Abbey to stage play about priest accused of child abuse

Se?n O'Driscoll in New York
01/05/2006

The Abbey Theatre is to produce John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer-prize-winning play Doubt, Abbey artistic director Fiach MacConghail announced in New York at the weekend.

The play, which won three Tony awards, has been a huge hit both on and off Broadway, will begin production at the Abbey in October.

Set in the mid-1960s, Doubt explores the life of Fr Flynn, a priest and teacher accused of paedophilia. It has strong parallels with the scandals in the US and Irish Catholic church. The priest's role was played by Cavan actor Brian F O'Byrne, who opens in Conor McPherson's Shining City in New York next week.

Mr MacConghail made the announcement at Manhattan's Harvard Club while on a fence-mending US trip following the Abbey's over-budget centenary production of the Playboy of the Western World panned by US critics in 2004.

At the speech, organised by the US-Ireland Alliance, he said the production of Doubt, along with Sam Shepard's involvement in producing True West at the Peacock Theatre, showed American playwrights' willingness to get involved with Irish theatre.

Referring to the Abbey's poorly received tour of The Playboy of the Western World in 2004, Mr MacConghail said: "What I think a centenary should be about is looking forward and I think what happened with the Abbey centenary is that it concentrated quite a lot in the past," he said.

He said there was a place for "museum theatre" in the Abbey and the theatre needed to rediscover its radical, questioning voice, as intended by WB Yates and Lady Gregory when they established it.

? The Irish Times