 1940s onwards, who has acted in more than 60 new Irish plays and can be seen these day as Eunice in Fair City. The launch involved generations of Irish theatre practitioners, including some who created the work catalogued in phase two of the playography, such as Phyllis Ryan, whose Gemini Productions and Orion Productions produced more than 40 new Irish plays, Barry Cassin, founder of 37 Theatre Company in the 1950s, and Josephine Funge, founder member of the Lantern Theatre.
The Gate itself is pretty busy these days juggling productions worldwide. Aside from the opening of Lady Windermere's Fan in May, it is planning next February's production of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, with Ralph Fiennes in the lead. Conor McPherson's Shining City may go to New York in the autumn and, following its Gate run, Friel's The Home Place will open at the Comedy Theatre in London's West End on May 25th for a 16-week run, produced by Michael Colgan and Sonia Friedman Productions and with most of the original cast, including Tom Courtenay and Derbhle Crotty. There are two cast changes, Harry Towb taking over from Barry McGovern and Sean Murray taking over from Pat Kinevane, who is otherwise engaged over at the Olympia playing Roy Keane in I, Keano's return match.
Speaking of which, it must be a record: shortly, there will be three original Irish musicals on stage simultaneously. We've hardly got a great tradition in the form, but with Improbable Frequency having just finished at the Abbey, I, Keano returns at the Olympia from Wednesday, while on the same night Shay Healy's The Wiremen, with Simon Delaney, opens at the Gaiety. And Alastair McGuckian's The Ha'Penny Bridge, with Flo McSweeney, is at the Cork Opera House from May 30th to June 4th, and at the Point, Dublin, from June 10th to 25th. Get out your dancing shoes and twirly cane . . .
Lennox Robinson revived
The proposed production of Lennox Robinson's Drama at Inish was one of the casualties of the great unpleasantness at the Abbey last year, so it's good to see it reappear in the programme announced for the second half of this year. Jim Nolan's production of Robinson's comedy will follows the Dublin Theatre Festival Shakespeare season at the Abbey and Peacock, in collaboration with Belfast's Lyric Theatre.
Fiach Mac Conghail leaves his role as ministerial adviser on the arts this week (prompting speculation about who will take over) and officially starts on Tuesday as director designate at the Abbey, working alongside artistic director Ben Barnes.
Meanwhile, Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue has announced his intention to establish the National Library and the National Museum as autonomous institutions under the provisions of the National Cultural Institutions Act 1997, with effect from next week. The organisations will thenceforth be non-commercial semi-State cultural institutions.
The new National Library board will be chaired by Gerard Danaher SCand the chair of the National Museum of Ireland board will be Dr John O'Mahony SC.
Have-a-go Gaybo
Gay Byrne took to the stage this week to lambast the Minister. Actually, that's not quite accurate, but Gaybo did take the opportunity to "have a go" (GB's words) at O'Donoghue about the need for "a lovely new concert hall built on this site" (at the National Concert Hall).
"God love the poor man," he added. "Everywhere he goes, people are on at him."
Among amusing anecdotes about all sorts generally connected with music, he lauded the Helix, its three venues, which can be used simultaneously (unlike those at the NCH), and its car park.
O'Donoghue was there in person for all this, as was assistant secretary general Michael Grant, who retires in June and whom Gaybo advised to get a Harley and a pushbike and a grandchild if he could manage it.
O'Donoghue had got in first, mind you, with his comments about the proposals for redeveloping the site at Earlsfort Terrace after UCD's departure.
"Financial issues surrounding the provision of additional accommodation have still to be resolved," he said. "My department has been engaged in a series of discussions with the Department of Education and Science, the Office of Public Works and UCD to clarify the financial and other implications of meeting the needs both of UCD and the NCH." And he hoped to discuss soon with Minister for Education Mary Hanafin "the parameters of a joint submission to Government on these interlocking issues". So, no news there then.
Byrne and O'Donoghue were among more than 300 people gathered at the NCH for the announcement of the season's concerts. In The Irish Times Celebrity Concert Series, violin virtuoso Anne-Sophie Mutter will perform in September with pianist Lambert Orkis. Other violinists on their way include Joshua Bell and (for the first time) Sergey Khachatryan (with pianist Lusine Khachatryan).
Other highlights of the series include cellist Steven Isserlis, pianist Alfred Brendel (who opens the season in August), the return of Chinese piano prodigy Lang Lang, and pianists Murray Perahia and Hélène Grimaud (with flautist Emmanuel Pahud).
In the international orchestral series, conductor Mariss Jansons (who was at the NCH this week with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra) will be back in September for the first visit of Amsterdam's renowned Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Other events in the programme include a weekend of music in March from the London Philharmonic Orchestra (with soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter again), the Philharmonia Orchestra with pianist Till Fellner under the direction of Christoph von Dohnányi, and one of Russia's most respected musical institutions, the Kirov Orchestra, under the baton of Valery Gergiev.
The line-up clearly got some people so fired up that there were queues at the box office even as the speeches were going on!