Mystery of the vanishing venues

Dublin desperately needs a medium-sized theatrical venue - for the sake of emerging companies as well as for audiences, writes Peter Crawley.

'Dublin will miss this venue," says Michael Scott. "Seriously, it will." You can understand his need for emphasis. Since 1999, Scott's Dublin City Theatre (formerly The Machine) has leased the SFX on Upper Sherrard Street from its owner, the music promoter MCD, and used the venue as a theatre, studio and rehearsal space. The SFX, an uninviting theatre space on the outside and widely considered inadequate for the needs of shows on the inside, now has a rendez-vous with a bulldozer.

When the complex is demolished later this year to make way for 41 new apartments, a chunk of Dublin theatre history will also be reduced to rubble. There has been a theatre on the site since the middle of the 19th century. The present building, named after the St Francis Xavier Hall and constructed in 1957, has served as the national concert hall, a home to the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra, and latterly an occasional, large-scale performance space.

Soon to be relieved of the responsibilities of running the venue, Scott isn't nostalgic for the days of leaking ceilings and chaotic get-ins, conceding that while the value of property in Gardiner Street might have recently shot up, the location of the SFX was always a problem: "It's not a venue where people can just generally walk to," he says. "We struggled with the venue for a number of years. Really, last year I decided it was time to stop struggling." However, he notes, a huge arts space is about to be lost in Dublin. And we've been here before.

The SFX is just the latest in a series of final bows and last exits for Dublin performance spaces. In 2003, the beleaguered Crypt Arts Centre, an 80-seat venue based in Dublin Castle, collapsed following the loss of Arts Council funding, the cessation of a FÁS employment scheme, and the demands for space in the Castle during Ireland's presidency of the EU. In 2004, the equally small City Arts Centre, which had long been an incongruous fixture among the encroaching financial institutions near Moss Street, sold its premises for more than €4.2 million, becoming a cash-rich but "virtual" arts organisation. Meanwhile, THEatre Space on Henry Street packed up shop with less ceremony, while the Tivoli awaits redevelopment as a theatre-cum-apartment complex.

The old cliche that all that's required for drama are bare boards and a passion becomes less inspiring in this town, when even bare boards have an over-inflated value in the ferocious property market. What Peter Brook called the empty space is now simply an apartment block waiting to happen. The shrinking of such stages has placed considerable pressure on Project Arts Centre, which, for renting companies, now seems like the only game in town.

"I'm very oversubscribed," admits Willie White, Project's artistic director, rattling through a schedule that is almost booked solid for 2006. "It reflects the fact that there's not very much infrastructure in the city centre." The Project, with two spaces available to rent to production companies, tries not to cater on a first-come-first-served basis, instead rationing out its available slots according to an artistic policy. When only so many companies can be accommodated, however, a show's prospects are automatically curtailed to generally no more than a three-week run. When Rough Magic's Copenhagen or Landmark Productions' Skylight proved to be runaway successes, for instance, neither company could extend their dates at the theatre nor transfer to a similarly-sized venue. Frankly, there aren't any.

And Project could use some competition. "It's an unpopular thing to be calling for more capital when there have been a lot of arts centres built everywhere bar Dublin," concedes White, "but actually the city centre is poorly served."

Nor is the Project a flawless venue. It has no run-around spaces, no flies; the flexibility of its black-box performance space requires time and money to manoeuvre; the auditorium size makes it difficult for even a successful show to make back any money; and its architecture seems generally oblivious to the needs of a show. In the words of Rough Magic's artistic director Lynne Parker, whose company has effectively grown up in the theatre, it is not user-friendly.

Yet, as Rough Magic's producer Loughlin Deegan acknowledges, it is important for a theatre company to be associated with one venue. "It's much harder if a company becomes nomadic," he says. In order to build a following, in other words, it's important that audiences know where to find you.

Theatre spaces are all about possibility, providing an architecture for the imagination. A venue's concrete dimensions are thus entwined with the art.

"Our imaginations are very much restricted by the venues that are available," says Deegan. "The size of the Project's space sets the artistic parameters. There will be the odd time when Lynne will be thinking about a show that may need a space bigger than, or different to the Project. And that's frustrating."

The forthcoming Rough Magic production, a version of The Taming of the Shrew which opens in March, is a case in point. With a 13-member cast it's an expensive show to stage. "If we were able to stage that show elsewhere, we would be able to recoup more of the costs - if there was a medium-scale venue in Dublin." There is a rare accord among companies, artists and development agencies that a medium-sized venue - one that holds an audience of between 400 and 600 people - is the single biggest deficit on the Dublin theatre landscape.

It is the infrastructural void that prevents the transfer of regional successes to the nation's capital, and precludes international tours from companies such as Suspect Culture or Out of Joint. And as Landmark Productions' Anne Clarke can attest, having recently leapt from Skylight and The Goat at the 200-seat Project to Dandelions in the 1,200-seat Olympia, "It was a real wake-up call for me. I hadn't actually realised the scale of the problem. Ideally we need a 600-seater in the centre of Dublin, which is big enough to make financial sense and isn't too terrifyingly big for shows of a certain scale." The Arts Council's recently published strategy, Partnership for the Arts in Practice, makes the advocacy for such a venue a priority.

Dublin City Council's own arts plan similarly aims to develop "major arts infrastructural projects". The question is, what's stopping them? With the implosion of the SFX passes the opportunity for something Michael Scott considers "could actually make an Opera House for Dublin" (another stated ambition of the Dublin City Council arts strategy), but there may still be an ideal theatre opportunity on the horizon.

"In most European capitals you have a City Theatre," says Loughlin Deegan. "We have a National Theatre here, but we don't have a City Theatre in Dublin. It is the responsibility of Dublin City Council to provide that, and I think there is an obvious opportunity staring us all in the face. The Abbey building has to be kept in theatrical use once the Abbey theatre moves. It creates an opportunity there, for a proportionally small investment from Dublin City Council, to provide the first City Theatre on that historical site."

In another display of "What comes down must go up", 345 years after it first opened its doors, Smock Alley is be resurrected at the end of 2007 under the aegis of the Gaiety School of Acting. Before the 220-seat venue reopens, however, the 110-seat Smock Alley Theatre Studio goes into use at the end of this month, providing the Gaiety School with a venue both for its students and the theatre community at large; "so that people have a home," as the GSA's director Patrick Sutton puts it.

This may be one of the few encouraging signs for young and emerging companies, who now find themselves squeezed out of the Project's Cube by such established companies as Rough Magic, Bedrock or Fishamble. "We needto be all moving up the ladder to make room on those stages," says Deegan.

Instead, emerging artists are left with few options other than the public toilets, car parks and assorted "site specific venues" during the Dublin Fringe Festival.

One contrary voice comes from John O'Brien, the former director of the Crypt, whose tenure ended when he arrived to the venue one day to discover that Dublin Castle had boxed up their belongings. "One of the massive problems with venues," says O'Brien, "is that to actually be cost-effective, a venue has got to have at least 500 seats and it's got to be able to fill them." It's one of the reasons he isn't optimistic about the forthcoming Dundrum Town Centre Theatre which will have 180 seats. "They'll lose money in the first two years," he explains bluntly. "Get me a napkin and we'll do the maths. A theatre of that size will not generate profit. It just won't."

Nor does he believe it's the lack of space which is curtailing theatrical development. "In this country we've become more concerned with the players and the painted stage than what they're emblems of," he says. "The history of theatre would suggest that when the creative groundswell is sufficient, then venues will be found. When there is a genuine desire for it, people will do theatre on streets, they'll do it in pubs. The spaces will emerge."

But, as Willie White likes to say, you have to plan for success. Few believe that audiences are the problem. Most believe that available venues are. "As well as Croke Park we need playing fields for the imagination," says White. Even in the ruins of demolished venues or among the blueprints for sparkling new property developments, theatres and audiences may continue their relationship: if you build them, they will come.