Old Lady of King Street is far from dead

The show went on through two World Wars and the 1916 Rising, but there could be more turbulence ahead. The pantomime venue dubbed the Grand Old Lady of South King Street in Dublin is to change hands for the second time in almost three years.

The current owners of the 127-year-old Gaiety Theatre confirmed this week that they were on the verge of disposing of the property snapped up for £2.8 million in March 1996.

In that time the British Break for the Border Group has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds refurbishing the theatre's bars and introducing late-night clubs, where revellers dance, and watch bands and old movies instead of the more traditional theatrical fare.

This week the company, which is selling the 1,100-seat theatre in a consolidation of its interests that consist mainly of night-clubs and restaurants here and in Britain, announced it was in negotiation with "interested parties". One of these is said to be an Australian producer with a strong commitment to the arts, and the sale, for a figure in excess of £3 million, is in a matter of weeks.

THOUGH her paint peeled and her furnishings sagged and times were sometimes tough, the Grand Old Lady remained a vibrant feature of the Dublin entertainment scene throughout this century and the final decades of the last.

For most Dubliners, their first visit to a theatre came when they approached the Gaiety's faintly Gothic facade. Well-scrubbed children clutching bags of bon-bons attended the pantomimes, which have been playing there since 1874.

Built three years earlier by the Gunn brothers, the Gaiety was designed by C.J. Phipps and decorated with ornate swirling plaster work now painted in dramatic golds, creams and reds.

Owners such as the Elliman family, builder Joe Murphy and broadcaster Eamonn Andrews have come and gone, but architecturally the theatre has changed little over the years. A refurbishment in 1955 saw the vertiginous gods area merged into the upper circle in what was the most significant structural change. The overall effect is one of spacious intimacy, and the Grade 1 listed building is still the finer example of the two Victorian theatres left standing in the capital.

When empty, hours before the hustle of the afternoon matinee of the current panto Cinderella, the silence hints at a thousand excited whispers of audiences gone by. In the long dressing room in use for the panto season by the Billie Barry kids, you can almost hear the chatter of past dancing troupes, all feather head-dresses and fish-net tights.

Lisa Misch, a young woman from Pittsburgh who has been working at the theatre for just a year, is giving the guided tour which includes exploring secret stairways and the presidential box. "It is just very, very beautiful and so old. Where else could you get such a palpable sense of theatrical history?"

There was a time when all the stars came out for the Gaiety, says George McFall (70), who was stage manager at the theatre for 48 years. Lillie Langtry, Orson Welles, Jack Benny and Sarah Bernhardt. Home-spun heroes Jimmy O'Dea, Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris.

And then there was the music. Marvellous operas, sometimes five in a fortnight, says McFall, companies from Italy and Paris with their hand-painted scenery and sets that had to be "taken asunder" and shipped back afterwards. The theatre remains the annual stamping-ground of the Dublin Grand Opera Society (now Opera Ireland).

This in the days when opera was loved by all, and South King Street used to be thick with people in sleeping bags camping out overnight to secure the best seats.

There were the musicals from societies around Dublin: the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society has been treading its boards since 1914. Recent dramatic highlights included Martin McDonagh's Cripple of Inishmaan, while in the past many of John B. Keane's plays received their first outing there.

The Gaiety has always been a commercially-minded venue. It was a people's theatre which gave the people what they wanted, a mixed bag of comedy, dance, drama and song. It gave them Maureen Potter, the grande dame of Irish music hall. For decades she packed out the theatre for 14 weeks in the summer with her Gaels of Laughter variety show and returned in the winter for the panto season, when she regularly packed it out again. She was there in the lean times, when the theatre got into financial trouble in the 1980s but was later wonderfully restored.

And the whole of Dublin knew her catchphrase as well as they knew the faces and names of the ushers who brought them to their seats: "If you liked the show tell all your friends. If you didn't then save your breath to cool your porridge."

ACCORDING to the chief executive, John Costigan, the Gaiety's many fans need not worry about the theatre's future. It will continue to be a commercial theatre, he says, and if a proposed application for millennium funding is granted, the Gaiety will be bigger and better than ever before.

What Costigan is proposing is a radical £5.1 million enlargement of the stage area and a refurbishment of the auditorium. The additional stage and orchestra pit space would allow companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Bolshoi Ballet and the Kirov to stage productions in the theatre that would be impractical with present facilities.

The overhaul will also increase the chances of the Gaiety becoming the permanent home of an all-Ireland opera society when, as planned, such a group is created.

Some people would be happier to look to the Gaiety's golden days in imagining a more dramatic future for the theatre. "I hope when it changes hands that someone who wants to be in the theatre business takes it over," says George McFall, who "detests" the advent of late-night clubs at the Gaiety and says it is a disgrace that better care is not taken of our old theatres.

"I hope they bring back the quality travelling companies and do a variety show during the summer. Some people say variety is dead, but I don't think so. It might be sick all right, but not dead. Just like the Old Lady."