The Irish theater of Synge and O'Casey continues to thrive as theater thrives nowhere else in the world, in countries where a ticket for a play has become the prohibitively expensive pastime of the rich, or has to be massively under-written by the state exchequer.
Like the Irish government itself, which is economically embattled and gives the impression of changing every other day, byzantine politics in the Dublin theater have caused talent to zigzag wildly among theaters and companies and directors from one year to the next. Highly politicized, the Dublin theater world revolves around a small group of working playwrights: Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, Hugh Leonard, and newcomers like Frank McGuinness or Anne Devlin.
Irish theater today is dominated by a national theater company at the Abbey that can no longer afford to take on any new artistic ventures or risks. In Ireland, artistic subsidies are first to suffer cutbacks, more so because they are relatively recent.
Rebuilt twenty years ago on the site of the old Abbey Theater, where William Butler Yeats brought his Irish Literary Theater in 1904, the home of Irish theater is an unprepossessing red brick box. In sad contrast to the glories of its own past, nowadays the Abbey is cramped by lack of money and incessant feuding between board members.
But last year it invited a young director from Galway's Druid Theater to guest-direct. Garry Hynes dusted off an early play by contemporary writer Tom Murphy, Whistle In the Dark, and won acclaim for her Abbey production. The appointment of a new artistic director, Vincent Dowling, who has been directing Shakespeare in North America and Canada, seems to herald a new era.
Foremost among the star names at the Abbey for many years was Hugh Leonard, the former civil servant who fills a kind of Neil Simon position as a tragicomic raconteur of Dublin suburban life. Quasi-autobiographical plays like Da and A Life made Leonard's career really take off. Soon Leonard was the toast of Broadway with a Tony to his name. For much of the seventies, he opened his plays at the little Olney Theater in Maryland under director Jim Waring.
But Leonard has always returned to the Dublin Theater Festival, where he enjoyed his first real success with a adaptation of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist called Stephen D nearly thirty years ago. Both Da and A Life led recent theater festivals, and have since been directed by the intense, energetic director Joe Dowling. Leonard and Dowling have ceased to do any new work for the Abbey.
Refuge at the Gate
The Abbey is far from being Dublin's only stage, though it is its only permanent and subsidized company. The Gate Theatre's manager, Michael Colgan, was able to profit from Dowling's controversial resignation from the Abbey. Since his troubled departure, Dowling has sought refuge at the Gate, where former Abbey actors now appear regularly even though they do not form a permanent company.
Founded back in the thirties by celebrated actors Michael Mac Liammoir and Hilton Edwards in a Regency relic at the other end of
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