AT the end of this month, the curtain will fall for good on the Focus Theatre at Dublin’s Pembroke Place.
Founded in 1963 by the Irish-American actor Deirdre O’Connell, the famously tiny venue will close its doors for the last time as its ongoing funding problem reaches crisis level.
“It’s a sad moment for many people. It’s the last of the pocket theatres in Dublin. But we have to move forward and try to embrace the future,” says Joe Devlin, artistic director of the Focus, which has been run by volunteers for a number of years.
“We can’t pay bills; we can’t pay overheads; we can’t pay the rent. We can’t afford to run a building in the current climate.”
With a 50th anniversary celebration on the horizon in May 2013, however, Focus is not going to disappear.
On the contrary, with an 18-month season of shows in the pipeline – including major co-productions with the Project Theatre and the New Theatre, as well as celebratory plays involving such luminaries of Irish theatre as Brian Friel and Tom McIntyre – the irrepressible Devlin insists that there’s a bright side to vacating the city centre space.
“Our raison d’etre is, and always has been, to create art – and working in larger spaces will allow us to continue to do that,” he says.
The company will operate out of Ranelagh Arts Centre for the next six months, and plans are already afoot to mount a series of site-specific, Strindberg-inspired shows in the suburb’s salubrious cafes. Devlin also hopes to tour to venues around the country.
Meanwhile, for those who want to say farewell to Focus in its current incarnation, its season of short plays by Samuel Beckett – entitled, with appropriately Beckettian blackness, Before Vanishing – runs until April 21st, while the final production in Pembroke Place will be Aidan Harney’s two-hander Hollywood Valhalla from April 24th to 26th.
