Farewell to the Mint

The Project Arts Centre will go dark for six months when it leaves its present home at the Mint off Henry Street on Saturday

The Project Arts Centre will go dark for six months when it leaves its present home at the Mint off Henry Street on Saturday. The company was unable to agree terms on a new contract to extend its lease in the building. Project opens in a new custom-built facility in Temple Bar in March 2000.

The Mint will continue to be used as a theatre venue under a new name, The Theatre Space at Henry Place, and the management of Teresa O'Toole-Cahill, whose husband Paddy Cahill owns the theatre and the Mint snooker hall next door. The company describes the hand-over of the venue as "amicable". Project will not be producing plays in the interim period but Janice McAdam, its director of public affairs, says it will be kept extremely busy over the next six months preparing for the opening of the new building.

"We had been negotiating for an extension to our lease since June. It's very sad to be leaving the Mint," says McAdam. "Everyone, theatre companies and audiences alike, had become very fond of the theatre."

The new Temple Bar venue will be more than double the size of the Mint. At over 1,500 square feet, the new theatre will seat 250 people. The five-storey building, designed by Dublin-based Shay Cleary Architects, will house a studio with a 100-seat capacity, a bar, offices and a roof garden.

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Project's opening programme in the new venue will include Somewhere near Vada - an international video-art exhibition. "The exhibition will be using the entire building," says McAdam, "so people will be able to explore every nook and cranny." The Project will be inviting people to view the "shell" of the new building when it is ready in December.

Five star acts

`If Chaucer had been born in a council semi in wild west Dublin, he might have written a play like this," said the Guardian. The Bush Theatre's production of Dubliner Mark O'Rowe's Howie the Rookie, a modern, urban cowboy story woven out of two monologues, has been bombarded with superlatives at the Edinburgh Festival. At the time of writing, hard negotiations about further touring were going on in Edinburgh. Scotland on Sunday did say that being at the play was like being at Moliere with only a smattering of French and asked what was the point of it all, but it was a lone voice. The List gave it five stars and praised Karl Sheils and Aidan Kellys' "supreme acting ability" and O'Rowe's "phenomenal script". The Scotsman also gave it five stars (but sadly, no Fringe First), and described it as "the real thing, a great, classy purposeful beast of a performance", with the performances radiating "that strange white heat of perfectly focused theatre energy that even critics see only once or twice a year".

The Scotsman also gave five stars to the Lyric Theatre's production of Stones in his Pockets by Marie Jones, the tale of an international film crew coming to Kerry to bleed the local community by way of "local colour". While it was described as being "slightly too long" it is also described as a "winning combination of real substance with stunning performances (from Conleth Hill and Ian Mc Elhinney) and pure laugh-till-you-cry entertainment value". The point is made several times by the reviewers that the "movie-making heavy-weights should skip that masterclass to take in" the play (the Times).

The production comes to the Grand Opera House, Belfast, from Tuesday, September 21st until Saturday, September 25th.

Touched, Ursula Rani Sarma's play about Cora and Mickey's dream of escaping the sticks for Dublin, which first played at the Granary Theatre, Cork and is playing in Edinburgh at the Hill Street Theatre, was favourably reviewed in yesterday's Guardian, being described as "a small piece, not a major one, but beautifully done and there's an ache in its imagery".

Co-opera north

Carl Rosa Opera's presentation of The Mikado and 42nd Street, staged by UK Productions are among the highlights of both the Cork Opera House and the Belfast Grand Opera House's programmes, another milestone in their creative co-operation. Other visiting international companies to the Cork venue include Opera and Ballet International with their productions of Nabucco and The Marriage of Figaro in October, and The Young Vic Theatre Company travelling to Cork from the Edinburgh and Dublin Theatre Festivals with its telling of Tim Supple's Arabian Nights, which is garnering rave reviews at Edinburgh.

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest gets a subversive and physical reworking by Kaos Theatre Company when it visits in October while Storytellers' and Cork Opera House's co-production of Emma runs at the end of September. Inspired by her brother Kenneth's 1996 film, Joyce Branagh directs Hamlet for Second Age in the Opera House in December.

Other Belfast attractions include the "testosterone-charged" dance troupe, Tap Dogs, the Royal National Theatre's production of Noel Coward's Private Lives, a new Rocky Horror Show, the San Francisco Ballet with Balanchine's Themes and Variations and a Grand Ballet Gala, the Irish debut of the Welsh National Opera with Don Giovanni and Rigoletto, Diversions dance company from Wales, and the Tricycle/West Yorkshire Playhouse production of The Colour of Justice, about the bungled police inquiry into the deaths of black men Stephen Lawrence and Duwayne Brooks in the US, a play which should have rich resonances in Belfast.

The Belfast Grand Opera House: Belfast 241919. The Cork Opera House: 021-270022

Beach ballet

Through Fluid Eyes, a dance work created "in direct relationship with nature" will be performed tomorrow night and Saturday night on Greystones Beach; there will be no stage, but "sky, sea, mountain and birds will act as scenery" and "poetry, music, movement and art will emerge". The project is the result of Theatre of the Unconscious's two weeks of work together in Co Wicklow. The theatre does not "set out to entertain or persuade", they say, "but values performance from a place of spontaneity and impulse". Tickets, including hot supper, cost £10, concessions are £5 and children are free. Meet at Greystones Harbour at 6.30 p.m. and pray for inspiration.