Less than a year after opening its doors, the Grand Canal Theatre has revitalised the docklands area, as well as invigorating Dublin’s theatre business

A YOUNG father and his son sat outside the Grand Canal Theatre sharing a sandwich the night before the first performance of the musical Scrooge. Despite the cold, they sat for 15 minutes, their faces glowing pink and green under the glow of the neon light display that illuminates the central plaza and the docks.

“None of this was here when I was a lad,” the man said to his son. He pointed a gloved finger towards Boland’s Mill and the old derelict granary in the distance: “It was all like that. There was nothing here. You wouldn’t come down here at night on your own.”

They put their sandwich wrappers in the bin and joined the crowds of people in the glass foyer of the theatre behind them.

The Grand Canal Theatre has become the symbol of success for the redevelopment of the docklands area. Its effect is visible on the streets of the area at night, as audiences cross the river from the Luas at Spencer Dock or the canal from the Dart station on Barrow Street, while the neighbouring restaurants and coffee shops are full.

The theatre has been operational since March, with more than 220 performances to its credit over the past nine months. Earlier this month, it sold its 300,000th ticket. If the arts tend to suffer during a recession, the Grand Canal Theatre has yet to feel it.

Of course, the Grand Canal Theatre is a commercial theatre in the West End/Broadway style, rather than a hub for new work or experimentation. It opened with a performance of Swan Lakeby the Russian State Ballet, and has hosted Scottish Opera's first visit to Ireland, but for the most part its repertoire has been unashamedly populist: established big-budget box-office successes imported from London, such as the current production of Scroogeor the recent production of Hairspray, which sold every single one of its 32,000 tickets during its two-week run.

“We are still at the beginning of our journey,” says general manager Stephen Faloon, “and so the programme does tend towards more popular titles as we grow our audience, but once we have that base – and things have gone really well for us since we opened – I hope we will be in a position to experiment a little, knowing that the audience will go with us.”

In 2011, the theatre will host the Dublin Dance Festival, while Faloon has been in negotiation with big Irish theatre companies such as Rough Magic, Landmark Theatre and Lane Productions about possible collaborations in the future.

The growing audience base for the theatre has been one of the greatest satisfactions for Faloon since the theatre opened.

“The greatest surprise and thrill was how healthy an appetite there is in Ireland for musicals,” he says. “Because it isn’t just a local audience, or a Dublin one, but people are coming from all over Ireland. And to think this is a totally new area of Dublin: no one had a clue where we were when we first opened. I mean when I had my first interview I didn’t know either, but now it is really on the map and that is an achievement.”

The greatest challenge that Faloon faced, however, was “trying to get a programme together” in the first instance. “Here we were, this time last year, a new venue, the building hadn’t even been finished yet and we were trying to persuade people to come over and put West End shows here. And they were nervous, reluctant. They needed to be persuaded that Dublin was a good venue, with a potential large audience, and that we were the right venue to come to.”

The difficulty was exacerbated, Faloon explains, “because musicals are expensive to produce and touring is even more expensive: you have per diems to pay, accommodation, and the physical cost of getting the scenery here.”

Furthermore, he continues, “Dublin is not London in terms of ticket prices, so we have to negotiate a ticket price with them while making sure that an audience will pay what we ask. But word of mouth has spread [to producers in London] that we are selling out shows, that Dublin is worthwhile, so I don’t have to make random phone calls now, I even have people seeking us out. And that means we can programme better and better stuff.”

As the new year opens, this includes forthcoming productions of The Sound of Music, Chessand Spamalot,concerts by Christy Moore and Alexandra Burke, and a return visit for the Russian State Ballet's Swan Laketo celebrate the Grand Canal Theatre's first birthday. The Russian State Ballet sold out every performance for the theatre's opening; hopefully their return will be another good omen for the year ahead.

www.grandcanaltheatre.ie