Named The Stage’s Theatre of the Year in 2023, the Lyric is the only full-time producing theatre in Northern Ireland. It has a permanent staff of 37 and is located slightly outside the centre of Belfast in a building that opened in 2011, with a main space seating nearly 400 and a studio of around 120 seats.
It is a prolific producer of quality work. Since reopening after the pandemic in 2021, it has produced 28 shows, of which 18 have been new writing. Highlights of the past year have included the world premiere of Owen McCafferty’s Agreement – about the Good Friday Agreement – and the production I saw, a radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Richard III, featuring Michael Patrick, who has motor neurone disease, in the title role.
The theatre’s executive producer, Jimmy Fay, reckons that – outside film – the Lyric is the biggest employer of freelance artists in Northern Ireland.
“The Lyric is a production company that has a theatre,” he says. “It’s not a theatre that is relying on other people to bring in work. We choose what to do. We create it. We have a workshop. We commission the shows, we rehearse in the main house. We build our sets just off site there. It’s like a movie factory.”
By Northern Irish standards, the Lyric receives substantial funding – its most recent settlement was £1.4 million, which puts it on a similar footing to, say, Nottingham Playhouse in England – but that funding has fluctuated quite considerably over the past few years and has gone as low as £900,000 in recent memory, which would put it more in line with somewhere like Farnham Maltings. Certainly, it is considerably lower than the principal producing theatres in any of the other UK nations.
The big problem, however, is the uncertainty of year-by-year funding agreements: “There’s no guarantee that next year we’re going to get the same as last year, which is a bit crazy to run the business on, because you want that bedrock of funding. If you were to take away that funding, the whole place would collapse.”
He has sympathy for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, which he thinks is “fundamentally trying to do the right thing with the resources that it has”.
“But something isn’t working. Something has to change, because actually, it’s too low. And it’s just too detrimental, particularly to freelancers. And for us, a couple of bad swings at the box office would take the grin off my face really fast.”
Fay sees part of the Lyric’s role as being a “launch pad” for other Northern Irish companies. As well as its own in-house productions, the Lyric serves as a home for outside work, especially in its second, smaller space, which hosts work from lots of independent Northern Irish companies. While I’m there, Tinderbox Theatre Company’s revival of Yerma is playing.
“I believe you need a really vibrant independent sector,” he says.
“When you have a lack of money, conservatism starts to come in, and then it just trickles down. It’s a bit like a frog in the pot of water, it’s boiling before you know where you’re at”
But it is in that independent sector where Northern Irish theatre is facing its greatest challenges. Belfast MAC, which features 350-seat and 120-seat theatres as well as art galleries, was created to be a regular home to Northern Ireland’s independent theatre sector when it opened in 2011. However, since reopening post-pandemic, it has faced crisis.
In 2023, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland threatened to remove funding from the venue. In the end, funding was restored, but the period of upheaval saw redundancies and the departure of the entirety of the centre’s senior leadership team: its chief executive, commercial director, director of finance and creative director in quick succession.
Jules Stewart is the recently appointed creative programmes manager, who heads up the theatre programming at the venue. “It was a really, really tough year, but we’re through it and we’re still here, and we still believe in the MAC,” she says.
She looks back on the years directly before the pandemic fondly, when the theatre would have produced at least two shows a year in its main space, as well as a programme of new work, “which would have been paid for by the more popular stuff… but there was so much variety. And then Covid happened”.
Unlike the GOH and the Lyric, the MAC has struggled to reconnect with its audience post-pandemic and Stewart says she has also struggled to find product that the arts centre can afford to programme, resulting in far more commercial hires and one-nighters.
One exception to that is Aurora, which is playing as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival when I visit. It is produced by Prime Cut Productions, one of Northern Ireland’s busiest and most successful independent producers. This year alone it has produced Lie Low, which played at the Royal Court in London, and The Pillowman in a co-production with the Lyric.
Una Nic Eoin is the company’s executive producer and speaks eloquently about the sector’s problems.
“There is a message coming down from our government that the culture of this place is second rate,” she says. “There’s such a lack of priority given to it. I think its placement in the Department for Communities was a terrible mistake, because you can never, ever compare an art gallery or putting on a theatre show to social housing. You just can’t. And so if you actually look at the department’s listings online, we’re always listed at the bottom.
“But when you have a lack of money, conservatism starts to come in, and then it just trickles down. It’s a bit like a frog in the pot of water, it’s boiling before you know where you’re at.”
Back at the Lyric, Jimmy Fay uses a similarly powerful metaphor to sum up the state of theatre in Northern Ireland: “I think it’s on a life-support machine. The funding is awful, but the talent is huge.”
