At the end of next week, Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey, will close its doors. Its next production, for the Dublin Theatre Festival, will not take to the stage until late September. For two months, therefore, the theatre, which receives the largest single Arts Council grant of any cultural organisation in the country, will not produce a single play.
According to the Abbey, the closure is for necessary and routine maintenance and refurbishment. But this normally takes only two to three weeks and is usually carried out in a traditionally fallow period such as mid-January.The era when coachloads of American tourists could be guaranteed to pull up outside the theatre during the summer may be over, but it seems strange that an artform seen as an important cultural attraction for visitors to other international cities should not fulfil that role in Dublin, with its deep theatrical traditions. And Irish audiences surely also have a right to ask what is going on.
The decision to go dark comes in the wake of a long-running but as yet unresolved series of controversies over finances, culture and governance at the Abbey arising from the departures of former co-directors Neil Murray and Graham McLaren in 2021. The total cost of these in settlement payments, legal fees and external reports is now over €1million. The Arts Council has withheld some payments in recent years pending clarification of these issues. A report on the Abbey’s governance due to be delivered last summer has still not been received by the council.
In 2022 Minister for Arts Catherine Martin reappointed economist Frances Ruane, chair of the Abbey board since 2017, for a further two years. Ruane’s term will end on July 28th and it seems unlikely that questions about governance will be answered before her departure. That is regrettable. While the sums of money involved are smaller than those uncovered by last year’s RTÉ debacle, they are still substantial. If the national broadcaster can submit to the level of public scrutiny that we have seen over the past 12 months, then no less should be expected of the national theatre.