City of phantoms: How did Dublin enter cultural collapse?
Dublin is haunted by missing venues. Infrastructurally, it is in a state of cultural collapse. Photo: The new SFX Hall, Irish Times 19th October 1957
Like a lot of culture journalists, I want to meaningfully address the wave of development that is demolishing venues in Dublin. What made sense was to try tell the story of what happened, extracting memories from history. It’s a story of people who fought to make the city a better place, and people who sold its cultural facilities to make a profit. It’s easy to forget the venues that are no longer present on the street, and I’m against forgetting.
In the Irish Times on 27th August 1984, journalist Ray Comiskey lamented how unsubsidised venues in Dublin had either closed shop or began reducing the numbers of plays in their programming. “To all intents and purposes the decline of independent management in the theatre is complete,” he wrote.
The shining hope in Comiskey’s article was a play scheduled to open at the Eblana Theatre in the basement of Busáras, where even resident producer Phyllis Ryan seemed to have given up on the viability of the auditorium’s small capacity. According to the article, the company mounting the play needed full houses over three weeks in order to make a profit. “It’s risky, yet with the theatre in general in the state it’s in now, someone has to try,” wrote Comiskey.
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Father Peter Troddyn of the Jesuit order on Upper Sherrard Street bought the counter-weight fly system from the soon-to-be-demolished Theatre Royal and helped transform the order’s Saint Francis Xavier (SFX) Hall into the city’s premiere pop music venue, destined to host concerts by U2, Sinéad O’Connor, REM and Alanis Morrisette. Troddyn hired a promoter from Denis Desmond’s MCD company as the venue’s programme director.
In 1984, Paul Mercier’s debut play Drowning ran at the SFX Hall, an ecstatic musical about a man in a neglected Dublin neighbourhood who escapes into the fantasy of living life as a rock star.
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The stockbroker Hugh O’Donnell sold his business to concentrate on his true passion. He founded Andrew’s Lane Theatre in 1989 with Pat Moylan and Terry O’Dea. Many contemporary plays from Europe and the U.S. received productions there, such as Patrick Süskind’s Double Bass (Brendan Gleeson as an orchestra musician in a love-hate relationship with his instrument - and his vocation) and John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God, about a nun who swears her pregnancy was divine conception.
Andrew’s Lane Theatre opened with Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, a comic back-and-forth between two New Yorkers - a romantic chef and a cagey waitress - who have sex after a date. “Why are you doing this?” says Frankie, still traumatised by an abusive ex-boyfriend. “I’m tired of looking. Everything I want is in this room,” says Johnny.
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Anthony Byrne, owner of the Dublin Bazaar, grew up watching Hop-Along Cassidy in the Tivoli Cinema on Francis Street. Wanting to give something back to his community, he transformed the cinema that was closed for over a decade into a theatre for £250,000.
In 1987, the Gaiety Theatre wasn’t available to the Dublin Theatre Festival and a different venue had to be secured for a flagship production of Pygmalion by Stockholm’s Orion Theatre. Construction on the Tivoli Theatre completed in time to host Orion’s production, which, among its inventions, transformed the theatre’s foyer into the rain-soaked, bustling Covent Garden of Bernard Shaw’s play. Pygmalion became a talking point throughout subsequent festivals.
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The satirical revue Sweet and Sour, featuring Anna Manahan and Fergus Linehan, ran at the Eblana Theatre for eight months in 1972. Lee Dunne’s semi-autobiographical play Goodbye to the Hill premiered at the Eblana Theatre in 1978, before transferring to a venue in the Regency Hotel where it ran for almost three years. A play can find a vast audience in Dublin.
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Ireland teetered on the verge of financial collapse during the 1980s. Charles Haughey’s plan to regrow the economy and attract new forms of investment introduced entrepreneurial policies, but these abandoned provision of services for the promotion of economic competitiveness. The 1986 Urban Renewal Act established a “special purpose development agency” (later known as the Dublin Docklands Development Authority), a quasi-governmental and quasi-non-government organisation operating outside the jurisdiction of Dublin City Council, to replace a dilapidated warehouse district with a new financial centre where there would be no capital gains tax on foreign currency transactions.
With the power to grant planning certificates to developers without permission from Dublin City Council, the Dublin Docklands Development Authority cast private-sector initiatives in the role of rebuilding the economy and shaping the landscape of Dublin. The initial 11-hectare site under the authority’s control was expanded to an area encompassing 526 hectares.
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In Annie Ryan’s 2020 comedy The Fall of the Second Republic, set in an alternate version of late-century Ireland, a deviously well-connected Taoiseach reminiscent of Charles Haughey conspires with a property developer to burn down a landmark theatre and build a banking centre. Politics facilitates the kind of urban development that replaces cultural venues with businesses that maximise profit. The satire felt personal coming from Ryan and Michael West’s company Corn Exchange, whose fate had been tied to the economy more overtly than others, having fought to survive a 48% cut to its Arts Council funding following the Great Recession. If The Fall of the Second Republic was the Corn Exchange’s final play, it took aim at the forces trying to destroy them.
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Thom McGinty (AKA The Diceman) recruited passers-by on Grafton Street into his surreal world of dramas and gags. In character as Mona Lisa, he dropped the legendarily cryptic demeanour to wink at admirers. People giggled at his Dracula when he terrorised them. He also floated down the street in Butoh-slow motion as a bloodied Pierrot clown following the homophobic murder of Declan Flynn. He appeared as a penis wrapped in a condom to protest a new law requiring a doctor’s prescription to purchase contraception.
A street can be a stage for playing out a society’s frustrations, as long as authorities don’t shut it down. In 1983, Dublin street performers organised when Gardaí began to remove them from Grafton Street. McGinty went to a Garda station looking for a street performance licence. “They said I couldn’t have a licence unless I was selling something. I told them I was selling winks,” he told the Irish Times. Gardaí told McGinty to write to a superintendent but he didn’t get a reply.
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In 1993, Andrew’s Lane Theatre presented Caryl Churchill’s play Vinegar Tom. Churchill dresses the play’s characters, who are 17th century women accused of being witches, in modern clothes because the play was conceived during a modern witch trial - when attempts were made to introduce abortion restrictions in England. Churchill met the play’s producers at a pro-choice protest. Seen at Andrew’s Lane Theatre less than a year after a referendum defined abortion access as a right to travel, it seemed women were not to be trusted, no matter the century.
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The Grapevine Arts Centre vacated its former premises when safety regulations came under increased scrutiny after the Stardust fire. Led by executive director Sandy Fitzgerald, the centre purchased a former warehouse on Moss Street in 1987 with a £144,500 loan from Allied Irish Bank and a £85,000 investment from U2. Renamed the CityArts Centre (inscribed in a stylish neon sign on the front of the building), the venue was designed to include rehearsal rooms, a theatre auditorium and a cafe.
In April 1994, Conor McPherson’s breakout play The Good Thief premiered at CityArts Centre. It set the precedent for a lot of standout plays in that decade, with its vivid monologue form, and the shades of Tarantino in its story of a criminal brawler fleeing for his life after botching an assignment. Six months later, an unprecedented revival of the play already went before audiences at Dublin Theatre Festival.
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Iomhá Ildánach theatre company, led by artistic director John O’Brien, made a deal with the Office of Public Works to manage the Crypt Arts Centre underneath Dublin Castle’s Chapel Royal. There, in 1996, Shakespeare’s epic The Tragedy of Julius Caesar received a knockout, intimate production by Loose Canon, marking early-career success for Karl Shiels, Susannah de Wrixton, Jason Byrne and Willie White.
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An Irish Times article on 1st December 1994 with the headline “Dead After Dark” observed how seven years on, Dublin Docklands Development Authority had failed to deliver its proposed mixed-use development. The launch of the project promised a neighbourhood “lively by day, luminous by night,” including an open-air market, a sculpture park, a folk art museum, a winter garden, along with cinemas, restaurants, bars and nightclubs. All that had been built so far were offices and apartments.
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Between the mid 1980s and late 2000s, Fianna Fáil governments introduced a series of measures benefiting the construction industry, making it the second-largest employer in the country after the public sector. In that same period, spending on local authority-housing was cut.
When the Bacon Report in 1998 advocated for local authorities to be granted power to acquire building land at use value prices, the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition government refused, saying it could interfere with the market. As far as the government was concerned, the provision of services rested with property developers.
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The Franciscan order on Merchant’s Quay were lease owners of the Riverbank, a 400-seat theatre situated across the Liffey from the Four Courts. The Riverbank was the home of Second Age, a company specialising in productions of classical plays. In 1996, the Franciscan order handed The Riverbank over to the Department of Justice, who converted it into court offices.
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In 1998, the Crpyt Arts Centre was the venue for Diptych, a play by Louise Lowe. Not unlike The Glass Menagerie, the play is a factory worker’s recollection of a time when he aspired to leave his job for a greater life, with his family’s financial survival hanging in the balance. From there, the plot enters Dublin’s spiralling heroin crisis. The man struggles with addiction, and his wife tries to persuade him to take methadone to help his withdrawal.
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Space 28, North Lotts is the home of Loop recording studio but in 1998 it accommodated Louise Lowe’s Faithful Place, a play set during the final months of the Monto red-light district in the 1920s. Prostitutes are seen fighting for their livelihoods as the Legion of Mary move in to shut down the brothels. The blend of subject matter, abstract design, movement and iconography (the Legion of Mary’s holy statuettes) would be transmuted 12 years later into Lowe’s breakout 2010 play World’s End Lane.
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In 2006, Bank of Ireland decided to close its arts centre on Foster Place rather than invest in basic equipment required for live performance. The venue was primarily used for music. Agnes Bernelle gave a concert of Weimar music there. Roger Doyle performed sections of his electro-acoustic epic Babel. When the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre closed, letters to newspapers pointed out that banks were posting record profits at the time. The site became home of the National Wax Museum for years, until the building-owners sold the site to the Irish Stock Exchange in 2016.
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At the Eblana Theatre in 1994, the poet Pat Tierney’s autobiographical play The Bleeding Moon received a production. Tierney’s much-publicised story was woven from Ireland’s hidden histories: he was separated from his mother at Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, abused at an industrial school, and was diagnosed HIV-positive at a time when the government had to be dragged into action on the AIDs epidemic. Tierney’s dramatization of his life is unsentimental, filled with rejection, but it doesn’t cow to those hardships. One scene shows him joyfully discovering masturbation in a Catholic orphanage, another sees him avoid danger as a cunning criminal. It was more important to get a one-up on the world.
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On Grafton Street, a child sobs when they drop their gelato. Someone dashes across the street to avoid an ex-lover. There is no one to ease the sting. Thom McGinty died from AIDs-related illness in 1995.
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Charlie O’Neill’s play Hurl, produced by Barabbas, premiered at the Tivoli Theatre in 2003. A group of asylum seekers, trapped in a limbo while waiting for their refugee status, form a hurling team and ascend through the league. It’s partly a feel-good sports play, but O’Neill doesn’t shy away from a dehumanising asylum process either, the same process that strands people in the direct provision system introduced four years before Hurl.
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The Focus Theatre closed its doors in 2012 due to funding issues. Deirdre O’Connell’s import of Lee Strasburg’s Actor’s Studio in New York was playing ground for Tom Hickey, Gabriel Byrne, Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy and Joan Bergin. In 2019, a boutique cinema Mutiny Theatre opened on the site.
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In 2004, Selina Cartmell imagined transforming the closed Iveagh Market on Francis Street into a colosseum for a major production of Titus Andronicus. The structure of the Edwardian-style building - under the neglect of lease-owner Martin Keane - was so deteriorated that the venue was deemed unsafe. Titus Andronicus went on to blow audiences away at Project Arts Centre. Dublin’s little piece of ancient Rome never came to life.
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Irish-American businessman Maurice Regan, who controls the Mercantile Group, bought the queer venue The Dragon on South Great George’s Street and closed it in 2015 to open a fusion restaurant. The closure disrupted the livelihoods of drag artists and DJs. Dublin’s remaining LGBTQ nightclub The George is currently under the ownership of the Mercantile Group.
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At the CityArts Centre in 1994, True Lines, a play devised by director John Crowley and cast, was a sensation. Here was a contemporary portrayal of Irish twenty-somethings living abroad, told with the sweeping visuals of a Robert Lepage play. A businessman traces an aboriginal walkabout in Australia (Tom Jordan Murphy), a waitress hitchhikes through the American West (Cathy Belton), an anthropologist works a dig in Africa (Gwynne McElveen), and an architect struggles with depression in Germany (Stuart Townsend), all exiled from Ireland and struggling to belong anywhere.
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In 2016, the Planning and Development Housing and Residential Tenancies Act enshrined in law the fast-tracking of student apartment buildings that don’t have to go through the local authority planning process. The kind of unchecked development allowed to take over the Dublin Docklands, free from the jurisdiction of Dublin City Council, extended across the city just as Dublin plummeted into a housing crisis.
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Return to the Hill at the Eblana Theatre in 1995 was Lee Dunne’s follow-up to his wildly popular 1978 hit Goodbye to the Hill. Dunne famously transmuted memories of his childhood in a neglected Dublin neighbourhood into a hard-boiled story of graphic sex and drinking. The absence of judgement in his portrayals of prostitution, alcoholism and gambling addiction is a more important aspect of his legacy.
Dunne gave the impression of being around forever. It has been speculated that Goodbye to the Hill, which ran for nearly three years, was the longest ever running play in Dublin. According to artist Gavin Murphy, who created an exhibition about the Eblana Theatre, flyers for Return to the Hill were still scattered on the floor of the Eblana Theatre as of 2017 - it was the last play to be seen at the theatre before it shut.
In 2012, Bus Éireann attempted to transform the venue into a new home for the Cyril Fry Model Railway Museum but that moved to Malahide’s Casino Cottage instead. The Eblana Theatre reportedly still has operationality as a theatre, despite being in the dark for 26 years.
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In 2001, the CityArts Centre suddenly closed its doors, with Sandy Fitzgerald stepping down as executive director. As it became in desperate need of refurbishment, the venue found itself sitting on the most desirous real estate in the city, near the business hub of the Dublin Docklands. The board sold the building to a consortium of property developers for €4.25m in 2003, making CityArts the richest arts organisation in the country.
According to an article in the Times Ireland in 2015, that nest egg was spent trying to justify CityArts’s existence as a community arts organisation without a venue, through an expensive restructuring process trying to secure its niche in the eyes of the Arts Council, all the while without a revenue stream. As for the CityArts site, it has been dormant for 18 years, while some of its owners were gnawed by debt during the Great Recession. It was put on the market in 2021 and is likely to be bought by KC Capital for €40m, who will transform it into an office building.
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Writer Griffin Hansbury began his blog Vanishing New York when a revered Polish coffeehouse inside a ballroom on Times Square was being replaced by a white-tablecloth restaurant with a “name chef.” Ever since, Hansbury has been documenting the transformation of beloved neighbourhoods into homogenous boutiques and condos, and gave a cogent account of the story in his book Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul. He defines a neighbourhood as an emotional ecosystem, and says that its destruction by hypergentrification is a form of trauma.
Quoting a previous critique of American urbanism and the disorientating effects of living through rapid, intense development, Hansbury writes: “If the pace of change accelerates, a disjuncture between memory and actuality arises and one moves through a city of phantoms”.
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In 2003, John O’Brien arrived at his office in the Crypt Arts Centre one morning to find his belongings already boxed up. The venue had sustained an Arts Council funding cut, and it was to be transformed into a media centre during Ireland’s presidency of the European Union. At the time, O’Brien spoke out against the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats government’s decision to cut FÁS Community Employment Schemes for the arts. Venues such as the Crypt Arts Centre and CityArts Centre were dependent on those schemes to cover the salaries of staff.
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The Chancery Lane Theatre established by Gavin Logue had too short a life, but in that period it hosted Red Kettle Theatre’s last play Perfidia before it went into liquidation in 2014. (Red Kettle had a surprise return in 2019 with The Red Iron, but it remains to be seen if that was a once-off). After transferring its plays to Dublin’s leading venues over 28 years, it must have been strange for the Waterford company to end things here, in an unfamiliar new spot with only 50 seats, located on a quiet side street. But whatever the play, Chancery Lane had the intimate, candle-lit ambience of a neighbourhood joint – something now sorely lacking.
In 2019, it was reported that the nearby Liberties neighbourhood was set for the same kind of homogenous development that swept the Dublin Docklands. Chancery Lane Theatre could have been something unique.
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In 2010, a group of seven artists had a radical vision for Dublin. Taking over the Tully Tiles warehouse on Smithfield Square, they founded Block T, an enterprise that provides artist studios for a membership fee, and runs art classes for the public. Block T announced in 2016 that they had to vacate the Smithfield premises because their model was “no longer viable in the growing market.”
Planning permission for a new building on the Block T site, due to contain offices, retail space and a restaurant, was sought by the Linders Group, a property holding group also altering the south-east corner of Smithfield Square into government offices. Block T still provides studios and classes at its current home on Bow Lane West but, unlike the Smithfield operation, it doesn’t have a performance venue. That dark, concrete expanse was lent to Andrew Adamson’s contemporary play Body Electric, where the gripping combat between two martial artists became a surprising adaptation of a Walt Whitman poem. Our bodies reveal our immaterial emotional states, the play suggests, and what’s dreamt up inside our minds sometimes manifests in the world.
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Long before the locality was compared to Williamsburg, Smithfield was dense with apartment buildings and few amenities. That didn’t stop director Vanessa Fielding, who secured venues such as Collins Barracks, the Law Society and Dublin Brewing Company for staging plays. Fielding became skilled at negotiating deals on cultural spaces with private developers and Dublin City Council. In 2008, she persuaded Paddy Kelly – one of the developers who bought the CityArts site and let it rot – to give her empty ground-floor units on the edge of Smithfield Square, and she founded an arts centre there: The Complex.
Fielding and her staff were evicted when the building was acquired by NAMA. She later struck a deal to move The Complex to the former Keelings fruit market on Little Green Street. After a few years, that venue was razed to become a hotel and retail complex, but The Complex survived by moving to a former fruit warehouse on Arran Street East – where it opened in 2019 with an exhibition space, artist studios and a high-ceilinged auditorium (that still awaits its first play). In an interview with Peter Crawley that year, Fielding was realistic about how the privately owned building is likely to be sold in the next few years, and The Complex would be without a home again. “All the good work could dissipate, unless, say, the Department of Culture were to buy the site,” she said.
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Photographers Sean Breithaupt and Yvette Monahan approached the owner of an empty 18th century warehouse on New Row South with the idea of setting up studios to be rented for shoots and events. South Studios was established in 2007 and hosted plays such as Ruth Lysaght’s sci fi drama Oh Look, Hummingbirds. Totally Dublin reported the closure of South Studios in 2017, to make way for apartments and a scheme comprising of a restaurant, café and gym.
In Oh Look, Hummingbirds, a journalist investigates a mysterious hospital that uses lifelogging technology to replay its patients’ trauma back to them. Obsessive video recordings of the journalist’s dead boyfriend are used to torment her, but towards the end there are memories of intimacy that prevail, unexposed by surveillance, and which remain poignantly private to even the play’s audience, via the abstraction of movement and video design. The creatives behind Oh Look, Hummingbirds came from Dublin’s alternative arts scene, which flock to off-the-beaten-track venues like South Studios.
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Denis Desmond, founder of MCD, eventually bought the SFX Hall from the Jesuit order on Upper Sherrard Street. In 2006, he knocked down the venue and built apartments. MCD currently owns the Gaiety Theatre and the Olympia Theatre.
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Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street announced a shock closure in 2020, while unable to trade during a COVID-19 lockdown, making it impossible meet the colossal rent set by the building’s owner – a company connected with developer Johnny Ronan. The closure endangered Bewley’s Café Theatre, a premiere venue for high-quality plays. An agreement was made to reopen the café on the basis that it pays its rent arrears.
Earlier this year, Bewley’s owner Paddy Campbell had the shrewd idea to donate the café’s majestic stained-glass windows, designed by Harry Clarke, as a heritage item to the State, entitling the café to a tax credit that would help offset the expense of its rent obligations. Ronan’s company initiated an ownership claim over the windows, arguing that they aren’t Bewley’s property to donate. Campbell says the windows were never part of the sale of the building to Ronan.
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In The World of Yesterday, a memoir of living in Vienna in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the Austrian writer Stefan Zwelig describes a civilisation in the truest sense of the word. The hearty deliberations of a serious café culture, the plentiful feuilletons and a largely art-loving populace made for a place where, as Clive James put it, “learning was a voluntary passion, and wit was a form of currency.” So intense was the enthusiasm for cultural amenities that people openly grieved when they were lost. Zwelig recalls the solemn atmosphere of a final performance at the venue where The Marriage of Figaro premiered, and how the audience raced onstage afterwards to take home a splinter from the stage as a memento. On another eve of closure, a concert hall where Chopin and Lizst gave recitals saw audiences stay in their seats for an hour after the performance ended, their heartbroken sobs rumbling into a loud keening.
Key to Vienna’s vibrant cultural infrastructure was the coffee house. Not as much a destination as a way of life, it was a place where ideas were exchanged through conversation or absorbed from reading feuilletons. According to Zwelig: “It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee. Every guest can sit there for hours on end, talking, writing, playing cards, receiving post, and above all reading an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.” Key players in Vienna’s literary and media scene were forced to flee before the country’s annexation by Hitler, forming a fault line across Austrian society and bringing the golden age of the Viennese coffee house to a close.
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Anthony Byrne, no longer enchanted by the picture-house of his youth, wanted to knock down the Tivoli Theatre and get a good deal for it. Development was first mooted in 2004, for a mixed-use scheme that included apartments and a new theatre. Byrne reneged on the promise of a theatre over the years – a 2017 planning permission application described a 289-bed aparthotel, restaurant and gym. Permission was refused after concerns were raised about the loss of a major cultural facility.
Byrne tailored the plan to include an “exhibition space” and permission was granted. The Tivoli Theatre is no longer on Francis Street.
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Pay Moylan became the owner of Andrew’s Lane Theatre, and managed it while building an international career as a producer. She channelled profits from Stones in His Pockets, which played London for four years before going to Broadway, back into the Dublin venue where plays by widely unknown playwrights searched for audiences, sometimes at a loss. Some wagers pay off but others aren’t worth the risk - the writing was on the wall, in 2007, that Moylan could not afford the cost of necessary refurbishment, and she sold Andrew’s Lane Theatre to property developers. A hotel since built on the site aims to attract “well-informed, contemporary and tech-savvy business and leisure individuals.”
The final play seen at Andrew’s Lane Theatre was 84 Charing Cross Road, New York writer Helene Hanff’s autobiographical play about a letter-written correspondence she had with a London bookseller. Both forge a friendship over several years, exchanging notes on literature, but he sadly dies before she has a chance to visit him. At the end, the fabled bookshop 84 Charing Cross Road closes.
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Ireland’s largest independent bookshop Chapters announced its closure this year. After nearly 40 years, it’s a bookshop that developed a reputation for one section in particular – the second-hand department is labyrinthine, presenting countless out-of-print editions at your fingertips. (I picked up the splendid first edition of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Shelbourne, illustrated by Norah McGuinness, for a bargain).
Chapters owner William Kinsella told Newstalk that for the first time since the Great Recession, the bookshop’s annual turnover didn’t grow. Kinsella’s approach may have been old-school – preferring the on-the-ground interaction of bookselling to the advent of online shopping, which he admits he embraced too late. The Irish Times noted that the unit let to Chapters is in the middle of a dispute between its owner, the Cosgrave Property Group, and a management company who have increased their fees by multiples.
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“The people who decided to put this street to use for the time that remains to it have behaved with the freedom of children playing in a junkyard,” wrote Maeve Brennan, in 1967, describing a new development in New York. An Irish émigré, Brennan was emotionally invested in her adopted home, and documented its cultural collapse in her “The Long-winded Lady” columns for the New Yorker.
In an article titled “West Eighth Street has changed and changed and changed again,” Brennan wrote about different moments of realisation that a wipe-out of cultural spaces was underway. For a restaurateur, it was when the Whitney Museum vacated its elegant townhouse-premises, which was later bulldozed. Brennan’s moment was when the International Book & Art Shop had to relocate due to high rents. Brennan appreciated the bookshop because it was not wholly enslaved to consumerism. Aimless browsing and curiosity were allowed to be purposes onto themselves. “Even if you bought nothing, you came out much better off than you were when you went in,” she wrote.
Brennan wrote with cool detachment, rarely sounding distraught, but here she couldn’t prevent a conclusion from sounding like an appeal to people’s rationality: “I look across the street at the dark blue paling and at the shuddering spectre of the long-gone Whitney Museum, and I think: what next? What next”?
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Artist Gavin Murphy held an exhibition about the Eblana Theatre in 2017. The title of the exhibition, Double Movement, quotes Roland Barthes: “This double movement is a profound one: architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.”
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In 2020, a group of artists who worked at the CityArts Centre launched a campaign to save its handsome neon sign. The campaign described the sign as an “important social and cultural symbol, one that represented an inner city community and key cultural institute at a time and place in our city’s history.” The artists called for the sign to be retained in any redevelopment of the building (unfortunately, the KC Group’s plan seems to involve razing the site and erecting a new building) or for it to be preserved in one of the city’s museums.
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According to a recent real estate report, the average salary of apartment residents in the Dublin Docklands is €117,095 per annum. Roland Quinlan, property editor of the Irish Times, reported in February 2020 that 100 new hotels were either in construction or in the planning progress in Dublin. The government long absolved itself of responsibility, leaving provisions of services to be handled by private-sector initiatives, which are driven by money.
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The new writing venue Theatre Upstairs at Lanigan’s, led by artistic director Karl Shiels, sometimes felt like an ingenious scheme. Shortly after its beginnings in 2010, it was courting playwrights who previously presented work at the Abbey Theatre’s Peacock stage, at a time when that theatre’s programming was risk-adverse and barely staged any new plays. Theatre Upstairs wasn’t just another small venue, it was a response to what had come before - plays seen there hummed with the inheritances of Conor McPherson and Mark O’Rowe, whose practical economy, shades of tragedy and scabrous detail had found breakout success in similarly intimate spaces such as the CityArts Centre. Playwrights Caitríona Daly, Stephen Jones and Seanan McDonnell had their debut plays seen there. Theatre Upstairs announced its closure in 2019.
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Announcements of new hotel developments that would shut Merchant’s Arch and downsize the Cobblestone pub ignited a public outcry. A campaign to save the Cobblestone, under the banner “Dublin is Dying,” led hundreds of protesters who, exacerbated by subsequent closures of Chapters bookstore and Science Gallery Dublin, marched to Dublin City Council offices. Anger transformed into action
Dublin City Council refused planning permission to Marron Estates to build a hotel on the Cobblestone site. The Council explained that it refused permission “due to the removal of a space which has been used for teaching, rehearsal and performance for traditional music, and which is considered to make an important contribution to the cultural offering in the area”.
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In its final years, the property developers owning Andrew’s Lane Theatre leased it out to club promoters. The promoter Cormac Cashman organised a club night called Fridays Are Gay (or F.A.G.). I was new to Dublin, and I danced there with a group of friends I recently met. I looked past the flashing lights at the princely expanse of the venue. I had no idea of what was already lost.
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