The Abbey theatre has seen riots, notoriously in 1907 and 1926, when Dublin audiences protested during performances of plays by JM Synge and Sean O’Casey. The latest rebellion has not erupted in the stalls of the theatre, but on social media. A wave of dissatisfaction and frustration has broken out in reaction to the Abbey’s announcement of its programme to commemorate the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Theatre artists have reacted in disbelief to a programme of 10 productions that includes only one female playwright (Ali White) and two female directors – Annabelle Comyn, directing Tom Murphy’s The Wake, and Vicky Featherstone, who will direct a new play by Belfast playwright David Ireland, called Cyprus Avenue.
Over the past week, eloquent statements about the programme announcement from Ireland’s leading theatre artists have deluged social media, with tangible results. The Abbey issued an open letter in response and an offer to host a public meeting, which will take place this Thursday, 12 November, in Dublin.
The Abbey’s Waking the Nation season was intended to “interrogate” the past and the events that led to Irish independence. The programme note refers to culture as a driving force for change. “We consider our stage a platform for freedom of expression. We believe our artists can tell the story of who we are and who we might become.”
When it began to sink in that the season comprised plays from the canon by O’Casey, Frank McGuinness, Tom Murphy, one Shakespeare, and four new commissions of work by men, the irony of the reference to “who we are” was unpalatable.
Stage designer and arts manager Lian Bell began to voice her dismay on Facebook. As the Abbey’s artistic director, Fiach MacConghail, had left for a week’s holiday, he answered questions on Twitter from, among others, the novelist Belinda McKeon. He has since apologised for his responses, describing them as intemperate. In their implication that the Abbey had no new plays by women that were ready for staging, that certainly compounded the injury, unleashing a ferocious reaction, which Lian Bell collated online under the hashtag #WakingTheFeminists.
Letters to the Irish Times included one from Druid Theatre Company’s artistic director, Garry Hynes, calling for all performing arts organisations to look to their own records on gender inequality. Others viewed this episode as one instance among wider forms of social discrimination – particularly glaring in the year of the landmark referendum victory for the same-sex marriage campaign in Ireland.
Bell has no interest in attacking the Abbey, but is looking to its future, to find ways to make sure that, as the national theatre, it becomes more open. Next year sees the inauguration of a new phase under incoming co-directors Graham McLaren and Neil Murray, who will bring their experience of the National Theatre of Scotland.
For distinguished theatre-maker Olwen Fouéré, “the principles of any national theatre have to be founded on equality and inclusiveness, particularly one as symbolically important as the Abbey. Therefore, I think it is entirely appropriate that the Abbey stands as the initial site of dissent. I hope that it will become a site of example and of true, non-autocratic, artistic leadership.”
A team of theatre colleagues has gathered around Bell, launching a website, an online petition, and organising the 12 November public meeting, which will be filmed and live-streamed. Bell sees the creative potential of so much unleashed energy. “I never considered myself to be a spokesperson, but I have been overwhelmed by the response. I lit a match without realising that the room was filled with gas.”
The image is echoed by Fouéré. “A huge bravo to Lian Bell who started the fire. Long may it rage.”
The Abbey’s progamme announcement comes at a time in Irish theatre when women are prominent in all fields. There are the playwrights whose work is more frequently produced outside of Ireland, such as Ursula Rani Sarma, Nancy Harris and Stella Feehily. From artistic directors of independent companies – Annie Ryan (the Corn Exchange), Garry Hynes (Druid), Lynne Parker (Rough Magic) – to co-artistic director/designer Aedín Cosgrave (Pan Pan), and producers Anne Clarke, Róise Goan and Jen Coppinger, the list is extensive.
Many of the rising female stars are “theatre-makers” rather than playwrights. They often do not use texts as their starting point, but devise performances collaboratively, with actors, musicians, sound designers and filmmakers. Some of the most interesting new work, from director Louise Lowe’s ANU Productions or Grace Dyas’s TheatreClub, combines a variety of approaches and forms – whether using documentary material, improvisation, or authored texts – to make work that is politically engaged, scrutinising the values and hierarchies of Irish society. And these companies are often choosing to work in site-specific spaces rather than conventional theatre venues.
One of the principal artistic achievements of Irish theatre in recent years came from ANU Productions with The Monto Cycle, a four-year sequence of site-specific works on the streets of Dublin’s north inner-city. Programmed by the Dublin theatre festival, these were created and devised by Lowe and an immensely creative team of designers and actors, and the cycle combined performance and multimedia installations. Women’s experience was central, whether as trafficked sex workers in Vardo, or as laundry maids in one of the now infamous Magdalene laundries run by the Roman Catholic church for decades. This piece, Laundry, was staged in a former convent that had housed these women.
These important works of theatre reflect social and political malaise and a mistrust of hierarchies. It is difficult to envisage an artist such as Lowe working with the Abbey currently, since her artistic methods are so different. Perhaps this will start to change next year. Graham McClaren and Neil Murray will be coming to Dublin from a national theatre that has successfully avoided being defined by an institutional building in which it is housed. The Scottish model of a theatre that is light on its feet, portable and responsive has a lot to offer the current brilliant wave of Irish theatre-makers. In the year when the Abbey’s substantial role in Irish public life, past and present, will be under the spotlight, the time seems ripe for its doors to be flung open.
