Fully visible only from the playing field, the Samuel Beckett Theatre is tucked in the corner of the New Square at Trinity College. It houses the university theatre (200 seats), the College Players theatre (75 seats), a top-lit dance studio, and faculty and administrative accommodation.
There’s a hint of the timber Elizabethan playhouse (picked up again in the oak-on-render colour contrast on the ground floor undercroft) as well as the tower archetype in Irish landscape in the four-storey oak block, gently stepping outwards as it rises. It was designed by De Blacam and Meagher and completed in 1993, and the intervening years have weathered the timber-clad tower (which is structurally steel and concrete) beautifully. It’s silvered at different rates, richer in colour where it’s more sheltered and desaturated at the most exposed parts. This isn’t damage, it’s weathering on the exterior of durable timber, and it adds to the romantic, out-of-time nature of the building.
