7 Exchange Street Lower has been, in sequence, a theatre, a whiskey store, a Catholic church, a Viking-themed tourist attraction, and a theatre again. That accumulation of lives is unusual enough, but the detail that sharpens it is this: when archaeologists excavated beneath the vaults of SS Michael and John's Church, they found the structural remains of the original Smock Alley Theatre of 1662 still sitting underneath. The building did not simply change use; it absorbed each new purpose into itself while keeping its bones largely intact.

John Ogilby opened Smock Alley in 1662, the same year London's Drury Lane was established, as part of the cultural machinery of the Restoration of Charles II. It was the first custom-built theatre in Dublin and the first outside London to receive the title of Theatre Royal. There was a practical problem from the start, however: the site had been built on land reclaimed from the Liffey, and the ground was unstable. The gallery collapsed twice, and the building had to be substantially rebuilt in 1735. Despite this, the theatre flourished. George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan all had plays performed here, and performers including Peg Woffington, Spranger Barry, and Charles Macklin worked its stage. It was also the theatre where David Garrick, widely considered the greatest actor of the eighteenth century, first played Hamlet. Thomas Sheridan took on management in the mid-1740s and introduced further improvements. When the theatre finally closed in 1787, it passed to a whiskey merchant before Father Michael Blake acquired it for religious use. In 1811, eighteen years before Catholic Emancipation, the bell of what became SS Michael and John's Church rang out as the first Catholic bell heard in Dublin in almost three hundred years. The church's original ceiling plasterwork and stained glass windows survive from that period. The building was deconsecrated in 1989, briefly became the Viking Adventure as part of the Temple Bar rejuvenation scheme, and then closed again in 2002 before a six-year renovation returned it to theatrical use in May 2012.

Smock Alley Theatre is an active venue today, so visiting is straightforward: check the programme in advance and book accordingly. The Exchange Street Lower address puts it firmly in the Temple Bar quarter, which can be loud on weekend evenings, so matinee performances or quieter weekday visits give a better sense of the space. Once inside, it is worth pausing to look up at the ceiling plasterwork, which dates to the building's time as a church, and to consider that the stage floor sits above the foundations of a theatre that was already old when David Garrick was learning his craft.