Cork Arts Theatre reopens next month, benefiting audiences and players alike, artistic director Dolores Mannion tells Mary Leland.

Cement dust in her hair and stars in her eyes just about sums up Dolores Mannion's condition as she surveys Cork's newest theatre building. It is, to be blunt about it, a black box, but it has been hollowed out of yet another of the city's multiplying apartment blocks and its very existence is a triumphant marriage of opportunity and negotiation.

The Cork Arts and Theatre Club has what seems like a long history; those who remember it best - and first - will recall a precipitous flight of stairs in a trembling building on the South Main Street where its tiny auditorium on one side of a minuscule landing was partnered by a somewhat larger bar on the other side. The memory is of great theatrical events in a small space - very occasionally interrupted, in the bar at least, by rumours of a Garda raid.

From there the club - and it was a club, with memberships and committees and rules - moved to Knapp's Square on the north bank of the north channel of the river; at least the back of the building looked out on the square while the front was down a narrow street, from which even more precipitous stairs led to the bar and reception area. The shallow auditorium was reached from there with another flight of stairs giving access to what passed for dressing rooms.

One of the joys of the new building is that audiences will no longer have to negotiate the gutter-dripping street and the vertigo-inducing stairs while players awaiting their cue will no longer have to hide from late-comers.

It might have continued like this, with serious programming at the mercy of an amiable management style, had not first Dolores Mannion arrived to straighten things out and second the little precinct itself come under the developers' writ.

Mannion has been with the club - now a limited company - for the past eight years, and from the beginning was intent on putting a coherent shape on its production policy (her CV includes 68 productions in a list which ranges from her social science degree to stage school in London and further training at the Lyric in Belfast) while also increasing its income by making it more useful to other companies.

Fondly known as the CAT Club, the theatre also runs an annual one-act play competition for new writing as well as a schools programme, and Mannion also worked to develop its relationship with the National Drama League of Ireland. It is with the local heats of that event that the new theatre will open to the public on November 2nd, a festival to be followed by the premiere of The Cage, by Patrick Galvin on November 7th. It's now 45 years since Galvin's first play, And Him Stretched, was produced at the Unity Theatre in London.

"Cork has never staged a premiere of Galvin's work. Yet he and his wife Mary Johnston have given so much to the city, not least with the foundation of the Munster Literature Centre. I didn't work with him at the Lyric in Belfast although I knew him when he was there. When I read The Cage, I thought it was a good play; when I heard a reading I thought it was a great play. It was written about 25 years ago, it's about women on the dirty protest in the North, but while it has some very disturbing scenes it's not a kind of Six Counties Bad Girls. There are some staging difficulties, but I think we've got over those."

SHE SHOULD KNOW, as it was she herself and the executive, led by chairman Rodney Bolingbroke, who designed the internal layout for the theatre. That layout was a kind of wish-list which architects James Leahy & Associates brought to fruition. It's very slightly bigger than before, and all on one level. The seating is arranged on a stepped concrete ramp which limits the flexibility of the auditorium space, although the extra eight feet of height above the stage gives greater scope for set design and manipulation - crucial, says Mannion, for the first major production.

The lighting will be rigged by Ray Casey, another theatrically experienced member of the board. The acoustic ceiling inhibits noise from below reaching the apartments overhead (a lot of money has gone into sound-proofing). Backstage there is a run-around space for easy movement and space for set and prop handling. The two dressing rooms are not big but they are adequate, with shower rooms en-suite, and there is a storage area which could serve that purpose as well if the need arose.

But the club has to be a club and so the second large space is the bar - with potential as a coffee-shop - which has all kinds of nooks and crannies capable of making money: an office and gallery to be rented out (Tig Fili is the potential tenant at a monthly charge of €1,200), a small workshop area, walls which can be hung with art exhibitions, a box office and administrative area for the theatre itself, toilets for the public and a bar storage area for stocks and supplies.

Here the great advantage for the CAT Club is the street-level entrance; this gives it a presence on the river-side, directly across the bridge from the Opera House. It also means the premises can be open all day so that its exhibition space has an additional value, becoming the only venue on this stretch of the north west bank to offer cultural as well as corporal refreshment.

This is the culmination of the past eight years during which the club readied itself for what might be coming, until eventually the plans of developer Neil Sullivan took shape in the form of a tall apartment building which, spreading across Knapp's Square and onto Carroll's Quay, would either eradicate the CAT club altogether or else incorporate it into the new scheme.

The club's landlord was Seán Lucey, who suggested that the 99-year lease might be manipulated into a purchase deal; the management realised that its rental income could be enhanced to match the repayments on a mortgage and drafted a business plan which has now resulted in a 100-seat modern city-centre theatre building at a cost of €500,000.

"It seems small money - it is small money!" says Dolores Mannion, as she remembers the work which went into the initial process of managing the club so that its debts were gradually wiped out.

"But we had to make the decision to carry on, this was such an amazing opportunity, and we knew we had the bar proceeds and venue rental to feed the mortgage - which is almost the same as the rent we had had to pay out ourselves. And because so many people on our executive committee are involved in theatre they are giving their labour free for the fit-out, which should cost about €45,000. The CAT Club has always been rent-driven and the intention is to change so that we'll be production-driven. As it is we're booked out to April of next year and our long-term plan is to have 12 in-house presentations in a year."

THE ONLY SPOKE in this apparently well-oiled wheel is staff. So far the club has worked with the FÁS Community Employment Scheme but it wants to be able to keep people for longer than a training period.

With no Arts Council support - although the club is applying now for a grant to fund a season of Galvin plays - and only an initial approach to the National Lottery for a capital grant, Mannion is hoping that Cork City Council might provide €250,000 which, by halving the mortgage repayments, would allow greater employment opportunities - as in, payments for professional casts as well as for long-term staff.

In fact, City Hall is already involved through its donation of €2,000 a year; perhaps it might consider a more significant endowment for a theatre which is now to be called the Cork playwrights' theatre, and which is already promoting Cork writing, not only through its own new writers' scheme but in its programming, with Galvin's premiere being followed by Declan Hassett's new play Survivors, which will be directed by Michael Twomey and opens on November 21st.