Karl Shiels was very nearly famous.

Eleven years ago, he was cast in a new play by an obscure young playwright that was to open the new theatre in Tallaght. Shiels starred alongside Aidan Kelly; the playwright was Mark O’Rowe and the play was Howie the Rookie, and it was the most ferocious piece of new writing from Ireland since Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark.

After a run at the prestigious fringe venue in London, the Bush, they played the Civic in Tallaght, to opening night acclaim and then empty houses. But then they toured to New York.

Ben Brantley, the famous New York Times critic, gave them a spine tingling review, and they sold out immediately. New York’s theatre scene took them to its heart. Producers and agents wanted meetings. They were flown to LA for auditions.

Jerry Bruckheimer was casting his Somali war film Black Hawk Down, and wanted to see them. They came to his office. The casting director told them to duck down behind chairs and have a mock gunfight. It was every actor, and every boy’s dream: a gunfight in the office of a Hollywood producer. They went at each other all guns blazing. Kelly machine-gunned Shiels; Shiels bazooka-ed Kelly.

Then the casting director plucked an imaginary grenade from her belt and lobbed it towards Shiels. KaBOOM! Shiels flung himself against the wall, as if his life, and movie career, depended on it. But the wall… wasn’t a wall. It was a screen, and he tore through it and collapsed into the cabinet that held Bruckheimer’s Oscars.

They didn’t get the parts. Then they were supposed to return to New York with the play for a second, longer run, but the actors’ union, Equity, fiercely resistent to non-American actors working on the American stage, blocked them. Other glamorous opportunities failed to materialise. They went back to their lives as working Irish actors: nearly, but not quite, famous.

Since then, Shiels has been a regular on the Irish stage, as well as an innovative, small-scale producer with his company Semper Fi (best known for Ladies and Gents, their play set in a public toilets, which has toured the world).

Shiels is not short for work, and with infant twins at home, not short for entertainment either. So why, when we meet, is he crawling around the derelict upper floors of a building on Abbey Street, with gaff tape and wiring?

Because he’s fed up hearing people moaning about funding cuts and recession, is why. And because he thinks that Dublin needs a new theatre.

That theatre is the Theatre Upstairs at the Plough, the pub directly across from the Abbey Theatre. From Monday, the theatre will run plays at lunchtime and early evening (6pm), with all tickets €10, and complimentary soup (at lunch) or a pint (in the eve). Its focus will be new work, with original plays at lunch, and a mixture of rehearsed readings and some revivals at night.

Any money that’s gone into it so far is Shiels’s own, though those costs have been low. For the Plough, it’s an opportunity to raise profile and business. There’s no public funding, and everybody involved is working for profit share instead of pay.

With hour-long plays and rehearsal periods of two weeks, Shiels hopes that the theatre will be able to draw in actors between other jobs, and even encourage those on stage at the Abbey, across the road, to use their down time during the day to perform at the Plough.

The choice of the Plough was fortuitous. For many years, it was the watering hole of choice for the Abbey’s actors. There was a record for the quickest journey from curtain call on stage to the bar at the Plough, and some actors were known for fitting in a quick pint between scenes.

But in 1978, after an international tour, the Abbey company returned to their local to find that the management’s attitude had changed. One night, the actor Des Cave arrived into the pub just after last orders, having been on stage and delayed by his some notes from his director. The rest of the cast were already there, drinking, but Cave was refused a drink. He fell into an argument with the manager, and, in protest, led his colleagues out of the bar and across the road to the Flowing Tide.

For more than three decades, that was where the Abbey actors drank, with occasional forays further afield to the Sackville Lounge; out of respect for Cave, it wasn’t the done thing to drink in the Plough.

And then, one day last year, with new ownership of the Plough in place, Shiels went in for an afternoon pint, and struck up a conversation across the bar. What would it take to get the actors back, the manager asked. Shiels undertook to talk to Cave.

On a Friday night shortly afterwards, Des Cave came off stage at the Abbey, crossed Abbey Street, and entered the Plough for the first time in 31 years. The pub fell silent. He made his way through the crowd, to the bar, looked up and down it, and ordered a pint of Bulmers. A cheer went up: the pub was packed with his colleagues, in anticipation, and the drink duly flowed.

From there, a shrewd suggestion from the manager sent Shiels upstairs, and he knew it as soon as he saw it: an intimate, manageable, pub-theatre space, in a prime location, with a theatre history. He was going to give Dublin a new theatre. All it needed was a few lights, black-out plastic for the windows, some sweat and a dose of imagination.

A Facebook group, Theatre Upstairs @ the Plough, has already 700 members. Established writers like Eugene O’Brien, Deirdre Kinahan and Jimmy Murphy have volunteered scripts. There’s a buzz amongst the community, and this new theatre could be something special.

First up, at lunchtime (1.10 pm), is Decked, by Shiels’s collaborator in the theatre, Paul Walker. The teatime show (6.10 pm) is Missing Football by Peter McKenna. It’s a brave venture, and it needs support. Pack it out.