Plays and adaptations: Is the Abbey playing the Gate’s game?

An adaptation of Roddy Doyle's novella Two Pints plays the Abbey Theatre. 

To read a poem in January, Jean Paul Sartre said, is as lovely as to go for a walk in June. But stroll down Cavendish Row these summer days, onto O’Connell St and turn left at the Luas tracks, and you might get déjà vu.

At the Gate Theatre you’ll see the return of The Snapper, a house-filling adaptation of the novel, steeped in nostalgia for the 1980s comforts of Roddy Doyle’s good loving Rabbitte family. When the production arrived last year, at the end of an adventurous season sadly contaminated by harassment accusations, it effectively bailed out the Gate. Bringing it back makes sense. 

In another coup by Doyle, his drama Two Pints, following two Joe Soaps righting wrongs over drinks, has pulled up a stool at the Abbey Theatre. There it plays in alternation with The Unmanageable Sisters, Deirdre Kinahan’s comedy about a group of women in 1970s Dublin. All three productions have been on before. They are also adaptations. 

That’s not surprising for one of those theatres. The Gate has adaptation woven into its DNA. As far back as 1931, the Irish Times published an article anticipating a popular novel that “everyone was talking about” being adapted at the theatre.

Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süß is based on the life of a Jewish merchant in 18th century Germany. In this Gate production Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, given a “restrained” performance by Hilton Edwards, is blamed for the death of a woman murdered by the wicked Duke of Württemberg, played by a new out-of-towner named Orson Welles. The production had enough demand to extend its run. A lesson was learned that projects with familiar sources can sell well. 

Throughout the 1930s Christine Longford and Edward Longford, the Oxford-grad shareholders who funded the Gate, helped seal adaptations as part of the theatre’s programming. Among their contributions was Christine’s thoughtful, if indifferently reviewed, version of Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee. Edward’s script for Carmilla - Sheridan le Fanu’s Gothic novella - received a dreamlike production in bold colours. There was also a candle-flickering horror version of Wuthering Heights by Ria Mooney and Donald Staffer. 

Hollywood had firmly moved into its Pre-Code era by then, meaning that Walter Ferris’s stage adaptation of Death Takes a Holiday could be brought back again and again to new audiences. (That’s not to say all stage projects received a boost from film adaptation. Jud Süb, ultimately sympathetic to its Jewish protagonist, was soon warped into a Nazi propaganda film, making its title toxic).

Despite seeing the Gate’s success with adaptations, it’s interesting that the Abbey maintained a steady course towards producing original plays. It would be a course it’d keep for at least 90 years. 

As a result, an invested-in playwright such as Teresa Deevy showed a wealth of theatrical influences in the 1930s, from the Chekhovian elegy of The Reapers to the Pirandello-like spins of Temporal Powers. But for the next two decades, the Abbey showed less interest in new forms of theatre, preferring instead conventional but topical plays about rural isolation, grey-flannel urbanities and returned revolutionary heroes. There were a few adaptations in the theatre’s Irish-language programming but nothing like the supply at the Gate, where Christine and Edward reworked more le Fanu and lots of Molière.  

Only a golden age of new drama in the 1960s seemed to slow down the business of adaptation. The Gate brought Brian Friel to Broadway. The Abbey developed new relationships with Samuel Beckett, Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy. Producers were spoiled for choice of new plays. 

There was also the matter of the Gate's financial problems. The auditorium was rented out by visiting companies, or even left dark, for stretches of the 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when the Abbey was busy exploring a repertoire of plays both national and international. 

But a familiar practice of Gate adaptation began to re-establish itself in the 1980s. Barry McGovern’s interpretation of Beckett’s novels was followed by Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, fresh versions of Chekhov, and so on. The Abbey, learning the firepower of the Peacock stage, developed the avant-garde plays of Tom Mac Intyre. 

The 1990s saw the unstoppable rise of the Christmas adaptation. The Gate leafed through the pages of Charles Dickens again and again, well into late 2000s, before moving onto attractive costume dramas such as My Cousin Rachel, Pride and Prejudice and The Heiress in the 2010s. The Abbey repeatedly dressed old plays such as The Rivals and The Recruiting Officer as holiday comedies, when it didn’t stick to reliable hits by J.M. Synge and Seán O’Casey. 

All of this has contributed a sense to generations of Dublin theatregoers that of the two full-time production playhouses in the city, one specialises in adaptations and the other doesn’t. What does it mean that the Abbey, having produced 11 adaptations in the past three years, now seems to be playing the Gate’s game? 

Some have expressed concern that it has come at the expense of the canon. Past plays deserved of rediscovery are left on the shelf, while books such as The Country Girls and Ulysses are modified for stage.

Upcoming premieres such as This Beautiful Village and Last Orders at the Dockside, next to Citysong, signal something else. If the back catalogue isn’t to be opened, at least it can gain some new entries. 

That draws our thoughts to what the next season will have in store. If a preference for adaptations over revivals continues, it will make one thing certain. The Abbey will be undergoing its most unrecognisable transformation yet, for better or worse.