On your right, look for the broad red-brick frontage with its rectangular face, a glass entrance at street level, and the Belltable name set across the front.
Belltable tells you something central about Limerick: this city has long loved a crowd gathering in one room to watch something unfold. Cinema, theatre, concerts, public talks, odd little experiments that might delight you or leave you baffled - all of that belongs to Limerick’s character. A city does not only perform in its streets; sometimes it performs in the dark, with everyone facing the same stage.
This building has changed costume more than once. Before Belltable, it lived as the Coliseum Cinema and, in another chapter, as the Redemptorist Confraternity Hall. Locals still enjoy the small irony that “Belltable” was itself a compromise: when the arts centre opened in nineteen eighty-one, one side wanted to keep the grand old Coliseum name, while the Confraternity Credit Union wanted to honour its own heritage, so they settled on Henry Hubert Belltable, the Belgian army officer who founded the Holy Confraternity here. Even the name above the door is a negotiated peace between nostalgia and ownership.
The show began in nineteen seventeen, when local merchant Michael Gough opened the Coliseum. His daughter Lena, a trained opera singer, used to perform arias between film screenings, which is wonderfully Limerick: not content with cinema alone, the place added live voice as well. In nineteen twenty-eight, the building screened Limerick’s first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. If you glance at the image in the app, you’ll see how restrained the exterior seems; all the drama happened once you crossed the threshold.
Then the glamour frayed. By the nineteen fifties, locals called it a flea-pit, and after a bitter strike in nineteen fifty-one to nineteen fifty-two, it closed. In one of those turns cities specialise in, the silent auditorium became a shirt factory in nineteen fifty-three, with sewing machines rattling where audiences had once waited for the lights to drop.
Its modern life has been just as dramatic. Inside are a two hundred and twenty-seat theatre-cinema, gallery, rehearsal rooms and workspaces for artists. Mike Finn premiered Pigtown here in nineteen ninety-nine, then returned years later and called the place a hothouse for Limerick talent. Even in rougher periods, Belltable Unfringed kept the spirit alive with gloriously unruly work, including a vegetable circus called Cirque de Légume. Then came the collapse in twenty thirteen: a one million euro refurbishment ran over by three hundred thousand euro, creditors met in an angry room, and Joanne Beirne dryly dubbed the new seating arrangement “Vatican Two theatre” because actors had to look up at the audience. The theatre reopened in twenty sixteen, proving that some buildings never stop auditioning for their next role.
From here, the city’s performance shifts outward - away from stage lights and toward the river, where newer glass and steel make their own statement at Riverpoint. If you want to come back, Belltable generally opens from noon to five thirty on Monday, from nine to five thirty Tuesday to Friday, and closes on Saturday and Sunday.
