Dublin’s disappearing venues: A promised 500-seat theatre is shrouded in mystery

On a recent visit to a cinema in Dublin city centre the familiar grand foyer had the jarring sense of being inhabited by a visitor from someplace else. Around a corner, and behind a staircase, stood a grizzly-faced usher, pointing a torch in the direction of cinemagoers’ seats.

What’s strange about seeing Mr Screen – the beloved grotesque by sculptor Vincent Brown – standing here, unremarkably installed in the entrance hall of O’Connell Street’s Savoy Cinema, wasn’t the toothily gruesome expression on his face. It was the confusion of something looking askew, as if out of place: doesn’t he belong somewhere else?

For 28 years the sculpture had stood on the corner of Hawkins Street and Townsend Street for everyone to see, including visitors to the Screen Cinema, an art cinema with a run-down charm, its neon sign blinking outside while foreign-language and independent films screened within. In 2016, its attendances said to have declined, the cinema was sold. Its operator, the Dublin Cinema Group, moved the sculpture across the river to its Savoy venue.

Mr Screen seems illustrative of what’s happening in the capital right now, where iconography from lost cultural infrastructure is detached from its sources, and easily deposited somewhere else, even as part of the rebranding of a street or neighbourhood. On Francis Street the sign from the demolished Tivoli Theatre has a dissonant effect in its new location outside a StayCity aparthotel, where the theatre used to stand.

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A marketing campaign, rebranding the site and the wider Liberties neighbourhood as part of a “new” Dublin, references the former theatre, as if promising visitors a destination rich with culture. In reality the aparthotel’s plans for an operational arts centre, included as part of a planning application to address the loss of the Tivoli, have yet to materialise.

The last of the independent theatre infrastructure established during the recession of the 1980s vanished with the razing of the Tivoli. Managers usually acquire keys to new venues during economic downturns, but the loss of long-time venues like Andrew’s Lane Theatre has recently dovetailed into the collapse of many new spaces created during this century’s recession: Block T’s large-scale Smithfield premises, South Studios, Theatre Upstairs and Chancery Lane Theatre have all disappeared. The supply of culture venues is in danger of not being renewed.

That makes what is currently happening on the corner of Hawkins Street and Townsend Street, on the former site of the Screen Cinema, all the more noteworthy. College Square, is a mixed-use development owned by the property group Marlet. According to its website, College Square will be a “place for residents and visitors”, with “54 high-end apartments and 18,300 sq ft of retail space”, and a “new shopping district” coming to life.

During the High Court proceedings in 2019 it was reported that Press Up hospitality group had expressed interest in operating the venue

An application for planning permission references a “c 500 seater entertainment venue”, indicated in a basement drawing as having an auditorium with a stage.

Though still under construction, the space is already attracting attention. At a meeting of Dublin City Council’s arts and culture committee last May, a feasibility report addressing the need for a 500-seat venue in the city identified the College Square premises as an existing development with “theatre or other similarly scaled venue” classification.

However, it’s difficult to find out whether the council’s idea or, indeed, any other culture space will occupy College Square. In 2019, The Irish Times reported on a High Court application by Dublin Cinema Group seeking an injunction against the College Square development. The group claimed that a restrictive covenant had been implicit in the sale of the Screen Cinema site, instructing that no cinema or theatre can operate there until 2036.

The group has initiated legal proceedings over similar developments before as part of internal disputes. In 2011 director Paul Ward brought an action against the group’s codirector Paul Anderson, who had entered an agreement to develop a new multiplex in Stephen’s Green shopping centre. Anderson argued that the project would not be in competition with the group’s nearby cinemas.

If the distance between O’Connell Street and St Stephen’s Green was too close for Ward to have a cinema competing with the Savoy, the distance between O’Connell Street and Hawkins Street is even smaller. The Irish Times asked the Dublin Cinema Group to clarify what kind of culture space could exist at College Square under the restrictive covenant, but received no response. Marlet declined to comment.

[ A farewell to Dublin’s Screen and the rest of the old-school arthouse cinemas ]

Dublin Cinema Group failed to secure an injunction against Marlet’s development, on the basis that any future breach of the covenant was only speculative at that time. “That is a hypothetical situation which does not concern this court,” said Mr Justice Michael Twomey.

Four years later the space is under construction, but its possible function remains unclear.

It may be difficult to imagine now, but the narrow intersection between Hawkins Street and Townsend Street, hemmed in by Luas tracks and behind the bulk of Pearse Street Garda station, was once a buzzing centre of Dublin cultural nightlife. Between 1935 and 1962 it was the location of the Theatre Royal, a gigantic cine-theatre with a stylish art deco facade, and a Moorish-inspired auditorium with high arches and marble staircases. It offered daylong events, combining intermittent film screenings with live music, spectacle and comedy: the smorgasbord of cine-variety.

“Here was this amazing place you could get into. It was very cheap,” says Conor Doyle, a historian dedicated to telling the venue’s story. The Theatre Royal, along with the nearby Queen’s Theatre on Pearse Street, formed part of a theatre district, with Mulligan’s pub on Poolbeg Street remembered as a popular establishment for audiences and stage folk. Doyle says that the Regal, a cinema adjoining the Royal, had a capacity for 650 people. “There were 1,100 seats in the Queen’s. 4,000 fit into the Royal, so all in all you had around 5,000 people milling around in that small patch of the city, which would be great to revive. It must have been incredible,” he says.

The high points of the theatre’s history, according to Doyle, were appearances by American music and comedy artists in the early 1950s, after manager Louis Elliman undertook a visit to Hollywood to secure star entertainers. There was a Nat King Cole concert in 1954, but most people mention Judy Garland’s visit in 1951. Performing in Dublin as part of a European tour, one year after a suicide attempt and collapsed relations with MGM, Garland’s concert seemed uplifting. Doyle tells a story about how the theatre personnel sensed she was missing her children so they brought the daughter of one of the Royalettes (the theatre’s in-house precision dancers) to meet her. The girl sat in the front row, and Garland dedicated The Trolley Song to her.

A previous era in the Royal’s history, under the management of John McGrath, sounds sensational and chaotic when read aloud today – a mix of Hollywood Golden Age stars seen in the flesh, alongside stunt performers, impressionists, musicians (Rachmaninoff!) and black minstrel acts. In 1936 there was a high-profile cancellation by controversial boxer Jack Doyle, and a protest by a group of 20 people – “mainly of West African nationality,” according to The Irish Times – against the African-American singer Clarence Johnstone for condoning the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Who remembers that?

When Doyle saw that a new pedestrian street would be running through College Square, he proposed that it reference the Theatre Royal. “Marlet have been brilliant. They were delighted to call the street Theatre Royal Way,” he says.

For him that is not another marketing tool to rebrand a neighbourhood. (He sensed that Marlet weren’t familiar with the Royal before they spoke to him). It is, however, another memory of an old theatre floating in a city that feels like it’s in a transitional period between inherited infrastructure and new builds.

During the High Court proceedings in 2019 it was reported that Press Up hospitality group had expressed interest in operating the venue. That company restored the Stella Cinema, which, not unlike the Royal, has a blast of art deco glamour. “We are prepared to do another culture-driven music venue like our award-winning music venue of the year 2022, The Workman’s Club which has over 500 cultural events a year, if Marlet want us to,” said a spokeswoman for Press Up.

That leaves the city waiting for a ball to drop, to see what happens next on the corner of Hawkins Street and Townsend Street, where, extraordinarily, it can feel like a song is meant just for you.