With enough new ideas and the will to execute them, and with a passion for staging theatre shows that will challenge and engage audiences, Galway could enter “a whole new scene of creativity”.
This is the view of Mike Diskin, who this month has taken over from Fergal MacGrath as managing director of the Town Hall Theatre. Mike, now entering his second stint in the position, knows it is not exactly a modest task he has set for himself, but he is determined to realise his vision.
To Belfast
and back
Mike Diskin was appointed the managing director of the Town Hall Theatre when it opened in 1995 and he enjoyed 12 successful years in the position. By 2007 he felt he had done all he could do in the position and he became eager for a new challenge. That March, he announced he was standing down as the Town Hall’s MD and he left to take up the post of hief Executive of The Lyric Theatre in Belfast.
“When I left the Town Hall I felt I had run out of new ideas and I wanted a new challenge and Lyric looked to be that challenge,” he tells me as we sit for the interview on a Wednesday morning. “I was nervous but I felt I had the skills, acquired from my time in Galway to meet the problems in the Lyric Theatre.”
However Mike’s experiences in Belfast were not the happiest and his two years in the city were hampered by frustrations and diverging points of view, especially with the theatre’s board of directors.
“When I hit Belfast I was told ‘People don’t go to theatre in Belfast! They like pantomimes!’” he recalls. “I often mourned the fact there was no equivalent paper in the city like the Galway Advertiser that people read religiously. We did put on some interesting shows and got audience support but the board of directors and I had different perspectives and didn’t see eye to eye. If it had worked out I would have stayed there longer.”
Nonetheless Mike has a number of positive experiences from Belfast which he looks back on with great fondness.
“We put on a Brian Friel play and to work with Friel was amazing,” he says. “The play was set in the 1930s and 1940s and I pitched it to the public and press as a chance for people to come and see the kind of lives their parents and grandparents lived and to understand their lives. It was a great success and when the entire Tyrone football team turned up one night to see it, I knew I’d hit the mark.”
After two years Mike felt he had to go and take time out to reconsider what it was he wanted to do and to plot his next move. He took a year out to think, but as an employee of the Galway City Council, who had been granted a leave of absence to go the Lyric Theatre, a return to Galway was tempting. When the then Town Hall manager Fergal MacGrath announced he was moving on, an opportunity for Mike to return to his old stomping ground opened up.
“There was a push and pull in coming back to Galway,” he says. “The positives of Galway, its artistic, social, and cultural scene, were reinforced for me in Belfast. The ability to do things despite problems is also easier than in Belfast.
“The push factor was this, and it’s an idea I’ve never wavered from. I like the Ted Kennedy quote: ‘The fight goes on, the cause remains.’ For me the cause is bringing the arts to a wide audience and I felt I once again had a whole range of new ideas that I wanted to try in the Town Hall.”
Reinvigorated
Mike has travelled from a position where he felt he had done all he could do to a point where he feels reinvigorated and eager to take on the challenge of running the Town Hall again, but this begs the question, why come back to the Town Hall, which he was already manager of for 12 years?
“Because the Town Hall is central to the arts and culture in Galway,” he declares. “What I am hoping to do it to re-energise and reinvigorate the connection between the Town Hall and its audience. The Town Hall is great at attracting audiences, but does it change enough lives? Are we getting excited about the arts? A show people sit back at and wait for things to happen is fine, but a show people interact with is much more exciting.
“The possibility of advancing the cultural agenda, while still catering for the diverse needs of audiences is the challenge. I want the Town Hall to challenge as well as entertain an audience. I want to position the Town Hall where it’s moving audiences along, not just reacting to what’s going on. That is what is exciting and challenging me about coming back to Galway.
“I want to put a new slant on the Town Hall programme, increase the quality of the shows, and bring the audience with us. I am talking to local actors and musicians and people who wouldn’t have thought of staging a show in the Town Hall before and I want to challenge them and myself.
“We could unleash a whole new scene of creativity in Galway and I am coming back excited with new ideas as big as that, and I hope to keep the routine of daily life at bay to pursue the bigger objective.”
Fergal MacGrath’s tenure as Town Hall MD has been highly successful. He presided over a complete refurbishment of the theatre, steered it through the first 18 months of the economic downturn, and was still able to draw large audiences and put on successful shows.
Mike was MD during the rise and rise of the Celtic Tiger era and now returns to a very different and difficult landscape. However he is not daunted by this challenge. He was one of those involved in the Galway arts scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period which many would argue was the most creative and exciting the city has thus far witnessed, but one that was also a period of economic gloom.
“I feel more comfortable in the current environment then I did in the Tiger climate,” says Mike. “The Tiger era seemed to devalue hard work and money was more important.
“I’m not one of those artistic directors whose first question is ‘What’s the grant money for the year?’ and works from there. I ask, how many shows can we put on? Which ones are important? What audiences can we get? Then I work back to the grant.
“I know how to put on a good programme and save euros. I do mind the pennies and I know audiences are suffering because of the economic downturn, so we will be looking at ticket discounts for customers. We will also be looking at creating a voluntary programme and encourage people with skills to help the Town Hall.”
