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The Smock Alley Theatre building in Temple Bar is one of the most important sites in European theatre history. When a new phase of theatre history began on these islands with the Restoration of Charles II, there were three theatres built within a few years of each other: Drury Lane (1662) and Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1661) and Smock Alley Theatre (1662) in Dublin. Only one of these three was a purpose-built theatre building and only one exists in substantially the same form as in 1662: Smock Alley Theatre. Smock Alley Theatre can rightfully lay claim to the title as the oldest theatre building on these islands.

Smock Alley Theatre is a vital part of our Theatre heritage. It is at the heart of Ireland’s great theatrical tradition. Smock Alley gave the world the great plays of George Farquhar (Love and a Bottle, The Constant Couple), Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer, The Vicar of Wakefield,) and Richard Brindsley Sheridan (The Rivals, School for Scandal, A Trip to Scarborough) It was on the stage of Smock Alley Theatre that the world’s finest 18th century actor, David Garrick, first played Hamlet. Other famous actors who trod the Smock Alley Theatre boards included Peg Woffington, Thomas Sheridan, Spranger Barry and Charles Macklin.

For more than a century, Smock Alley Theatre put Irish theatre on the European map. If we are to ask historically what makes theatre such an important part of Irish culture today, we need to go back more than two centuries before the founding of the Abbey Theatre, to the Smock Alley Theatre of 1662.

Almost 350 years later, we are reinstating for our Capital city, for Ireland and the world, Dublin’s finest theatre of 1662-Smock Alley Theatre.