That detail alone sets this building apart: a former Church of Ireland parish church that has traded its congregation for an audience, while the dead remain quietly in residence below the north wall.

The structure dates, by local account, to around the 1720s, though it almost certainly occupies the site of an earlier parish church. When Samuel Lewis described it in 1837 he called it 'an old structure, thoroughly repaired', which suggests it was already wearing its age visibly by then. The building's plan is fairly typical of the period: a rectangular nave running east to west, with lancet windows, those tall narrow pointed arches common in Gothic-influenced ecclesiastical architecture, lighting the interior in pairs and singly. To the west stands a three-storey embattled tower, the battlemented parapet giving it a faintly defensive look, with a spire added later. That spire, along with a chancel to the east and a bell, all arrived in 1885, when the church underwent considerable structural alterations. The hipped projection on the north side was purpose-built to house the private pews of the Moores of Moorpark, a family significant enough locally to warrant their own dedicated space, constructed directly over their burial vaults below.

The building sits on the western side of the graveyard and immediately south of the old Market House, two neighbours that between them say a good deal about how the town of Kilworth once organised its public life around commerce and worship in close proximity. Its current life as a theatre gives it an afterlife that is perhaps less unusual in Ireland than one might think, where redundant churches frequently find new purposes, but the particular combination here, Georgian origins, Victorian additions, aristocratic burial vaults underfoot, and a live performance space above, makes for a quietly layered kind of place.