Abbey changes in Dublin
Anyone who has not been to the Abbey for a few months is in for a pleasant surprise. The auditorium has been completely revamped into one block of seating rising from the front of the stalls to the back of the old circle. It’s like the new Trafalgar Studios, only much better done, and much more comfortable.
Gone is the old torture of the blue reclining seats: welcome to cosy red comfy ones. Still, the director Fiach Mac Conghall — a man whose name is easier to say than to spell, believe me — insists that the Abbey will be moving soon to a new site. This seems a shame when they have such a nice new theatre up and running.
The first Saturday night of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival saw the first preview of Roddy Doyle’s contemporary West Dublin pub take on The Playboy of the Western World: mutterings already in diehard quarters about the playboy being a Nigerian son of a cocoa exporter who has not laid his da low with a loy, as in J M Synge, but pasted him prostrate with a pestle.
That is pestle as in pestle for pounding yams, not pestle as in Knight of the Burning variety. The production opens Wednesday, by which time the Katona Joszef company of Budapest will have departed with their stunning production of Chekhov’s Ivanov set in a 1960s Communist provincial wilderness and acted with unutterable brilliance.
Luckily for Kenneth Branagh next year, few critics are likely to draw any comparisons with his own Donmar in the West End attempt on this early masterpiece (it was also brilliantly done at the Almeida a few years back, with Ralph Fiennes as the hapless hero, but even that version pales besides the Katona’s).
The intoxication induced by this production quite restored my spirits after I arrived in Dublin without my credit cards. I shall name and shame the new Academy Plaza hotel as treating my crisis with dunderheaded lack of consideration.
A faxed over copy of the card details proved illegible and still they insisted on me paying my bill in advance with cash (no cash card, either) or else I could sling my hook and find a park bench for the night. Luckily, PR supremo Gerry Lundberg came to my rescue. I hope he tells everyone in town to avoid the place like the plague.
Apart from my happy chance encounter with Fiach, and the fortuitous intervention of Gerry, I have so far whiled away some pleasant moments with Louise Jeffries, theatre director of the Barbican, who is weighing up the chances of bringing the new Playboy to London. I she does, she’d better start leafleting up the Kilburn High Road right now. Reluctantly she’ll pass on the Ivanov, I think mainly to spare Ken Branagh his blushes.
