Hammer Time: theatre legend with a keen nose for business

Michael Colgan has guided the Gate from financial ruin to record profits - but in the arts world the name of the game is often funding. He tells Donal Lynch about art, commerce and the bottom line

Michael Colgan by Jon Berkeley

Donal Lynch

In the high ceilinged back room of a building on Parnell Square Gate director Michael Colgan sits back in an armchair surrounded by "bits of my life".

This was the seat he used to sleep in after his marriage broke up and everywhere you turn there are reminders of triumphs past: Oscar winner Frances McDormand in Streetcar, Ralph Fiennes in the Faith Healer, Colgan himself receiving his OBE from the Queen.

But more than a museum of past glories, this room is also an office, the nerve centre from which Colgan reigns over Sodom (to the Abbey's 'Begorrah'). On one wall are huge charts of forthcoming and past stage productions and in front of him sit the audited accounts for the Gate for last year. They're reminders, perhaps, that Colgan, as artistic and commercial director, straddles both worlds. History might be dandy but he keeps the bottom line of the present firmly in his crosshairs.

And as such he realises that this may be a pivotal moment for the institution to which he has given the better part of his life. Like most industries theatre has suffered a crippling downturn in the last few years and has had to pull out all the stops to keep afloat - Colgan has slashed costs, toured heavily and instituted matinees.

But, unlike most industries, his also has the safety net of Arts Council grants to cushion the fall back on - by dint of the assumption that theatre does us all good. Leaving that aside the problem has been that the net is strung a bit more tightly for some than others. The Abbey, for instance, received around six times the funding (€7.1m) last year than its North O'Connell Street derby rival - which got just under €1m.

Despite having 123 seats fewer, the Gate tends to be roughly neck-and-neck with the Abbey in terms of putting bums on seats and its productions have routinely eclipsed its better-funded neighbour in terms of awards, international touring and industry recognition.

In fact during 2013 The Gate box office was over €2.7m, by comparison to the Abbey's roughly €1.9m.

A new report by Scottish consultancy firm Bonnar Keenlyside said recently that our "national cultural institution" had strayed from its own mission statement of "placing the writer and artist at the heart of Ireland's national theatre." The report found that the Abbey merely "engaged" actors but the people who run it are managers in the words of the report "…setting it apart from other creative producing theatres of national significance."

The implications of it all seemed clear: at an artistic level - the only remaining justification for the yawning disparity - the Abbey is not justified in receiving the lion's share of funding and, by implication, other theatres are getting screwed.

It's a point most assuredly not lost on Colgan.

"I think, and I would say this but I can back it up with figures, that the pressure on The Gate to break-even is greater than that on most major theatres in Britain and Ireland," he tells me. "My guiding light has always been that a production has to wash its own face. By that I mean it has to be able to pay for itself from the box office.

"The Arts Council grant goes towards the rent of the building (The Gate is owned by the Rotunda) down to the ink in my pen and that sort of thing. When I took over the box office was 28pc of overall turnover, while the Arts Council grant was 72pc. We're now looking at situation where Arts Council grant is less than 20pc of turnover."

Colgan maintains that, given the money that the Gate gives the state in terms of VAT and social insurance charges, The Gate is nigh on cost-neutral.

Theoretically the generous level of funding the Abbey receives should allow it to stage more artistically daring plays - but for Colgan the disparity means resorting more than he would want to tried-and-trusted standards.

"We can't afford failure but at the same time if you keep doing Oscar Wilde or A Christmas Carol you will go into a downward spiral. Sometimes you will do a play because you need to make money."

Colgan is careful to stress that the tensions between The Gate and the Arts Council are "nothing to do with the personalities involved" - but rancour between the two institutions is nothing new. In the early 2000s the Council slashed the grant to The Gate from £800,000 to just £200,000 because the theatre had "cash in hand" of £656,000 on its balance sheet at the time.

Colgan claims that the Council used this as part of the justification for the decrease.

He says: "The real problem has always been that it has been assumed that The Gate can manage just fine by itself. We are victims of our own success."

Much the same might be said about Colgan himself. There were murmurs two years ago when it was reported that he was the highest paid arts administrator in the country - but given the fact he rescued The Gate from severe financial crisis and shepherded it over many years of record profits, he might justifiably have argued he was good value.

But then he is very persuasive on most topics. His father was an insurance salesman and growing up Colgan says he was quite unworldly about financial matters. He says he "never cared in the least about making money" but also felt that he was "in my bones, like my family, a persuader, a salesman."

He was a theatrical type and according to one former girlfriend went around quoting Wilde and Shakespeare (which makes his sometime nickname of MC Hammer all the more hilarious). He took over The Gate when he was 32 after cutting his teeth in the Trinity Players - which he only joined because he was invited there on a date - and stints at the Abbey and the Dublin Theatre Festival.

At the time there were many who doubted that he could fill the shoes of Hilton Edwards and Michael Mac Liammor, the charismatic and flamboyant couple who had founded the Gate in the 1928.

" I remember coming into the office on that first day", he tells me. "And it looked like the type of place you might go to get the results of an x-ray. I walked over to the photocopier and there was a copy of a recipe from Woman's Way on it. And when I removed the page a little cloud of dust flew up. That will tell you how dynamic the place was."

The inertia of the place was comforting in a way however.

"I always liked the idea of taking over something that is in trouble," he tells me. "If you take over a success you might live in fear of being found out - but with something that is failing you can save it and feel satisfied."

In his 30 years at The Gate, he has produced many award-winning plays, including The Collection by Harold Pinter, The Home Place starring Tom Courtenay and Three Sisters starring the three Cusack sisters.

Colgan always seemed to have a knack for dusting off the right classic and when it became all the rage for American film and TV stars to take their turn on the London stage he ensured Dublin was not left out, bringing talent like McDormand, Fiennes, Liam Neeson and Christopher Meloni to the Gate.

His productions of Beckett's plays have been staged at festivals from Chicago to Beijing, Melbourne to Toronto. The Pinter specials were presented in Dublin in 1994 and 1997 with a major festival in New York in 2001. In 2005 The Gate produced a festival to celebrate Pinter's 80th birthday, part of which travelled to London and Turin.

Unsurprisingly, Colgan has a down-to-earth perspicacity about his audience.

"If you're in a business for 30 years you don't just see trends you see mega-trends. I've been a producer through seven or eight World Cups. And usually it's a great time because of the adage that women go to the theatre and men are brought there. But now more women watch the World Cup because of the players have become superstars and so on.

"I think my audience is older than most. I think there is a time when people get married and after the babies they realise that there is more to life than sitting in with babies and they start going to dinner parties and the theatre might be discussed and then they go.

"The Saturday night audience tends to not be as discerning. We don't do subscriptions or group bookings. The problem is that the product is perishible. If don't sell seats K3 and 4 on a given night they'll never be sold. You pay 50 quid for two tickets - but at the end of the evening you don't have a tangible thing. But we can survive because we're not for profit."

His latest venture is a new staging of The Mariner, adapted by Hugo Hamilton, who wrote The Speckled People. "I'm going to run the play in the [Dublin Theatre] Festival and all seats will be €25 and it will be a fascinating experiment because there's a massive distinction between something being inexpensive and it being a bargain.

"I think what the recession has done is made people duty bound to get a bargain. We need to satisfy the guilt of our conscience."

The financial tumult of the last few years didn't cause him any sleepless nights, he says, in part because he shored up the business by touring more and staging matinees. But the past few years have been tough personally. His former wife, Susan Fitzgerald, with whom he had remained close, passed away last year after a long battle with cancer. And he has seen many of his friends, some of whom are property developers, being "treated badly".

"I knew a lot of people who were in terrible negative equity and had massive mortgages," he says, "but I really do believe that all the developers shouldn't be tarred with the same brush. I think Harry Crosbie and Sean Mulryan are special people. If you took me and Fiach Mac Conghail [the Abbey director] and Garry Hynes [Tony Award winner] out of the theatre in Ireland all at the same time, it woudn't make for a good future.

"I am talking, of course, about Nama. I think the business about the Bord Gais Theatre being for sale for €20m - which is €60m less than it cost to build - is not the right route. It is short-sighted of us to not let the people who know what to do continue doing it. There are a lot of indians and not a lot of chiefs."

It's been said that it's difficult to get into The Gate but even more difficult again to get out again. In 86 years the place has only had two Artistic Directorates.

"If I'd murdered someone I would have only gotten 14 years," he quips, but despite turning 64 in the days before we meet, he has no intention of retiring any time soon.

His three children and three grandchildren live near his own home in Ballsbridge and its difficult to imagine the Parnell Square stomping ground without him.

"This is a difficult job, it would be impossible to walk away without an appointed successor," he says. "But the board will make that decision. If you're swimming against the current or running up hill it's time to stop. But, to quote Beckett, I'm not ready to give it up, not with the fire in me now."

'The Price' by Arthur Miller is now playing at The Gate