Actually, Dublin is a wonderful city. Though being not so big, it surprises us with its contrast. And it is not only in landscape, but also architecture. On foot or on a leased bike, just within an hour, you can plunge into the atmosphere of Middle Ages, the Victorian Age or visit a city of the future. When we talk about the city of future, first of all we mean the Docklands district of Dublin.
The story about Dublin Docklands will be in our next posts, but now we would like to tell about our visit to the Dublin Grand Canal Theatre and the Russian ice-show. Several words about the theatre itself. The Grand Canal Theatre opened its doors only in the spring 2010 and embodied the newest models of modern architecture in city building. For example, the building itself is somewhat angular, of irregular shape and all the outer parts of the theatre are made of glass.
The front part of the Grand Canal Theatre, according to the idea of the theatre’s architect, Daniel Libeskind, is to remind about theatre curtains. But personally our imagination is probably rather poor; as we could not define what is it like.
Describing of the audience hall is much easier. Everything here looks like a sailing ship. There are sails hanging over the seating, and arched parts of walls resembling the body of the sailboat itself. Several circles and upper circle of stalls create a three-dimensional effect, but nevertheless it is hard to believe that the audience hall can sit two thousand people.
And now let’s talk about the show “Snow White on Ice”. The Russian ballet group of the ice-show were at their best. Very often complex elements of the show were interrupted by noisy plaudits of the audience. Apart the high professionalism of the artists, we were surprised by special effects and colourful decorations which changed very often. Everything was very colourful, musical and was watched in one breath.
The Grand Canal Theatre compares favourably to the Olympia Theatre in the sphere of organizing of act-wait and alcohol drinks. We were glad to notice that it was prohibited to enter the audience hall with alcohol drinks including beer. Consequently, people didn’t go “out and in” during the performance like in the case of the Smockie group concert. But there was a little imbalance because of the cloakroom not working. The rest was just amazing!
