The great theatres explosion

All the world's a stage: performance venues are bursting out all over, North and South. In the North, lottery funds have contributed to the explosion of theatres throughout the six counties. With the help of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's lottery unit, local councils have been able to meet a significant percentage of capital costs. As in the Republic, councils then put together additional finance packages through, for example, European programmes and their own funds.

In the Republic, we are also seeing the fruits of former arts minister Michael D. Higgins's decision to funnel £3 million of EU structural funds into a Cultural Development Incentive Scheme (CDIS) to develop a "necklace" of civic theatres in the greater Dublin area. Tomorrow, the second of these, the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire opens, and a new Blanchardstown venue is due to follow in the spring.

In addition, the current Minister for the Arts, Sile de Valera, allocated £36 million earlier this year to the ACCESS scheme for capital development projects. Applications for funds for new theatre venues are currently being assessed.

Most of the new venues will be multi-purpose, so that a wide range of groups - professional theatre companies, community arts groups, schools, amateur dramatics groups, musical societies and popular entertainers - can avail of state-of-the-art facilities.

The assumption is that once the new venues exist, they will attract an audience. But will they? It is likely only if the programming is varied and of a high standard, and the shows are well-publicised. Some theatres are meeting an obvious demand. When the theatre at the Dunamaise Arts Centre, Portlaoise, opened in May 1999, the shows packed out because the local population was "starved", according to its manager, Louise Donlon. The theatre has a large catchment area, and although "at first people in outlying areas were very wary", its commitment to audience-building means it now attracts an average 70-80 per cent box office.

Since it opened in October 1999, An Grianan, the 350-seat theatre in Letterkenny, Co Donegal has been steadily winning an audience, and its average box office is now around 60 per cent. But it remains to be seen how Derry's planned 1,000-seat theatre will affect it.

For the new venues in the greater Dublin area, a certain amount of audience research was undertaken before development began, although Karen Louise Hebden, director of the Pavilion, Dun Laoghaire says she has "no concept of who our audience is".

Brid Dukes, director of the Civic Theatre, Tallaght (opened March 1999) is confident that the new theatres in Blanchardstown, Ballymun and Dun Laoghaire will not affect her theatre's audiences.

"Fifty-two per cent of our audiences come from Dublin 24 anyway, and we've always focused on this local area and hinterland," she says. "Our biggest problem here has been making people aware of us. People also have huge problems trying to find us because we haven't been properly lit or signposted."

This is about to be rectified, and a new staff member responsible for audience development, Kerry Handley, has just been appointed. While Dukes admits that some recent shows, such as 1900, have had very low attendance (only 30 per cent box office), audiences are growing steadily, with an average box office of 55 per cent.

Once the fanfare of the launch fades, a newly appointed venue manager's next challenge is to secure ongoing revenue funding - for programming, marketing, staffing and operational costs - and competition for this is stiff. Both arts councils tend to wait and see how the venues perform before committing themselves to an ongoing subvention. There is a danger that while the facilities will be impressive in themselves, venue managers won't be able to develop challenging performance programmes because they'll be under pressure to make their buildings financially viable.

Solutions to this dilemma would be for lottery funding in the North to be made available for running costs; for local county councils, North and South, to spend more on their own venues (after all, they did build them); and for more government funds to be made available.

Is there enough good work being produced to sustain all the arts centres and theatres around the country? Even if there is, co-ordinated touring plans need to be developed between venues, to make the most of available "product". This is already happening informally between Dunamaise Arts Centre in Portlaoise and the neighbouring Mullingar Arts Centre, and between the Civic Theatre, Tallaght and the new Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. Both Brid Dukes and Karen Louise Hebden believe it will be necessary for the theatres to produce new work in-house, to supplement the touring productions they put on.

Some of the smaller venues (under 200-seats) may have to be commercially focused, as they won't be able to accommodate theatre companies which are on the regular touring circuit.

According to Karen Louise Hebden, there should, ideally, be an Arts Council officer with specific responsibility for venues and touring strategy. One encouraging development is Auditoria, a co-operative project between the two arts councils. This two-year review of the planning, programming and provision of performance arts venues, North and South, should provide a valuable analysis when its findings become available.