Is it curtains for regional theatre as we know it?

It's easy, these days, to feel nostalgic for a time when things seemed irretrievably better. But earlier this year, when a 20-year-old copy of the Limerick Events Guide was unearthed and its contents circulated online among local artists, it didn't require much sentimentality to recognise what had been lost.

Inside, an ad for the Belltable Arts Centre, from 1995, listed three new plays produced by three professional regional companies in Ireland, performing for a week apiece: shows from Waterford's Red Kettle, Limerick's Island Theatre Company and Mayo's Yew Tree Theatre. There was a particular poignancy in that trio: all of them have since been de-funded by the Arts Council and ceased operation. They're hardly alone. Since 2008, and the beginning of the financial crisis, 25 production companies have seen their regular funding discontinued – 10 of them based outside Dublin.

Beneath the posting, the playwright Mike Finn, formerly of Island, left a trenchant comment. "The biggest scandal in arts funding in recent times is the concentration on theatre funding in the capital. Makes my blood boil to see what we have lost."

One of the most anguished and brutal decisions of the Arts Council in recent years has been the effective dismantling of the company structure. There are now just eight regularly funded theatre organisations left standing, including the Abbey, and only two of them exist outside Dublin: Druid in Galway and Blue Raincoat in Sligo (Corcadorca, in Cork, is funded via another platform). The new policies developed to sustain artistic activity have hit regional theatre disproportionately hard.

This makes Niall Henry, the artistic director of Blue Raincoat, seem like an endangered species. Ireland's only full-time ensemble originates its works in the Factory Performance Space in Sligo – often alternative, usually physical – and regularly tours them through the country. Henry has noticed, with growing alarm, the thinning programmes of the venues they visit. "You're going around the country and there's nothing," he says. "Relative to 20 years ago, when we were really poor, and it was chock-a-block."

I met Henry last March, when Blue Raincoat was premiering Shackleton, a stately and wordless piece based on the explorer's legendary Endurance mission. Henry had developed a fascination with explorers: another piece, The First Cosmonaut, depicted the journey of Yuri Gagarin, while his latest production, a revival of Alice in Wonderland, suggests a long-standing kinship with adventurers. But it was hard not to read their Shackleton, especially, as another kind of metaphor, less given to stirring feats of heroism than a much rawer story of survival.

Henry understood the rationale behind the closure of so many of his peer companies. When the Arts Council’s own budget from government (itself never generous) began to diminish severely from 2009 to 2014, it became hard to justify having so much public money tied up in unexamined existing relationships. The mechanism that sprang up to replace companies has been project funding – artists propose to stage or develop a single work, and successful applicants receive money to undertake that project. Competitive, unpredictable and sought by productions of vastly different scales, project funding offers little stability for artistic careers, but it has proven an effective policy for the creation of some vibrant new works. Most of them have been based in Dublin: 25 projects were funded in the capital in 2015, with 11 funded elsewhere.

Project funding, Niall Henry says, has "been extremely successful in Dublin because it's a big urban environment. But in areas of lower activity that type of structure doesn't work." Compounding this is an inevitable talent drain. As Louise Donlon, the director of Limerick's large Lime Tree Theatre and the recently restored Belltable Arts Centre, points out: "There would have been a time when there were a number of people in Limerick who were able to make a living in the city doing theatre. Now most of them have had to go to Dublin."

That also makes it difficult to rebuild infrastructure in the regions. “There isn’t that critical mass any more, a group of people able to generate work,” Donlon says of the shrinking local industry. “If someone in Tralee decides they want to apply for a project award, they have to assemble a team and bring everybody to Tralee. Financially, it just doesn’t make sense.”

Here, it seems that the Arts Council's policy is being thwarted by the Arts Council's practice. "There is a distinctive relationship between people, places and culture," reads its recent policy document, Making Great Art Work, while advocating for "sustainable, countrywide development of the arts". You can find a similar thrust within the Government's published draft of Culture 2025, its framework policy document, exalting cultural participation and provision across the nation with a similarly vague idea that local authorities will pay for it. Nobody I spoke to found this encouraging.

To help keep the lights on in regional venues, the Arts Council has increased its touring support in recent years, to appreciable effect: from 2010 to 2014, the number of supported tours rose modestly (from 12 to 15), but the number of performances they gave more than doubled (from 124 to 274, extending the audiences outside Dublin from almost 25,000 to well over 41,000). But the scale of those touring productions has been modest; typically one-, two- or three-person shows which, thanks to the Show in a Bag platform, have come to characterise much of contemporary touring.

NASC, for instance, a network of regional venues that pool resources to co-host touring productions of a larger scale, plans to facilitate a new tour next spring following a hiatus of three years. “Shows are not touring,” says Donlon, whose Lime Tree Theatre is a member of NASC. “We’d meet very regularly and we find that there just isn’t the work out there. Fundamentally, it’s down to lack of funding. There are people out there who want to make work and tour it, but they can’t.”

Niall Henry describes a critical juncture in cities such as Waterford and Limerick, without producing companies and with scant programmes. “It will take a long time to fix that. When that’s gone, and this is the key point, the next thing that goes is the market. And when the market goes, the will goes.”

Donlon felt similarly. “Going to the theatre has fallen off the agenda,” she says sighing. “It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation: We’re not presenting it every week so it’s not possible to build the audience. Then you stop programming it, which discourages even more people from going. It’s an impossible situation.”

Henry was able to make positive proposals, though, based on the audience loyalty engendered by Blue Raincoat's example which has managed to sustain an audience locally, nationally and build one beyond (this year they brought their outdoor production of Yeats's On Baile Strand from Sligo's Strandhill to New York's Coney Island).

“It’s a problem that you have to come at in a number of ways,” says Henry. “Genuinely, what we need to do is find some kind of investment strategy for a couple of centres outside Dublin. We also need a touring strategy that’s happening with a certain pattern to create a market.”

One idea is to stimulate “touring roadshows”, a season of works led by a bums-on-seats big-hitter, followed by an established alternative company and concluding with an emerging one: a three-for-one deal involving Druid, Brokentalkers and Collapsing Horse, for instance. “It sort of makes theatre work for itself,” said Henry. “You have to do build a season to sell it.”

Donlon is enthusiastic about the idea. “The audiences are there, and there’s definitely potential to do that. But it’s a long-term strategy. Audiences take a while to give you their trust. Once they do, they’ll take a chance on something you recommend.”

It will also take time to build up local capacity again, and it will require dynamic thinking. “I agree we can’t go back to the way things were,” says Henry. “But I don’t agree with the idea that one size fits all. That’s a philosophy that kills things.”

I wondered whether Blue Raincoat, as one of the last regional theatre companies left standing, felt any sense of security. “The only security I find, strangely enough, is in the middle of terrible fear,” says Henry. “Our security is in the idea that if we try to be better than we were yesterday, as honestly as we can, then all things being equal we will continue to be funded.” If regional theatre isn’t left to languish, it’s important to find a new approach for its support.