Staging a turnaround in Dublin: Director of storied Abbey Theatre aims to boost its finances, ambitions
By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff
April 15, 2007
Boston Globe
DUBLIN – Last fall, Fiach MacConghail sat down with the actor Stephen Rea in Princeton, N.J., where they were attending a theatrical conference.
MacConghail, director of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, was on a mission to lure alienated Irish artists back to the national theater, and he urged Rea to return to Ireland’s most important stage after an 18-year hiatus.
Thanks, Rea told him, but no thanks.
“I’ve got some bad news,” MacConghail replied, drawing a trump card in the form of a script. “Sam Shepard has written a play for you.”
Rea cursed, and MacConghail (pronounced McConnell) knew he had him. MacConghail suspected Rea might say no to him, but not to Shepard, whom Rea had first worked with in London in the 1970s. Not long after, MacConghail and Rea met up with Shepard in New York to plan the world premiere of “Kicking a Dead Horse,” which last night ended its month-long run at the Peacock, the Abbey’s smaller stage.
The play’s title sounds almost like MacConghail’s job description. As the first head of the Abbey in its 104-year history who is neither a writer nor a director, MacConghail’s job has been to breathe life back into one of the world’s most famous cultural institutions after years of financial improprieties and aesthetic complacency – while proving he has the artistic chops to match his business and political acumen.
With longish hair, faded jeans, and a devil-may-care attitude, the 42-year-old Dubliner brings to his job something of the rebel spirit that motivated Lady Augusta Gregory and William Butler Yeats to found a national theater in the first place. If the Abbey’s core mission has always been to promote and develop Irish plays, MacConghail is determined that it more fully capture a contemporary Ireland that is suddenly rich, suddenly swarming with foreigners , and suddenly unsure just what it means to be Irish.
MacConghail’s background has been as an impresario, producing plays and arts festivals in Ireland, Europe, and the United States.
If Ireland’s post-colonial struggle for independence and identity was a common theme of the Abbey’s first century, MacConghail is convinced that the challenges it faces managing prosperity and newcomers will be fodder for a new generation of playwrights.
“Almost half of the people we have working in the front-of-the-house staff are immigrants,” he said, sitting in his office at the theater as Rea rehearsed in an adjacent room. “But that experience hasn’t been reflected on our stage yet.”
Almost two years into the job, Mac Conghail is still shaking up the Abbey, even as he prepares to position it to move in the next five years from its gritty northside location of the last 41 years to a modern, gleaming home in the city’s docklands section. He said he spent the first 14 months of his job “turning the business around.” He inherited a $5 million deficit and poor morale. He oversaw a 30 percent turnover in the 100-member staff, bringing in a team that was as enthusiastic for change as he was. He drew up a three-year plan and got $33 million from the government to pay for it.
“I spent the first year just steadying the ship,” he says. “Now it’s about investing in the art.”
Beyond the Abbey’s shoddy bookkeeping, he found an increasingly bankrupt artistic environment that had alienated the very people the Abbey should have been courting. He learned that many of the most prominent Irish writers and actors did not want to work at the Abbey, citing previous, off-putting experiences, or worse: indifference to their work.
One of MacConghail’s first diplomatic overtures was to Conor McPherson , whose plays had found enthusiastic audiences and critical acclaim in London’s West End and on Broadway but had somehow eluded a natural home in the national theater in his hometown. McPherson is writing a play for the Abbey now.
“Of all the things I inherited, I’d say the worst was the paucity of Irish writers in the wings with plays ready to be put on,” MacConghail said. “If these writers don’t get their work on the stage here, they will simply drift into TV or film or something else.”
MacConghail has brought a producer’s experience and an evangelist’s zeal to recruiting a new generation of Irish writers, including Jessica Cooke, but also to coaxing established artists back, including Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Mark O’Rowe and Martina Carr. He has spoken to established stage and film actors, including Fiona Shaw and Sinead Cusack, about returning to the stage they have avoided for so long. He has also looked beyond Ireland for material. He said the Abbey will do a Shepard play annually.
"Sam's biggest influence was Beckett, and his plays have a resonance here – dysfunctional families, globalization, these are issues we in Ireland struggle with," he said.
MacConghail says his predecessors got in trouble by not knowing how or when to say no. He has lengthened the incubation period for new work to two to three years, saying too many productions had gone on too soon. With experience producing on Broadway, and in-laws in Boston, he wants to tour. But he said the company couldn’t afford it during his first two years. He said he hopes to bring the Abbey to New York next fall, and to Boston in 2008.
MacConghail’s latest coup is securing the rights to stage the Irish premiere of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Doubt," at the Abbey. A date has yet to be set.
There was some grumbling last year when Mac Conghail spoke of a temporary ban on the revivals of Irish classics that were an Abbey staple for generations. Some critics sniffed that Mac Conghail looked down his nose at the likes of Sean O’Casey.
MacConghail’s office wall tells a different story. In 1917, his grandfather, a Dublin newspaper hawker named Billy Kelly, brought an aspiring writer named Sean O’Casey to attend his first play at the Abbey. A letter from O'Casey thanking Kelly for introducing him to the joys of the Abbey hangs next to Mac Conghail’s desk.
Today, Billy Kelly’s grandson is looking for the next Sean O’Casey, and says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if that person was Polish or Nigerian.”
Kevin Cullen can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, an article on Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in Sunday’s Arts & Entertainment section stated that John Patrick Shanley’s play "Doubt" had not yet been staged at the theater. The play ran there last fall.)