Original Abbey Theatre Programme - 1903

Following on from the discovery of the Abbey Theatre playbills several weeks ago, we can now show you another wonderful item in much the same vein. This is a programme from October 1903, when the plays The King's Threshold by W.B. Yeats and In the Shadow of the Glen by J.M. Synge premiered. The actors featured included Sara Allgood, Seumas O'Sullivan and P.J. Kelly. They were performed along with Yeats' Kathleen Ní Houlihan in Molesworth Hall, Molesworth Street in Dublin by the Irish National Theatre Society. The Abbey Theatre opened the following year, when the Mechanics' Hall on Lower Abbey Street became available. The opening run would see two of the plays from this programme staged again, Kathleen Ní Houlihan and In the Shadow of the Glen.

In fact, this production probably played an instrumental part in the development of the Abbey. Annie Horniman, the patron of the Abbey who eventually purchased the building on Lower Abbey Street, came to Ireland in 1903 in part to design the costumes for The King's Threshold.

It's not known precisely how this programme came into the possession of the O'Malley family, but as Mary O'Malley had such a keen interest in Yeats' drama and in the Abbey Theatre we can presume she collected it  at some point in the course of her research.

Sarah Poutch

Preparatory Work

One of the most important tasks when cataloguing a large collection such as the Lyric Theatre Archives is to arrange the material in a logical and useful order before descriptions are created in the catalogue. At present I am collecting photographs, audio reels, scripts and programmes and organising them by theatrical production. This means that when they are fully listed, researchers will be able to easily locate and access all of the available media related to the specific play or event that they are interested in.

While that sounds like rather dry and perhaps even uninteresting work, the truth is that archivists will find some fantastic items while carrying out such work. This week I have mainly been working with programmes from the theatre’s long and varied history of productions.

Early Lyric Theatre programmes

 

A great job was done in collecting and preserving these programmes, with the majority of the theatre’s productions represented. 

It is especially interesting to note which productions were staged several times over the decades. Researchers will no doubt find fertile ground here when comparing the similarities and differences between these different productions.

We can see here that the Lyric produced a version of Euripides’ Medea in November 1957, the same play that was recently staged to great acclaim as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival.

We can for now only imagine the insights to be gleaned between comparisons of the staging of this Ancient Greek play in 1950s Belfast and modern day Dublin. With the forthcoming availability of this collection,  the opportunity to do so will be offered.

Sarah Poutch