By Damian Murphy
But for a cast-iron canopy, its barrel roof a kaleidoscope of multi-coloured glass fish scales, the façade of a Wide Streets Commissioners-era premises at 72 Dame Street gives little clue that it leads to a spectacular Victorian theatre. The curtain was first raised on a performance space off Dame Street in 1855, when Henry Connell advertised in the Freeman’s Journal to invite customers to his ‘Monster Saloon’ in Crampton Court, with ‘two spacious Rooms for gentlemen who wish to partake of chops … [and] commanding uninterrupted views of the Entertainment in the Saloon’.
The Olympia began to take on something resembling its present appearance when Dan Lowrey Senior bought the site in 1878 and engaged John Joseph O’Callaghan (c. 1838–1905) to build a new theatre in the irregularly shaped plot, its entrance on Crampton Court, its stage house on Sycamore Alley. The Star of Erin Music Hall opened in December 1879, but there were several re-brandings in the 1880s and ’90s by Dan Lowrey Junior, who initiated a wholesale reconstruction in the spring of 1897.
It was his chief backer, Adam Findlater, who presided over the opening of the Empire Palace Theatre for that winter’s season. The new theatre reused some of the existing structure but, enlarged and reoriented, the stage house replaced terraced houses and the auditorium was entered from Dame Street. The bulk of the theatre soars over Crampton Court and Sycamore Alley, its expanses of concrete and stock brick lacking beauty, its architectural interest lying instead in the clever arrangement of its many interior spaces set around a large auditorium and on a cramped site. That the architect, Richard Henry Brunton (1841–1901), had little experience of designing theatres, having enjoyed a career in Japan designing 26 lighthouses ‘in the Western style’, is remarkable. His skill is also on show in Cork’s Everyman (1896).
Designed for 1,500 patrons, the sumptuous but intimate auditorium provided seating in the stalls, circle and gallery, and in twelve private boxes arranged in two tiers on either side of the stage. The theme was, and remains, exuberant rococo, with pillared horseshoe-shaped galleries and bow-fronted boxes decorated with China-white high-relief plasterwork cartouches, the elliptical proscenium given a frame of gold-accented foliage, playful cherubs overhead drawing attention to a group of Classical instruments, the ceiling a riot of curlicues and swirls, all against a claret-red ground.
Victorian theatres were always prone to fire, but it was outrage at the playing of God Save the King, not fire, that prompted Peadar Kearney, author of Amhrán na bhFiann (see p. 70), to turn the hose on the orchestra in 1915. The theatre shook off its imperial connotations when renamed Olympia in 1922.
Demand for live shows dwindled in the 1960s, and the future of the Olympia, already uncertain, was made all the more doubtful when in November 1974 the curtain crashed down on a dress rehearsal of West Side Story, followed by the proscenium and a section of the ceiling, shattering boxes and the front of the circle. A campaign for restoration was boosted when Dublin Corporation provided an interest-free loan of £100,000. The Olympia reopened in March 1977 but, in an unwelcome epilogue to this offstage drama, the cast-iron canopy supplied by the Saracen Foundry of Glasgow was accidentally demolished in 2004. It has since been faithfully restored.
Damian Murphy is Architectural Heritage Officer, NIAH. Series based on the NIAH’s ‘building of the month’, www.buildingsofireland.ie.