Abbey Road On The River

The end of Abbey road

SO, WHAT now for the Abbey in the wake of the Government’s firm decision against relocation of the theatre? The announcement appears to signal the final curtain on a long and blundering off-stage farce that has probably received more attention than the drama on stage.

It is now ten years since former taoiseach Bertie Ahern put a stop to what seemed like achievable, and reasonable, plans to transfer the Abbey to a new home across the river Liffey close to where Dublin now happens to have a well-attended and impressive venue, the Grand Canal Theatre. It has been a decade of false hope and lost opportunities during which time we have had six ministers in search of a new location, a plethora of promises and costly feasibility studies but no creative outcome that advanced beyond lofty aspiration.

When the Abbey emerged from its crisis-ridden centenary in 2004, a number of possible new locations had been identified and political commitment to providing a fitting 21st century venue for what we regard as one of our national treasures was repeated ad nauseam.

While the most recent proposal, to move to the GPO site had at least a touch of imaginative flair to it, both the enormous cost and the opposition to placing the theatre on such symbolic and hallowed ground, were always going to be handicaps to such a proposal. The Minister for Arts Jimmy Deenihan states the decision not to proceed “was taken on the basis of the very significant potential costs involved”, but he also rightly questions the “historical appropriateness”. Minister points to the terrific improvements made in the auditorium of the current theatre by its director, Fiach MacConghail. From an audience perspective this has been a transformation that begs the question as to why it did not happen long before MacConghail’s tenure.

The most practical, as well as desirable, solution to the theatre’s accommodation problems would of course be the eventual acquisition of adjacent property – a possibility that had no chance in the years of high property prices. MacConghail is right to insist that a new premises is necessary and has to be kept on the agenda.

The boom years of the national exchequer have left little in the way of a legacy to our capital city’s cultural infrastructure: the once-promised “golden period of construction where the arts is concerned” – a new Abbey and a world-class Concert Hall – turned out to be as extravagantly exaggerated as some of the lines O’Casey gave Fluther Good in The Plough and The Stars.

WASHINGTON, D.C. Abbey Road on the River ~ Sept. 1–5, 2011 ...

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