Culture Shock Fintan O'TooleThe new Abbey is unlikely to be built before 2010 - some 16 years after the formal process began
If it were a play, the epic saga of the Abbey Theatre's new building would be a combination of Long Day's Journey Into Night and Waiting for Godot. Vivian Mercier's famous description of the latter as a play in which nothing happens, twice, came to mind last week. The heading on the press release from the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism was "Minister announces details of design competition for new National Theatre in Dublin's Docklands". For some reason, it reminded me of the heading on a press release from the same department issued on September 7th, 2006: "O'Donoghue announces international design competition for the Abbey Theatre at George's Dock in Dublin". More than a year after it was first announced, the design competition for the new building has now been announced again.
The Abbey highlighted the inadequacy of the present building in the early 1980s, when Joe Dowling was artistic director. Nothing much happened until 1994, when the theatre commissioned a preliminary study highlighting the lack of disabled access to the Peacock, terrible acoustics, noisy and worn mechanical and electrical plant, outdated stage equipment, poor fire safety. At that time, the theatre came up with a refurbishment plan, costed at £10.4 million and including a narrower, more focused auditorium.
Three years later, this plan was scrapped in favour of a more radical strategy. The building was to be reconstructed from the inside out, opening it up with three levels of foyers and a rooftop restaurant. The Peacock would now be above, rather than below, the Abbey stage. The building would now occupy both 25 Lower Abbey Street (already owned by the Abbey) and number 24, which would have to be acquired. The cost, including the rental of a temporary home for two years, was estimated at £25 million. The whole thing was to take 45 months, with the go-ahead to be given in November, 1997, construction beginning in October, 1999, and the new theatre opening for the Dublin Theatre Festival of 2001.
We are now approaching, therefore, the 10th anniversary of the putative go-ahead for the new Abbey. Over that decade, a lot has happened and nothing has happened. The Abbey got the go-ahead in principle from the Government in 2002. Then, having argued vehemently that the existing site was adequate, and that one of the strongest justifications for public investment was the "regeneration of this significant area of the city", the Abbey changed its mind. It flirted with the idea of moving across the river - and thus out of the Taoiseach's constituency, to a new site in the docklands. There were then high hopes for the Carlton cinema site on O'Connell Street (still by far the best option). Then it was to be the Coláiste Mhuire site on Parnell Square. The new target date for opening was the Abbey's centenary year of 2004. This gradually became a commitment to make a decision in 2004. That promise at least was kept, with the announcement that the site for the new theatre would be George's Dock.
However, the pace of developments has been glacial. The announcement of the design competition in September 2006 was taken by many of us to mean that a design competition was actually about to take place. Last February, John O'Donoghue, then Minister for the Arts, told the Dáil that "a jury is being set up to select the winning design", with the winners to be announced in the summer. In fact, the jury was announced only last week, and the winner of the competition will not be chosen until "the middle of 2008". Even if all goes smoothly, the earliest we are likely to see a new Abbey is some time in 2010 - 16 years after the formal process began.
Will it go smoothly, though? So much of this saga has been characterised by an unwillingness to settle for relatively simple solutions. There was no real need to move out of the present site in the first place, and the recent redesign of the Abbey auditorium reinforces the belief that it would have made sense to spend £25 million in the late 1990s to create a decently modernised theatre. It wouldn't have been the "iconic and dynamic structure reflecting the city's growing reputation as a global capital of culture and creativity" that is evoked in Séamus Brennan's press release. But do we really need that kind of grandiosity in an era when simplicity is theatre's greatest power?
Doesn't the whole thing risk becoming the cultural equivalent of the Bertie Bowl? And does the project have to be done through that other rhetorically fashionable device, the Public Private Partnership (PPP)? John O'Donoghue described the PPP process for the Abbey as "a lengthy and complex method of procurement". The record of PPP developments so far has been very poor, and I wouldn't bet against the PPP process leading to further Byzantine delays.
The building of the current Abbey took 15 years from 1951 to 1966 - regarded at the time as an outrageously long period. In spanking new 21st century, we will break that record.
fotoole@irish-times.ie