This theater was created as an amateur 60 years ago by the neurologist Pearse O'Malley and his wife Mary. The first performances were given right in the doctor's office, then a stable was adapted for the theater, and in 1968 the theater got its own building. True, for the sake of economy, it did without rehearsal rooms and administrative premises, and changing rooms and toilets were located in temporary buildings. Despite all these difficulties, the cultural institution survived and is now the only full-fledged professional theater in Northern Ireland. Belfast residents loved the old building, but when water poured into the auditorium from holes in its ceilings, the need to build a new structure became obvious.
Now the theater is located on the border of the city center, on a flat, irregularly-shaped area. A massive building with angular outlines on one side overlooks the rows of red brick residential buildings, on the other - on the bank of the Lagan River overgrown with greenery. It's amazing how its perception changes depending on the point of view: from the opposite bank of the Lagan it seems romantic, the view from the embankment resembles the Scandinavian architecture of the 1960s, from above the theater looks modern, from the inside - delightfully old-fashioned.
The building includes a hall with 390 seats, an experimental studio and a large rehearsal room. All three spaces are designed to minimize barriers between the public and work areas, and ideally between actors, audience and staff. There are many curves and angles in theater - “folds,” as John Toomey calls them. In his opinion, such unexpected connections "make people comprehend each other." The culmination of this approach is the auditorium, the rows of seats in which are arranged asymmetrically, which, according to the architect, helps to establish contact between the actor and the audience. The boxes are located on the walls - not for reasons of practicality (there are only 12 additional places in them), but in order to "settle down" the vertical surfaces of the hall. The interior of the hall is decorated with dark wood.
A. G.
