Promotional art for The Children. The Gate Theatre hasn't opened a new production in five months, but the wait was necessary to shore up its new play.
There you are, a producer of exceptionally high regard. Unburdened by the cost of year-round overheads, you tour shows throughout Europe and the U.S. You have brought together the latest experimental performers, designers and composers. You’ve whipped the media into a frenzy with your unconventional performances. And what do you decide to do? You decide to put on a traditional production.
Many eyebrows were raised at Sergey Diaghilev, the artistic director of the Ballets Russes, when he announced a revival of Marius Petipa’s classical ballet The Sleeping Beauty in 1921. Following the ferocious movement of The Rite of Spring and the cubist fantasia of Parade, this move seemed mad.
The truth is that despite his success, Diaghilev was still plagued by deficits and hounded by creditors. Any modern producer could see the logic: some works from the canon are time-tested and stand a greater chance of breaking even. But what happens when a reliance on old plays becomes the norm?
When asked to point out new plays that performed commercially well in the Abbey Theatre's 492-seat theatre, it made me think. I recall Alice in Funderland, the 2012 musical by Phillip McMahon and Raymond Scannell, doing well. Tickets for Mark O’Rowe’s Our Few and Evil Days became impossible to find.
But most new plays showed signs of dwindling houses. In 2013 ticket deals for Shush by Elaine Murphy were sent out for needed publicity. Richard Dormer’s Drum Belly had reduced-€10 tickets on sale before opening night. Compared against old favourites that year - William Shakespeare’s King Lear and Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara - it’s easy to assume that new plays just don’t perform well.
That would be to forget the disproportionate number of new plays that get produced for big stages. The Gate Theatre was a worse offender under Michael Colgan’s artistic direction when it produced a new play once every two years, most of which seemed to struggle. (For 2014’s The Mariner by Hugo Hamilton, all tickets were reduced to a €25 flat rate).
Those past managements showed a fear of new writing, and didn’t stimulate much public excitement around the discovery of new voices. Last year, that seemed to change.
While it’s true that an adaptation of a book is different from an original play, you couldn’t help but admire the public demand for Asking for It. The excellent adaptation of Louise O’Neill’s novel by Meadhbh McHugh and Annabelle Comyn filled the 650-seat Everyman before selling out its Abbey run. Asking for It was unlike adaptations such as Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights - it had only been published three years earlier. Theatre audiences were coming in droves for a recently new story.
The sold-out runs of Asking for It mightn’t surprise those following the novel’s popularity, but what on Earth explains the runaway success of The Unmanageable Sisters at the Abbey? Adapted by Deirdre Kinahan (whose work was seen on much smaller stages until then) from a play by Canadian Michel Tremblay (who’s hardly widely-known here), the production filled houses for a month. Clearly, its promise of an all-women cast railing against de Valera’s Ireland - not to mention its extraordinary word-of-mouth - was difficult to resist.
The commercial performance of these adaptations could encourage producers to take more risks. It may have been five months since a new production opened at the Gate, where Ruth Negga’s performance in Hamlet and a return of The Great Gatsby did good for the box office, but that wait has likely shored up its next production. Judging by previous new plays at the theatre The Children, Lucy Kirkwood’s standout drama about marriage and legacy, will have to seek out its audience.
The Gate’s artistic director Selina Cartmell has approached this with practicality. Where the theatre’s 2017 production of Tribes by Nina Raine struggled to fill houses over six weeks, The Children will run for just over three weeks, expecting its audience to come and go by then.
Kirkwood's drama also has the allure of being presented “side-by-side” another new play, David Eldridge’s Beginning, which, when taken in together, may resemble one epic about human relationships. This will be the first time since 2003, the year of Mark O’Rowe’s Crestfall and Brian Friel’s Performances, that the Gate will produce two new plays in the one year.
Reassuringly, the Abbey’s artistic directors Neil Murray and Graham McLaren are making a similar effort. The national theatre will produce three new plays on its big stage this year. It hasn’t matched that number since 2009, when it premiered Marina Carr’s Marble, Sebastian Barry’s Tales of Ballycumber and Sam Shepherd’s Ages of the Moon.
This year Citysong by Dylan Coburn Gray, This Beautiful Village by Lisa Tierney-Keogh, and Last Orders at the Dockside by Dermot Bolger will have the benefit of an altered and intimate Abbey auditorium, and runs stretching between two and four weeks.
The hope would be that if new plays find audiences, more new writing will be seen on big stages. A renaissance in playwriting isn’t an impossibility. When the avant-garde Ballets Ruses put on the classic The Sleeping Beauty, a work of elegant movement and design, it was a complete flop. If you give audiences something new and adventurous, they come back expecting more.
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