Analysis: The Eblana theatre ensured the capital city's main bus station was also a busy cultural and social space for many decades

Michael Scott's modernist designs for a new city bus station in Dublin took the form of Busáras. Beginning service in 1953, the station has been a recognisable mainstay in the daily lives of commuters in Dublin’s capital, bringing passengers to and from the city in their thousands annually.

What passengers may not know is that the bus station was also a busy cultural and social space for many decades. In its basement today still lies the Eblana, Dublin’s buried theatre.

Dublin of the 1960s was an increasingly busy city. With a greater influx of young people into the city from rural communities who were turning away from a life of agricultural work and the growth of exposure to internationalising cultural influences more generally, Dublin at the time catered for a younger generation with new and different tastes.

The Eblana opened in 1959 and was located in the basement level of Busáras. It included a full raised stage and 244 seats within an albeit cramped space and regularly hosted new and latest Irish and international plays, from Brian Friel to Sam Shepard.

The Eblana was home to some of Ireland’s leading actors and directors of the time. Phyllis Ryan from Gemini Productions was heavily involved in staging and producing new work at the Eblana. It featured new, international and often risqué and controversial plays, that otherwise may not have found their way onto other Dublin stages, or of they did, were often affected by charges of 'indecency’ and a moral censorship of Irish culture by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Typical topics often reflected social concerns of the day, such as emigration, unemployment, sexuality, religion and politics.

Poster for Staircase at the Eblana Theatre, Dublin in 1969. Courtesy of University of Galway Library Archives

The group Amalgamated Artists were another key stakeholder at the Eblana, presenting numerous productions through the 1960s and 1970s, including Irish premieres of international plays. Staircase by English playwright Charles Dyer opened at the Eblana in October 1969. The action takes place in a barbershop called Chez Harry and with David Kelly and Godfrey Quigley playing two gay barbers. Frank J. Bailey, the artistic director of Amalgamated Artists, believed the play to be not about homosexuality, but rather "its theme is far more universal, the terrible affliction of loneliness".

Bailey’s theatre company often presented the stories and experiences of those he called ‘social outcasts’ and the marginalised everyday lives of those from working classes to the gay community. With such works and themes often getting a billing as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, Amalgamated Artists at the Eblana contributed to what one Irish Times critic in 1970 described as "a new liveliness and an international dimension to Dublin Theatre".

While the Eblana was often ‘dark’ for periods in the late 1970s, Phyllis Ryan and Gemini scheduled a new season of works in 1979 that included the Irish premiere of Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends, as well as a production of Joe Orton's Loot. Orton, along with English compatriot of the new wave of post-wat drama in London, John Osborne, found a home for his work at the Eblana in the 1970s.

Poster for What the Butler Saw at the Eblana Theatre, Dublin in 1971. Courtesy of University of Galway Library Archives

Orton was murdered in 1967 and his plays were widely recognised as being wild farces and satirical black comedies of the kind that would previously have attracted the ire of the Catholic Church and its moral cultural censorship. Orton's Loot and What The Butler Saw, as well as Osborne’s Look Back in Anger were all produced at the Eblana in the early 1970s, entertaining audiences when only a decade previously such international works would struggle to be seen in Dublin or avoided being shut down.

New American plays also often found a first Irish audience at the Eblana. Douglas Kennedy and Robert MacNamara's Dublin Stage 1 Theatre in association with the Dublin Theatre Festival presented the Irish premiere of David Mamet's American Buffalo at the Eblana in 1979.

The Irish premiere of True West by Sam Shepard followed at the theatre in June 1983 by Red Rex Theatre Company, founded by Garrett Keogh and Vinnie McCabe who were later joined by Michael Harnett. Shepard’s play had been a recent Broadway and London success, giving the fledgling Red Rex company a theatrical coup in securing its Irish premiere.

Poster for True West at the Eblana Theatre, Dublin in 1983. Courtesy of University of Galway Library Archives

True West starred Barry McGovern, Mannix Flynn, Vinnie McCabe and Anna Manahan. News reports of the time also show how the curtain between theatre and bus station was often quite thin. During a performance of True West, an American tourist complete with a large backpack wandered onto the stage looking for the toilet.

Indeed, stories from the Eblana often note that weary bus passengers wandered into the theatre by mistake looking for the basement toilets, leading to the quip that Busáras was the only public toilet in Dublin with its own theatre. Workers upstairs in the station bar and restaurant recounted how actors would nip upstairs at the play’s interval, weaving through passengers and loaded baggage for a quick drink, fortifying themselves for the rest of the show ahead.

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From RTÉ Archives, First House presenter Tom McGurk takes people to see A Borderline Case by Harry Barton at the Eblana Theatre during the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1975

In 1986, Dubliner Lee Dunne premiered his new play, The Second Last Straw. Set in contemporary Dublin, the play focused on the drug culture affecting large swathes of the city's working class. The play, Dunne said, "lifts the lid off the sex, violence, and hypocrisy that is Dublin life today", adding that "the play will pack them in at the Eblana – the Dubs know I give them a good show".

The advertisements from Eblana Theatre programmes also show city businesses and new ventures catering to a new youth culture. Full page ads for Zhivago, for instance, promise revellers "the most exclusive, luxurious and exciting nite-spot [sic] in Dublin", offering a range of outlets from coffees and lunch to dinner and discotheque.

After a remarkable contribution to Dublin cultural life for half a century, the Eblana closed in 1995. Its origins as an early newsreel cinema and later-life as a theatre in a city bus station that had ambitious plans (including a planned rooftop nightclub in what is now the Department of Social Protection's canteen) is a reminder of the cultural spaces which were present and are now lost in the capital. Theatres, cinemas, nightclubs and more have been demolished, lost and not replace in the city in recent decades.

Today, Busáras still serves bus passengers arriving and departing from Ireland’s capital. 70 years on, though, the Eblana sits neglected, silent, and dark in the basement, locked up and wasted at a time when cultural and social spaces are at a premium for Dublin’s artists and audiences alike.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ