Abbey Theatre, 1904

Shortly after Christmas, Steve Wilmer mentioned to me that, in 1961, distinguished Dublin city architect and town planner Daithi P. Hanly succeeded in saving the stones of the old Abbey Theatre, which were being dismantled and prepared for dumping, in preparation for the building of the new Abbey on the site. The old Abbey’s front façade and vestibule on the corner of Marlborough Street and Abbey Street, undamaged by the fire of 17th July 1951, had continued in use until 1961 as the ticket office of the Abbey players during their exile in the Queen’s Theatre. At Hanly’s request, the contractor, Christy Cooney, had the stones numbered and transported, along with the old theatre’s canopy, railings, windows, vestibule fittings, and billboards to Hanly’s garden and a former boathouse in Vico Road, Dalkey, where they lie to this day (Sunday Independent, August 7, 1988).

Charles Duggan, Dublin City Council’s Heritage Officer, on learning of the “Abbey Theatre, 1904” project, sent Niall Ó hOisín of NOHO a PDF of documents and press cuttings relating to Hanly’s visionary deed of cultural preservation and his subsequent efforts to find a proper home for the old theatre’s façade. From the mid 1980s until his death in July 2003, Hanly, backed by a cast of Irish theatre notables, from Cyril Cusack to Vincent Dowling, succeeded in generating a great deal of interest in the story both in the media and among potential stakeholders in the proposed reconstruction. While Boston College expressed an interest in acquiring the stones should no home be found for it in Dublin, and exploratory, but ultimately fruitless, discussions took place with Trinity College Dublin about the potential incorporation of the granite façade, measuring 25 feet high and 34 feet wide, into The Lir, National Academy of Dramatic Art, Hanly’s preferred outcome was to have it re-erected close to its original site as an entrance to a proposed National Theatre Gallery or Museum.

It would be a joy to be able to see this “original Georgian façade, with the name ‘The Abbey Theatre’ in dark green letters above the main entrance” (“Where Stands the Abbey?” Dáithi P. Hanly letter to the Irish Times, 30 May 2002), as well as the several other fixtures and fittings preserved by Hanly, and to incorporate them, as virtual objects and textures, in at least a digital rebuilding of the old Abbey Theatre. Perhaps this effort could help to draw attention, once again, to this precious survival and the question of its future.

I met up with lighting designer, Zia Holly, at 3pm this afternoon in the Science Gallery Cafe. Holly wrote a recent BA dissertation on the history of lighting design at the Abbey from 1904 to the present day.* She conducted research in the Abbey Archives, as well as interviewing Leslie Scott who, as the Abbey’s Chief Electrician, oversaw the transfer from the Queen’s Theatre – the company’s home following the 1951 fire – to the new Abbey Theatre in 1966.

Zia gave me a her chapter on the early days of the Abbey, as well as documents describing the various technologies in use during the period with which her research was concerned. She notes that, with Yeats’s emphasis on the primacy of the spoken word: “spectacle was not one of the key concerns of the Abbey in its infancy and it would be some time before the Abbey would seek to encourage or even credit design elements in its productions.” (unpubl. ts. p.7)

Hugh Hunt’s volume The Abbey: Ireland’s National Theatre, 1904-1978 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979), carries actress Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh’s recollections of the theatre’s opening night, which gives a vivid impression of Abbey actors frantically doubling up as stage technicians:

“Back stage, Willie Fay, dressed for his part in one of the new plays, a wild wig slipping sideways over his elfin face, swung unexpectedly from a baton high in the flies, arranging the lighting.” (Hunt 1979, p.62)

This additional theatrical role of William Fay was not entirely arbitrary: Holly notes that, before being employed by the Management Committee to advise Joseph Holloway and supervise the renovations of the theatre, Fay had worked as an electrician (unpubl. ts., p.8). But the scene Nic Shiubhlaigh records tends to confirm the impression that the early Abbey was not very much concerned with stage lighting beyond what was required to illuminate the actors.

Indeed, the “modest and unpretentious” space of the proscenium-framed stage, just 21 feet in width by 16 feet in depth (Hunt 1979, p.58), would in any case have afforded limited scope for spectacular effects.

Photographs confirm that footlights were not in use at the Abbey at this time. Actor Udolphus (Dossie) Wright, like Fay, also served in multiple roles including, until 1952 as “master of the switchboard” (Hunt 1979, p.192), “in which capacity he indulged his passion for flooding the stage with amber light” (Hunt 1979, p.68, in Holly unpubl. ts. p.10) – an impression of the Abbey’s approach to lighting which, Holly notes, is borne out by production photographs of the period.

Holly concludes:

“Lighting as an art form relies on attention to detail and at these early stages of development, where design implementation relied on an understanding and mastering of complex and cumbersome technologies for its expression, it was essential, if art was to be the outcome, for its facilitator to have an enthusiastic and focused artistic desire coupled with technical know-how. The practical necessity of role-juggling, inevitably led to lighting being neglected beyond the standards of sufficiency.” (unpubl. ts. 10)

Many thanks to Zia for her kindness in time and access to her dissertation!

* Holly, Zia “Technology and the Rise of Lighting Design in the Abbey” BA Dissertation, Department of Drama, Trinity College Dublin, May 2010.

I met Niall Ó hOisín at NOHO HQ on 46 South William Street at 2.30pm. In fact, Niall had introduced himself to me back in October 2009 after a DHO and Architecture Ireland-sponsored lecture I gave, on “Recreating Research, Art and Education in Shared Virtual Worlds”, which took place simultaneously in Dublin City Council’s Wood Quay Auditorium and on Digital Humanities Island in Second Life.

I was delighted to find Breffni O’Malley there at NOHO, too. Breffni and I met at ARQUEOLÓGICA 2.0 in Seville last June, at which he showed me the amazing “Dublin City Walls” mobile application that NOHO and he (then at Silver City) produced during their Medieval Dublin project for Dublin City Council. This is a truly stunning mobile app: truly the best by far that I’ve ever seen: I hope it gets a wider audience!

Getting back to business, we talked through the “Abbey Theatre, 1904” project, and estimated that, in order to make the visualisation process as streamlined, and therefore affordable, as possible, I will need both to secure ample, good-quality research sources and to examine them in advance sufficiently carefully to be able to give NOHO detailed advice on their interpretation. Under those circumstances, NOHO ought to be able to produce a good model, concentrating on the auditorium and stage areas, in around 7 days (5 days for 3d modelling and 2 days for texturing and lighting). Niall’s team will then need a further day to prepare the model for the Metropolis real-time engine used by Trinity’s “GV2: Graphics, Vision and Visualisation Group“, led by Professor Carol O’Sullivan, so that she can guide a funded summer intern in populating the Theatre with avatars (virtual humans) simulating both actors and audiences.

We looked at some books in the NOHO “reference collection” (which were glad to be temporarily liberated from the reach of all the renovation dust upstairs) and Niall pointed me in the direction of the Irish Architectural Archive and its on-line Dictionary of Irish Architects 1720-1940. He also promised to send out a query to a couple of contacts, including the Heritage Officer for Dublin City Council, Charles Duggan, who might have, or know about, further resources.

Niall has, as a personal project, modelled the streetscapes of much of the contemporary Dublin city centre, using the animation frames slider in his modelling software as a timeline (one year per frame) to correlate the location of past and present structures. It’s beautiful work! Perhaps we could, in time, extend this work to the Abbey Street and Molesworth Street section of Dublin from, say, 1903 (immediately pre-Abbey) to late July 1951 (immediately following the fire of 17th July).

In 1904, Annie Horniman acquired the Hibernian Theater of Varieties (commonly known as the Mechanics’ Theatre) on Lower Abbey Street, Dublin for the use of the Irish National Theatre Society.

Joseph Holloway, staunch supporter of the Irish National Theatre Society and architect, was engaged to renovate the interior of the theatre, which opened on 27th December 1904 with performances of On Baile’s Strand by W. B. Yeats, Cathleen ni Houlihan by Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News. The “old” Abbey Theatre remained in use until damaged by fire in 1951.

The task of digitally visualising the Abbey Theatre as designed by Joseph Holloway poses many challenges. Holloway’s architectural plans and drawings fortunately survive in the National Library of Ireland, and we have several black-and-white photographs of the early Abbey. However, it is more difficult to obtain detailed information about textiles, colour-schemes, and fixtures and fittings originally employed, as well as the less photogenic but functionally important backstage areas.

Because there will inevitably be gaps and contradictions in the historical information available to us, it becomes crucial to open the doors to the interpretative process so that the decisions we are making can be freely observed. By documenting the research process, and publishing wherever possible the primary sources upon which our visualisations are based, viewers will be able to evaluate the finished models as confidently as they would any other kind of research hypothesis.

This approach is guided by the principles of the London Charter for the Computer-based Visualisation of Cultural Heritage (2.1) February 2009. (If unfamiliar with the use of computer visualisation as a historical research method in general or the London Charter in particular, a good place to start is the on-line Introduction to the Charter written by Richard Beacham, Hugh Denard and Franco Niccolucci in 2006.)

By publishing our journey as a web-log, to which anyone can add comments, we hope that the Abbey Theatre, 1904 project will help to stimulate new ideas and questions about the history of this fascinating and important time and place.

To continue, see the website’s Contents, or use the links in the right-hand margin.

I met Carol O’Sullivan, Professor of Visual Computing at Trinity and Head of GV2: Graphics, Vision and Visualisation Group in the Science Gallery Cafe at 11 this morning. She brought me over to the GV2 lab and showed me Metropolis: Supercrowds for Multisensory Urban Simulations. This is a research project designed to discover what is required in order to make users perceive a virtual, real-time world as credible; or, to put it in their own words: “to apply principles of human multisensory perception to create a lifelike depiction of a virtual urban environment with street scenes, crowds and traffic noise”.

There’s a rather wonderful model of parts of Dublin city, including the Trinity College campus on College Green, created by Dublin company NOHO. The model runs on an Ogre-based real-time engine, and is populated by “characters” who move through the space and interact with each other in highly lifelike ways. The lab also contains a Vicon optical motion-capture suite, which is used to model the movement and gestures of the in-world characters.

Carol suggested that, if I were to give her the project’s 3d model of the 1904 Abbey Theatre, she would in principle be willing to assign one of her funded summer interns to populate the model with virtual characters. We might, for example, explore how closely we could recreate, from contemporaneous accounts, the Playboy of the Western World riots of 1907. That is a pretty exciting prospect!

Carol advised that, in that context, I might consider approaching NOHO to discuss the modelling of the Old Abbey Theatre. Not only is their work first rate but, there are obvious benefits to working with a company that has previously developed content for Carol’s work with the Ogre real-time engine.

An inspiring look at the work of an inspirational team; I hope we can manage to put all the pieces together for a collaboration this summer!