Mick Lally, Micheal Mac Liammoir, Maeliosa Stafford, Maire Stafford, Walter Macken, Frank Dermody . . . the little playhouse in Galway's Middle Street has a large and impressive roll-call. It even boasts its own resident ghost.
This year the Taibhdhearc celebrates 70 years, but does it deserve 70 more?
It is a question that has been asked more than once, and most recently of the new Arts Council, which has no direct link with the institution. Founded by Galway University academics in 1928 with Mac Liammoir's Diarmuid agus Grainne as its first production the Taibhdhearc is the national Irish-language theatre. For many of its critics, this title is now something of a joke.
Take its summer season, when it should be alive with all sorts of productions reflecting the revitalisation of the language in this part of the west. Instead, it relies on the very successful show, Siamsa, which is a combination of music, song and dance geared towards a tourist audience.
Run by a voluntary board and with a very small staff, the theatre is, on the face of it, a very successful enterprise.
It is funded by the Department of Arts, Heritage, the Gaeltacht and the Islands. The board leases the hall, which it owns, for various cultural events to help defray expenses. It aims to stage six or seven of its own productions every year.
Unfortunately, it is not always easy to find a cast, according to Sean Stafford, a long-time board member and father of Maeliosa, whose wife Maire has appeared on stage many times.
Funding is also a factor. "We tend to share singers with other amateur musical societies, and many of our finest actors have gone on to better things like Teilifis na Gaeilge."
The fact that the theatre has had a series of artistic directors in recent years may point to a more fundamental problem, however. Among them have been Trevor O Clochartaigh, now associated with the aforementioned Teilifis na Gaeilge soap, and Sean O Tarpaigh, who is with Ros na Run and is a founder member of Galway's new Bloodstone Theatre group.
Just over three years ago Mr O Clochartaigh, who was initially employed as administrator, drew up a development plan for the board which aimed to take the Taibhdhearc into the next century. Many of the points he made then have been reiterated in a recent submission he gave to the Arts Council, which makes the case for development of Irish-language theatre.
O Clochartaigh, An NUI Galway graduate from Carna who is now a freelance television director with his own company, Sin Sin, Mr O Clochartaigh argues that the Taibhdhearc requires a professional company similar to that founded by himself and several colleagues just over a decade ago.
Na Fanaithe, as the troupe was called, toured summer colleges in Connemara, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and other counties during 1987, and went from strength to strength over the next five years.
A highlight was its production of Lorca's Yerma during the Galway Arts Festival in 1991, using a tent at Father Griffin Road.
The following year the play was staged at Expo in Seville. The troupe began using Conradh na Gaeilge premises in Galway's Dominick Street, where Siamsa also started.
At no time did it get much encouragement from the Taibhdhearc. If anything, O Clochartaigh recalls, the theatre board saw these young bloods as a threat.
Theatre in education, drama workshops in schools, these are the sort of activities with which a professional company, attached to the Taibhdhearc, should be associated, according to Mr O Clochartaigh.
It should be underpinned by the Arts Council, which is believed to support the allocation of more resources to activities as Gaeilge, and which also emphasised the importance of theatre in education in its 1995-1997 plan.
The Taibhdhearc should be central to this, he says, a view also shared by other former artistic directors, one of whom compares the board to "an old Russian bureaucracy" with all dynamism being strangled by Government grant-aid.
"The problem is that the nine-member board is self-perpetuating, apart from two vacancies which rotate every second year, and it doesn't want to let go," Mr O Clochartaigh says. "The Minister can't even control it, and doesn't even own the building, which is a wonderful little venue.
"There is no representation by Udaras na Gaeltachta (the location is not strictly in the Gaeltacht), or Bord na Gaeilge or the Arts Council, and even the system of voting is geared to preclude any sort of new ideas or initiative.
"Galway's Town Hall theatre, Macnas, the film centre, Teilifis na Gaeilge, these are all vibrant, evolving, changing, and yet the Taibhdhearc is still stuck in a groove," he says. "It has had so many talented people through its doors, and yet there is something about the prevailing group mentality that holds it back."
The chair of Udaras na Gaeilge, Prof Gearoid O Tuathaigh of NUI Galway, who Udaras na Gaeltachta and recently joined the Taibhdhearc board, believes there is a wider dimension, related to the less-than-healthy state of drama in the Irish language.
"The original vision of the 1920s and 1930s was tied to a general optimism about Irish, with an Irish-speaking battalion in the Army, Irish in the university, and a voluntary cadre of activists keen to promote drama.
"But what emerged was a more complex story, with the Taibhdhearc being only one part of a picture that involved the Abbey's commitment to the language, and other Irish-language theatres like the Damer and Amharclann na hIde.
"Some of the recurring problems experienced are associated with Irish-language theatre as a genre," Prof O Tuathaigh says. "The challenge for the Taibhdhearc is reflective of that wider challenge which the Irish-language community must take up."