The rebuilt New Theatre, on the site of the Irish Communist Party headquarters, which you enter via Connolly Books, keeps alive a vision of an older, socialist Ireland, writes Angela Long
It has risen like a phoenix from the flame. The flame is red, of course, and burning in the hearts of those who have kept the faith among the retrograde aspects of the prosperous New Ireland.
It's a double-headed bird too, truly a mythological beast to behold with respect. One presides over the inner debate, while the other is the dramaturge, overseeing the extroverted enactment of plays with a straight and timeless meaning. This double act that has renewed its vows to be fresh and challenging for Irish society comprises Connolly Books and, behind it, a reconstructed New Theatre, in the famous home of the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), surrounded by giddy, materialist Temple Bar.
The New Theatre, which accommodates an audience of 66, has been dark for three years. It opens again this week, rebuilt, with new seats, at peace with the Poddle below, to a performance of The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O'Casey, Connolly's old friend and fellow traveller in the Irish socialist movement. And Connolly Books, which had taken refuge in the new "Italian quarter" on the other side of the Liffey, is also reopening, with a streamlined look but the same feisty philosophy. Behind it all is the extraordinary philanthropy and consistency of Mick Wallace, rebel builder with a cause.
The two businesses run separately, but are comfortable bedfellows. However, the theatre is not as overtly political as the bookshop, and Ronan Wilmot, director of the New, plays down the communist role on his side of the door. "Our manifesto, philosophy or whatever you call it, would be to do classic Irish plays that have been neglected. It's over a decade since Shadow of a Gunman was done in Dublin," and he mutters in disbelief and disgust at the theatrical establishment's reluctance to engage with O'Casey. "But we also want to work with young companies, to give this space to them for little rent, if they don't have it."
The New Theatre was set up in the mid-1990s, with the blessings of Eugene McCartan, general secretary of the CPI and chief of Connolly Books, and the late Michael O'Riordan, communist stalwart and combatant in the Spanish Civil War. "I had approached Anthony Fox. At the time I was taking a lot of shows to Berlin, and I wanted to be back here," says Wilmot, who started as house manager at the Peacock in the late 1960s. "Michael and Eugene okayed it, and we were off."
THE PREMISES HAD been a meeting hall for the CPI and other socialist groups, and later became a rehearsal space for the neighbouring Project theatre, hosting Jim and Peter Sheridan among others. As the New Theatre (the same name as James Connolly's original theatre in Liberty Hall), Wilmot recalls, it hosted memorable productions of JP Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and the premiere of Bedbound, by Enda Walsh. But by 2000 a redesign was needed, and several years later Wilmot faced the fact that a redesign was not enough to overcome structural decay and deficiencies.
"Then Mick [ Wallace] stepped in, there was some negotiation with Connolly Books, and after a while the work started."
Wilmot, meanwhile, took his production of The Tailor and Ansty on the road. It was a great success, with Wilmot as the tailor, Buckley, and Nuala Hayes as his wife Anastasia - Ansty. The play, says Wilmot, will be a mainstay of the future programme at the New. But the fare won't all be resolutely Irish, message-laden or hardline traditional. Soon after the Gunman run ends, Shirley Valentine will have a season. There's nothing wrong with giving the people what they want, says Wilmot, as long as it's not theatre programming by focus group. He is highly critical of the mainstream, middle-class theatre scene of Dublin.
"The scene is not in a healthy state, and yet at a time when there has never been so much money in the country." He has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the Abbey, and is contemptuous of the off-stage performances surrounding the National Theatre. Wilmot has a lifelong association with the Abbey: his father, Seamus, was chairman of the board and turned the sods for the present building.
"I worked in the Abbey for seven-and-a-half years, and never heard anyone complain about the building. When it was packed every night there was no talk that the building was unsuitable. Suddenly the wail started up that they would have to move. Look at their last offerings . . . School for Scandal, Doubt, Julius Caesar, The Crucible, I ask you.
"The RSC revisits the canon of English theatre continually, and they have been hugely successful with that. But there seems to be some suspicion, snobbery, I don't know what it is here, about the parallel body of Irish work. I think there is a grave danger in Dublin. What seems to be happening is that important theatres, like the Gate, have a very safe policy."
Is this focus-group programming? He wonders. "The choices are playing to a very middle-class, upper middle-class constituency. I believe that is not the role of subsidised theatre, or the National Theatre. There it is, with €5.5 million and the debts written off."
What is missing is what George Bush Sr made famous as "the vision thing". "There seems to be nobody with any vision. When I think about it, looking now, looking back, the only person who had vision in Irish life was Dr Noel Browne [ the health minister in the 1950s who launched the anti-TB programme]."
In his way, with his colleagues, he's hoping to pump a bit of vision into the theatre scene. "We will hold open auditions. I don't mind if the queue is long, I think that's very healthy. And we'll always take scripts - though in the past it's been very hard to find anything right."
The theatre has been freshened, shored up, new seats installed, but the stage is still small and the scene is intimate, with the audience closely involved. The architect, working with Wallace Construction, is George Morris.But the theatre is really the baby in the house. The bookshop dates back to the 1930s, though not in Essex Street, where it first arrived a mere couple of decades ago.
EUGENE MCCARTAN, MANAGER of the shop, is a true believer. He is general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, and a devotee of James Connolly and all he stood for. On the night that the Red Flag was dragged down from the Kremlin by the "betrayers of socialism", Michael O'Riordan and his comrades raised the Red Flag over Connolly House, Dublin, declaring: "Our flag stays red." McCartan continues the struggle. He has been with the bookshop some 27 years, and recalls the highlights of its history, the founding in 1933, the intense unpopularity which saw it move premises several times before coming to rest in East Essex Street. It has a salient, if not iconic, presence for the Left, the intelligentsia, the bookish, those who, as McCartan identifies them, are looking for an answer.
Recalls one such Dubliner, a frequent browser in days of yore: "Connolly was the place where you could, if you wanted, always get Connolly, and Marx/Engels, Plekhanov, Stalin, Mao, plus books on (mostly English) working class history, which I was interested in, and various oddments Progress Publishers in Moscow off-loaded on them, like textbooks on "heat engineering". These latter always mystified me and I thought they were something of a joke, but someone told me many years later that they were snapped up by UCD engineering students as they were very cheap and quite academically respectable." Ideological currents sometimes crackled in the air, he recalls. "If you'd had the nerve to ask for Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov you would have been run out of the place."
The bookshop has a modern, streamlined look to it now, with dark walls and simple lines, but the stock will stay true to its mission, McCartan says, to question the status quo. "There will be broader stock, but it will be in the same vein, and we are trying to bring in more books in other languages, Portuguese for example for both the Brazilian community and Portuguese people living here. We'll also have a wider range of magazines and papers in a number of European languages.
"This place, the cultural centre of theatre and bookshop, is unique on this island," he says proudly. "But the Arts Council doesn't view it this way. Yet it is of great benefit to the city of Dublin." As for the man who has made it possible, Mick Wallace, "I don't think he came out of it losing money" - although there is not a lot of profit in small theatres and socialist tracts.
"If this were in Paris, the reopening now would have sparked loads of articles and excitement," chimes in Wilmot.
"There is a strong current of thought that theatre and books should be challenging, that perspectives in the world in which you find yourself should be challenged," says McCartan.
The reborn bookshop won't quite be on the Borders/Hughes models, with almost as many cappuccinos as volumes, but there will be a small coffee bar, which will also be used for refreshment during performances at the theatre. "We'll also have talks, seminars, this will be a permanent place for political discussions, for anyone who wants to question," says McCartan. Eventually there will be an archive in the basement, and an archivist. The keeper of the flame.
The New Theatre and Connolly Books are at 43 East Essex St, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. The Shadow of a Gunman runs until mid-April. Telephone 01- 6706631
