They say you need your bad luck to strike during the dress rehearsal, at the latest. The dress rehearsal for Swan Lake went smoothly.

On opening night, over 2,000 people mingled in the foyer and bars of the new Grand Canal Theatre, celeb-spotting or simply being celebs.

The staff, who had been practicing their drills for two weeks in an empty theatre, wore an air of nervous, earnest excitement. Tailbacks formed at the entrance to the auditorium, as people stopped sharply, struck by the scale and elegant lines of the stage and theatre.

The acoustics were stunning: in the hands of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, under the baton of the eighty year old Russian conductor, Georgy Zhemchuzhin, Tchaikovsky’s score sounded crisp and full. The Russian State Ballet’s production was utterly conventional, but the simple artistry of the backdrops and the grace of the corps revealed the stage’s potential.

At the end of the third scene, the curtain came down to allow the set change for the ballet’s climactic scene at the lake of swans. And stayed down.

Backstage, there was panic. The conductor had disappeared. The stage crew radioed each other frantically on their walkie-talkies. In the auditorium, the audience felt a shiver of schadenfreude as they sensed the almost imperceptible delay.

There was a stand-in conductor, in case of emergency. Three minutes after the curtain went down, he was on and the final scene began, the audience none the wiser.

The principal conductor, meanwhile, had been found in his dressing room. In Russia, they typically take an interval between scenes three and four; though they had confirmed the change for Dublin in the dress rehearsal, he forgot.

The hiatus was barely more than three minutes, and most of the audience had likely forgotten it by the end of the ballet, when they gave a rousing ovation to the company and, clearly, to the theatre itself. For the theatre’s general manager, Stephen Faloon, it was just one of a number of minor crises that were successfully negotiated, from the trivial – two coffee machines breaking under the strain of opening night – to the more traumatic.

Six days before opening, a contractor working on the street outside cut through the theatre’s electricity supply, plunging the building into darkness, and leading to the alarms going off and the fire brigade arriving when it was eventually reconnected.

The day of the opening, Faloon arrived at the theatre to find the same contractor digging again in the same spot… He had to phone the Council to have them told to stop.

With two matinees on the opening weekend, almost 13,000 people had been through the theatre’s doors by Monday. By year’s end, Faloon expects to have staged 265 performances, and hosted over 350,000 audience members. In its first full year, 2011, he hopes to have 400 performances playing to well over half a million people. Over 120,000 tickets have been pre-sold for upcoming shows.

These numbers are extraordinary. The Grand Canal Theatre, in its first nine months, hopes to welcome almost three times as many visitors as the Abbey does in a year, and to do so, without subsidy, at higher ticket prices.

This suggests the question: what are the subsidised companies doing wrong?

The defensive answer would be “nothing”: the Grand Canal will mostly be presenting proven entertainment “product”, such as the West End transfer of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down The Wind (in May; see www.grandcanaltheatre.ie or call (01) 6777999) with which indigenous companies can’t hope to compete. Some of this will be bland, but it will have star power, and it will sell.

But a fuller answer would reveal that Irish companies, typically, have been institutionally indifferent to box office metrics. Companies that rely on the Arts Council rather than box office for most of their income have inherently less incentive to focus on marketability and sales.

I see the manifestations of this on a weekly basis in shows that are poorly marketed and, critically, have no online presence: companies that have no website, or websites that are months out of date, or no social media component.

More fundamentally, shows are badly chosen: companies choose to stage relatively obscure material with little thought for the need to balance this with more accessible fare.

This makes it all the more exciting to see one of the leaders in the independent theatre sector, Rough Magic, making the bold move onto the Gaiety stage this year, with a production in June of The Importance of Being Earnest starring Stockard Channing of The West Wing fame.

This will complement Rough Magic’s recent production, Sodome, My Love, a monologue translated from the French by the actor Olwen Fouéré, in a programme for 2010 that cleverly mixes ambitious populism with high-minded artistic ambition.

Back at the Grand Canal Theatre, Stephen Faloon hopes that there will ultimately be a place on his stage for companies such as Rough Magic that seek a larger audience for their work. He sees the theatre as potentially a venue for ambitious Irish companies to premiere work for large-scale international tours, as well as for receiving shows in the Dublin Theatre Festival.

Such collaboration would be exciting, and also fitting. The Grand Canal Theatre may appear to be a beacon of private development, but it started life as a public-sector project, initiated by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.

The Irish theatre sector has much to learn from this gleaming new theatre, but also much to bring to it.

Published in the Irish Independent.