`Children in arms cost one guinea. The public are advised that there are police in attendance. Bicycles are stored free. Gentlemen in bare feet are not admitted." The last assistant manager of the Queen's Theatre in Pearse Street claimed he had come across an old poster for the theatre containing these words. They speak of a world which, though it was still flourishing 50 years ago, could now be separated from us by 500. Music hall and its successor, variety, was a theatre of the poor, the unsophisticated (though that could not be said of many of its performers) and of ordinary Dubliners for whom it was a vital and popular part of life. If we could sit in on one of these shows now, we would probably think it quite terrible - but times change, and 50 years from now people will undoubtedly feel the same about the vast majority of our own most popular entertainments.
Philip B. Ryan was the historian of this world. He died last year, and his often fascinating book is a fitting memorial to him. Because of his interests it tends to concentrate on variety, though the old Abbey (a nest of vipers as well as a cradle of genius) is here, and there is much in the section on the Queen's about its use as the home of melodrama, and the place where great writers from O'Casey to Beckett were influenced.
Variety evolved from the music halls, due to the success of the latter. As the demand grew for popular entertainment, impresarios came to see that there was a huge family audience waiting to be tapped. Women, in general, were not attracted to the rough and ready world of the old halls, where drink, violence and easy virtue were often ingredients in the stew of a night out. Bigger, more elaborate theatres were built and better behaviour became the norm. It was not long before chains of theatres were formed throughout Britain and Ireland, with artistes contracted to move from one to the next. Thus it was that many, if not most, of the acts that were to be seen in Dublin came from across the water.
All this changed with the start of the second World War, when travel became more difficult. So far from destroying variety it led to a new golden age for it here, with new, local stars being discovered and given their chance in a way that would have been more difficult for them in the past. It was not to last long - the advent of television in the post-war world rang the death-knell of variety, to all intents and purposes, by the 1960s.
Seven important Dublin theatres have disappeared in living memory, according to the author, and their histories are set out here. The Theatre Royal was the greatest - or maybe just the biggest - of these. It had four incarnations, 1821 to 1880, 1886 to 1895 (when it was known as The Leinster Hall), 1897 to 1934 and, finally, 1935 to 1962, when it accommodated 4,000 people, including standing room. It was claimed that it was the biggest theatre in Europe, though in fact there was a 5,000-seater in Germany. A vast barn of a place, its size made intimacy between audience and performers almost impossible, but it was greatly loved and, as well as its variety shows, played host to a host of international artists, ranging from Paul Robeson and Fritz Kreisler to Danny Kaye and Bob Hope. It ran a new film and stage show every week, and it was said of the performers that they had to remember the current show, forget the last one and learn the next one, all at the same time. Sundays were the only night for which it was possible to book, and so popular were they, that every week ticket scalpers did a thriving business on the street outside.
Then there was the Queen's, home of a troupe of comedians called the Happy Gang until the Abbey took it over in 1951, when its own theatre burned down. It stayed there until 1966, one of the dreariest periods in our national theatre's history, when most of its work, as the author points out, wasn't all that different from what the Happy Gang had been doing before.
Who now recalls the Tivoli, not the present house in Francis Street, one of the few gains for the theatre in modern Dublin, but a music hall on the quays where the former Irish Press offices now stand? It closed in 1928. The Capitol, originally called La Scala and built as an opera house, will be better remembered. It was a splendid building which opened in 1920, and fell to the developers in 1972.
Other theatres have sunk into even deeper obscurity. I must confess I had never heard of the Coliseum - in fact, I've used the name in a new novel of mine, believing it to be fictitious. It was a sizeable building that could hold 3,000 people. It stood where the arcade behind the GPO is now, was opened in 1915, blown to pieces in the 1916 Uprising and never reopened. Equally little known, though more modern, was the Torch (opened 1935, closed 1941) which was in Capel Street, at the Bolton Street end.
All these and the people who played in them are charted, as is the Olympia in its earlier lives as, first, Dan Lowry's Music Hall and then the Empire Palace. There is little space for the many small theatres that have always come and gone in the city; they include the Lantern, the Garrick, the Eagle, the Pocket, the Hardwick Hall and, of course, the splendid Pike - the list goes on. Perhaps more might have been given to some of these and less to diversions such as the life of Peg Woffington or the malign role of W.B. Yeats in the founding of the Abbey, as the author sees it. But the book does contain one quite remarkable addition; a wonderfully warm and witty evocation, by Noel Sheridan, of his father, the much-loved but vulnerable comedian, Cecil Sheridan. If, like Mr Hardcastle in She Stoops To Conquer, you love everything that's old: "old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines", then this is the book for you.
The Lost Theatres of Dublin by Philip B. Ryan. pp 240. The Badger Press. £16.99. Fergus Linehan's new novel, The Safest Place, set in the world of Dublin's variety theatre, is published today by Town House.
