The designation is telling: within a single generation, a working playhouse had already passed into the category of the antiquated, rendered obsolete and forgotten by the pace of the city growing around it. That building was the Theatre Royal on Smock Alley, and the quiet irony of its early redundancy sits at the centre of what makes it worth noticing today.

The theatre was built in 1733, and its architect was Edward Lovett Pearce, the same man responsible for the Parliament House on College Green, now the Bank of Ireland, one of the most ambitious public buildings of Georgian Dublin. That Pearce should have designed both a seat of government and a place of popular entertainment in the same decade speaks to the breadth of his practice, and to Dublin's ambitions as a city in the early eighteenth century. By the time Rocque was drawing his map just twenty years after the theatre's completion, the building had already acquired that loaded prefix: old. The source for this identification is Lennon and Montague's 2010 study, which places the Theatre Royal firmly within Pearce's body of work.

Smock Alley itself, tucked into the older street fabric south of the Liffey, is easy to miss if you are not looking for it. The site sits in an area of Dublin that has been repeatedly built over, and the physical traces of Pearce's theatre are long gone. What remains is the cartographic ghost on Rocque's 1756 map, which is available to view through various digitised historical map collections online and is worth consulting before any visit to the area. Walking the lane today, with Rocque's map in mind, gives a sense of how compressed Dublin's history can be in a small stretch of ground, where a building designed by one of the country's foremost architects had already become a memory before the century was out.