Save the last dirty dance for me

There may be few theatres in Ireland that know their audience quite as well as the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. The largest venue in the country, currently for sale for €20 million, generally operates as a receiving house for touring West End product, critically aware of every trick necessary to fill 2,111 seats.

So what’s the deal with the toilet queues? On an evening last week, lines of women curled through the corridors of the venue before the show and during the interval, progressing at such an anxiously slow pace it would have moved a music festival crowd to riot.

Audience research shows generally that more women than men attend theatre(nearly 60 per cent), but for Dirty Dancing any men in attendance are statistically insignificant. The atmosphere, accentuated with whoops, whistles and awwws, is like a slumber party circa 1987. Significantly, the house is full.

The last month has not been fun for theatre managers. Such is the gravitational pull of barbecues, beer gardens and the World Cup that, without immensely tailored programmes, a theatre’s audience stands to be decimated. It was saddening to see such conventional wisdom confirmed, to hear of smart, ambitious new works cancelling performances.

It's not exactly reassuring that the solution apparently lies in conservative commercial choices. Dirty Dancing, as both a home-video adaptation and a returning show, essentially sells itself as something its audience has already seen.

At a very well-attended Saturday night performance of Aristocrats, the Abbey's summer show, it was hard to say whether so many tourists had been enticed by accident or canny design. Patrick Mason's production is an appropriately stately and elegiac take on Brian Friel in Chekhovian mode, with a measure of political commentary in the margins. Yet, sitting among rapt American and Greek visitors, you appreciate how an Irish classic by an Irish master in the Irish National Theatre offers a cultural triple lock – a shamrock of assurance – during high tourist season. Audiences are always out there; they just have to be activated.

The Galway International Festival, for instance, noticed a few years ago that people were leaving it longer and longer to book tickets. This year, the centrepiece of its theatre programme, Enda Walsh's new play Ballyturk, sold out two months in advance. The Walshappeal has always been high, and the star cast of Cillian Murphy, Mikel Murfi and Stephen Rea doesn't hurt. But nothing else was known about the play beforehand. Are audiences less risk-averse than we think?

In Poland recently, all the talk was about Golgota Picnic, a production by the dependable Argentinian controversialist Rodrigo García, scheduled to be staged at the recent Malta International Theatre Festival. Following repeated and increasingly threatening protests against the show's "blasphemy", the performances were pulled – and, in the ensuing outcry, the play became considerably more popular than anyone could have planned, receiving dozens of readings throughout the country.

The religious outrage was as predictable as the progressive outcry, but, in a weird way, both sides got what they wanted: an unreasonable antagonist to strengthen its resolve.

It may be a far cry from the crossed-legged lines of Dirty Abbey, but here too there's a similar method at work. Audiences haven't disappeared Dancing or the tour buses to the – they've just splintered into many different audiences. The trick is to pick one and build on it.