An Irishman’s Diary: Dublin’s communist bookshop and an ancient theatre

A good theatre venue, ideally, should itself have a bit drama. This need not involve extravagant architectural effects. Consider, for example, Dublin’s New Theatre.

In most ways, it’s a quite conventional little space, with 66 seats and a stage. But it’s also a play in two acts, because to get to the theatre, you must pass through a book shop. And it’s no ordinary bookshop. It’s the only communist one in Dublin.

This is an inversion of the usual order of things, whereby a radical organisation maintains a moderate front so as not to attract unwanted attention, or scare away the faint-hearted. Here, the back-room operation is the more mainstream of the two. Although they’re mutually sympathetic, the theatre has a broader remit than the shop, reviving neglected Irish plays and hosting minor productions that might otherwise struggle to get a stage.

The night I was there, they were doing Molière's The School for Wives and very entertaining it was too. And apart from scandalising the church in pre-revolutionary France, Molière was hardly a radical.

But Connolly Books is not only the atrium of the theatre, it's also the interval bar. So over tea or a glass of wine, you can browse Das Kapital or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists or admire the miniature busts of Lenin and Marx behind the till.

That the shop survived the fall of Soviet communism is no surprise because it and its predecessors have survived a lot of other things down the years.

In the book-burning 1930s, one of several ancestors had to close after a crowd of protesters – apparently inspired by a Pro-Cathedral sermon on the dangers of socialism – incinerated the shop.

A 1950s successor was also attacked before the business moved to Parliament Street and then around the corner to East Essex Street where it is now and where it has since also survived the rise of that flagship of rampant western consumerism known as Temple Bar.

Famous plays

Anyway, as I say, the history of the venue adds a certain frisson to the theatre. As perhaps does its geographical setting.

During Molière’s quieter moments, I sensed the presence of an underground movement, although this is probably only because I’d read about the complex renovations required by the building a few years ago due to the fact the River Poddle runs beneath it.

Of course you can have too much drama in a theatre, as the history of another nearby venue, Smock Alley, proves.

In its latest incarnation, Smock Alley is newer than the New Theatre. But it’s also the city’s oldest surviving playhouse. It just took a very long interval – more than 200 years – between acts.

This was partly a drinks interval. For years after its closure in 1787, it served as a whiskey warehouse. Then it became a church, and that too had a theatrical element. When the religious building opened in 1811, marking the retreat of the Penal Laws, although Catholic Emancipation was still some years away, it was the first Catholic church to ring its bells in the city since the Reformation.

As for its earlier spell as a theatre, that began way back in 1662 and lasted over a century and in the process introduced some famous plays to the world, including Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer and Sheridan's The School for Scandal.

This was despite serious structural problems relating to its Liffey-bank location, on reclaimed land, which meant that the action was not always confined to the stage.

On one notorious occasion in 1670, during the performance of a Ben Jonson play, the upper gallery collapsed onto the middle one causing that in turn to crash down onto seats below, killing – according to one contemporary account – “a poor girlie”.

There was another collapse in 1735. And yet nearly three centuries later, when the by-now closed church on the site was excavated by archaeologists, it was discovered that the old theatre had never been demolished, as long believed, but that the 1662 foundations and much of the post-1735 rebuild remained. So in 2012, after extensive renovation, the old Smock Alley reopened.

Like the New Theatre, it's fully river-proofed these days. Which is just as well, or we might all have been tempting fate the last time I was there. The occasion was an Irish-language performance of a Samuel Beckett play, Matalang, better known in English as Catastrophe. @FrankmcnallyIT