'Yeats Day' on the 13 June annually has become a day of celebration of the works and life of Ireland's Nobel-Prize winning poet, W.B. Yeats. It is also a timely opportunity to reflect on others who have made important contributions to the engagement, study, and interpretation of Yeats' works, including the considerable body of plays written by Yeats. One key person in this regard is Mary O'Malley. Born in Cork in 1920 and later the founder of the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast, along with her husband Pearse, the production and direction records of O'Malley, combined within other series of files within the O'Malley/Lyric Archive at University of Galway Library, provides a vital insight into Mary O'Malley's artistic vision as well as into her own work and processes as a director of Yeats' plays.
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| Mary O'Malley at Yeats' grave, Sligo. c. 1960 |
The first production of the Lyric Players Theatre took place in March 1951 and included a production of W.B. Yeats’ At the Hawk’s Well at Ulsterville House. With the O’Malley family soon moving house to a premises on Derryvolgie Avenue, it afforded the emerging group a new beginning. Space on the grounds of the house that lay over a converted hay loft were divided into two rooms which became the theatre site for the Lyric Players.
Already greatly influenced by W.B. Yeats
and poetic theatre (such as that by Austin Clarke and his earlier Dublin-based
Lyric Theatre Company, where O’Malley had attended performances previously),
she was a committed producer and director of Yeats’ plays at her theatre in
Belfast. In combining the visual, the aesthetic, as much as the lyrical, Yeats’
plays found a invigoration home of experiment and form at the Lyric, through
Mary O’Malley, and with a host of important contributions in acting, design, choreography,
music, and form, while keeping the poetic theatre at the heart of Yeats’
original vision to the fore. Mary O’Malley recounted that the first production
of Yeats in 1951 was an important touchstone for the development of the
artistic vision, policy, and repertoire of the Lyric Players and later its
later theatre:
The stage was
set and we endeavored to create a style suitable for dramatic poetry. This
work and experimentation still goes on. Artistic activity attracts like the
enchanted waters of the Hawk’s Well – the ultimate, always elusive. This, then,
was the reason for beginning: a handful of people interested in the theatre,
poetry and the arts, inspired by the legendary Ulster hero, ignored all
obstacles and founded a Poet’s Theatre”.
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| The studio theatre, DerryvolgieAvenue, 1960s |
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| Music score from 'Calvary', Lyric Players, 1954 |
The archive of the O’Malley/Lyric
Theatre Belfast contains a vast record of the growth and development of the
Lyric Theatre, the tireless work of Mary O’Malley and of her husband, Pearse O’Malley,
in ensuring the theatre’s artistic and cultural expansion. The Lyric was more
Arts Centre that ‘just’ a theatre as at various times in the 1960s and 1970s
its ran an art gallery, music and drama school, craft shop, as well as
publishing a highly significant literary journal, Threshold, which ran until its final issue in 1990. The Lyric
Archive is also an indispensable source of information on the study of and
production of Yeats’ plays. The archive has detailed records of numerous
productions of Yeats’ plays from the 1950s onwards.
One remarkable archive item is Mary
O’Malley’s personal copy of The Plays of
W.B. Yeats. Every page of the volume is filled with detailed annotation,
production notes, direction comments, as well as sketches and drawings of stage
designs. The item presents itself as a handbook for the director interested in
engaging with the vision and task of staging Yeats’ often experimental form. In
discussing the directing of Yeats’ O’Malley once commented on the importance of
voice to the actor when interpreting Yeats’ theatre: “Only those well-disciplined
in speech and movement can be utilised . .
. lines must be clearly and unselfconsciously delivered.”
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| Mary O'Malley's annotated edition of "The Complete Plays of W.B. Yeats". |
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| Mary O'Malley's annotated edition of "The Complete Plays of W.B. Yeats". |
Throughout the archive are detailed
production records, including annotated production and design notes, musical
scores, designs, photographs, programmes and posters from numerous Yeats
productions at the Lyric. Design was also an important factor with artists like
Alice Berger-Hammarschlag and Louis Le Brocquy all designing Yeats plays at the
Lyric.
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| "At the Hawk's Well", Lyric Players Theatre, 1960 |
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| Handwritten note on the 'Death of Cuchulain' music and dance sets, Lyric Players Theatre, 1959, |
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| The Cuchulainn Cycle performed by the Lyric Players, 1978 |
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| Programme from the 10th Anniversary Cuchulain Cycle by the Lyric Players, 1978. |
The literary journal, Threshold, of which Mary O’Malley was
the founding editor provided more fertile ground for the exploration and
discussion of the themes of W.B. Yeats’ plays and poems. The first issue of Threshold, edited by O’Malley, and all subsequent
issues, carried a quotation on its inside cover from W.B. Yeats’ The King’s Threshold:
Cry
out that not a man alive
Would
ride among the arrows with high heart,
Or
scatter with an open hand, had not
Our
heady craft commended wasteful virtues.
In her foreword to the first issue
in 1957, O’Malley wrote:
The history of
Irish periodicals is not encouraging. Despite high literacy standards and imaginative
presentation of general topics, few have survived. No one, however, would deny
the value of their contribution to creative writing and objective criticism. It
is hoped that Threshold will provide a medium for a further contribution.
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| Centenary flyer from Lyric Platers' Centenary Celebration of W.B. Yeats. |
In a later editorial for Threshold in 1958, O’Malley again
outlined for artistic vision which straddles the poet and the theatre as a dual
form of complementary expression, stating that: “The theatre links the writer
and artist with the craftsman and ordinary citizen more intimately than any
other medium.”. In the centenary year of the birth of W.B. Yeats in 1965, Roger
McHugh guest edited a special issue of Threshold
which was dedicated to the work and life of W.B. Yeats and to which Mary
O’Malley contributed an essay on the plays of W.B. Yeats. A full run of the
journal, as well as its administrative correspondence are all collected within
the Lyric Archive.
The Lyric Theatre also has a long
association with the Yeats Summer School is Sligo. The group performed at the inaugural
summer school in 1960. The archive has play programmes, photographs from that
visiting production to Sligo in 1960 and files of correspondence between the
Lyric and the Summer School through subsequent decades.
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| The Lyric Players performing at the first Yeats Summer School, Sligo, 1960. |
The first dedicated biography of
O’Malley, entitled “Fierce Love”, was recently published by former journalist
and writer Bernard Adams. In his description of his subject, Adams wrote that:
Mary O’Malley wanted to change the world. In 1947 she came up from the South of Ireland to live in a place which badly needed changing – the Unionist-dominated statelet of Northern Ireland. She wanted to transform her Belfast world, politically and culturally.
The many legacies of Mary O'Malley, and of her work with the Lyric Theatre lives on through the Lyric in Belfast today, as well as through the Lyric archive at University of Galway. The archive material relating to W.B. Yeats is indispensable to the study of how Yeats's work for the theatre was produced and directed by one of modern Ireland's greatest Yeatsians, Mary O'Malley.
The O’Malley/Lyric Theatre Archive catalogue can be searched here.
An selection of digitised material from the Lyric Archive can be viewed online here.
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| Mary O'Malley, pictured at the Lyric Theatre on Ridgeway Street c. late 1960s. Lyric Archive. |
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