Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 17:32:00

The contractors worked twenty-four-hour shifts and built it in twenty-five weeks. The Gaiety Theatre on South King Street, off Grafton Street beside St Stephen's Green, opened on 27 November 1871 with the Lord Lieutenant as guest of honour and a double bill of She Stoops to Conquer and the burlesque La Belle Sauvage. The theatre was the project of brothers John and Michael Gunn, whose family ran a music business on Grafton Street; they hired C.J. Phipps, the leading theatre architect of the day, whose Venetian facade and European opera-house auditorium remain the essential Gaiety. The original house held 2,000 across four levels - a 21-row pit, balcony stalls, first circle, amphitheatre and a nine-row top gallery, plus fourteen private boxes - with innovations for the era including tip-up seats, stone staircases and a dedicated firefighting main. Frank Matcham, the most celebrated theatre architect of the age, added the parterre and dress-circle bars and redecorated in the 1880s, giving the room its baroque adornments; the top gallery was removed in 1955, and today the house seats 1,145 on three levels. From the outset the Gunns ran it as a receiving house for touring companies rather than a producing theatre, and the policy endures - opera, ballet, West End musicals, drama and the famous Gaiety pantomime, a Dublin Christmas institution for over a century. It is Dublin's longest-established theatre in continuous production, known affectionately as the Grand Old Lady of South King Street, and its stage has carried everyone from grand opera companies to the annual all-star panto dames. A century and a half after the Gunns' gamble, the formula holds: the highest-quality popular musical and dramatic entertainment, in the handsomest Victorian auditorium in the city. The building holds a particular place in the national memory beyond the playbill - generations of Dubliners saw their first opera, first ballet and first panto under the same gilt ceiling, and the theatre's late-night cabaret and concert history has folded everyone from grand divas to rock bands into the story of South King Street.