Theatre Archive Doc of the Month - 'A Whistle in the Dark'

The theatre archive document of the month for May is to coincide with the return and nationwide tour of Druid Theatre's DruidMurphy series. This 2013 season run showcases some of Tom Murphy's greatest literary and dramatic works, Conversations on a Home Coming and A Whistle in the Dark. Druid's relationship with Tom Murphy, dating back to when he was Writer-in-Association with Druid in the 1980s has allowed for the creation of an examining of Irishness, the Irish family and Irish history and society so visceral that enthrals audiences at home and abroad still to this day.

 

This document is a cast photograph from the 1987 production of A Whistle in the Dark, which was produced at the Jesuit Hall in Salthill and directed by Garry Hynes. This play's history is well worth noting as it received its premiere at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London in 1961 having previously been rejected by the Abbey Theatre. In the photograph are: (l to r standing) Peter Gowan, Maeliosa Stafford, Johnny Murphy, Mick Lally, Corinne Ransom. (Front row, L to R) Sean McGinley, Godfrey Quigley, David Herlihy.

The Druid Theatre archive at the James Hardiman Library contains further records on the history of this classic murphy play. Interestingly, cast member Maeliosa Stafford (2^nd from left, standing) is currently playing the role of 'Dada' in the current Druid Theatre production of A Whistle in the Dark. Further records relating to this play in the Druid archive include:

T2/152 Scope and Content: A Whistle in the Dark - Written by Tom Murphy and directed by Garry Hynes. Performed at Jesuit Hall, Salthill, Galway. File contains printed playbill featuring biographical essay on Tom Murphy, details of cast and production crew members, article entitled "Drama and Metaphor" by Christopher Murray. 3 copies. Printed black and white flyer and invitation to the opening night performance of the play. 12 items. Assorted photocopy of press cuttings of reviews and coverage of the play taken from various Irish newspapers and press. 60pp Date: 13-25 Jul 1987 Extent: 142 pp

 T2/153 Scope and Content: A Whistle in the Dark - Black and white photographs featuring cast members in costume and on set during rehearsal of A Whistle in the Dark. Contact sheets feature 11-12 images each. 2 items Also includes black and white images of Druid theatre members posing as a group outside Druid Theatre. Those pictured include Sean McGinley, Maeliosa Stafford, Mick Lally, Godfrey Quigley and others. Quigley is seated in these three pictures. Items measure 203mm X 254mm. Date: Jul 1987 Extent: 5 items

 

T2/154 Scope and Content: A Whistle in the Dark - Photocopy of typed script of A Whistle in the Dark, written by Tom Murphy.  Date: Jul 1987 Extent: 1 item

The Druid Archive catalogue can be viewed in full here.

John McGahern Summer School coming soon

Leitrim Co. Council, in partnership with National University of Ireland Galway, have announced that the seventh International Seminar will take place in Co. Leitrim during 23rd – 25th May 2013 to commemorate the work and literary achievements of John McGahern, one of Ireland’s best known and respected modern writers.

McGahern in the U.S.A. c. 1966 from the Patrick Gregory-McGahern Collection

Contributors to the International Seminar will include eminent writers, critics and academics as well as local writers. The keynote address ‘Handrails to the Past: McGahern and the Memory of the Irish Revolution’, will be delivered by Professor Roy Foster. As well as appealing to all lovers of McGahern’s own work, the International Seminar will be of interest to literary researchers and to book clubs, to readers of contemporary fiction and modern writing, and to all national and international students of Irish literature and culture.


The James Hardiman Library is proud to hold the McGahern Archive amongst its holdings. Fully catalogued and available for consultation by readers, (see catalogue list here) the McGahern archive is an incredible insight into

1963 Letter to James Rigney

the literary mind and the writing processes of McGahern as is represented by vast amounts of research notes and drafts of his greatest published and also unpublished fiction works in novel, short fiction, essays and drama. The personal and professional relationships that shaped the work and life of McGahern is explored through the series of correspondence and letters in the archive.

The library also holds a number of related collections including correspondence between John McGahern and his fried Niall Walsh (a medical doctor from Balinasloe) and a collection of correspondence between John McGahern and his American editor Patrick Gregory (This later collection is currently being catalogued).  We also occasionally receive individual items from members of the public.  For example we recently received this letter from the daughter of James Rigney one John McGahern’s lecturers in St. Patrick’s teacher training College in Drumcondra. 

Fergus Fahey, Institutional Repository & Digitisation Librarian at the James Hardiman Library, who catalogued the McGahern archive, will give a talk at the Summer School entitled The John McGahern Archive at NUI Galway. His talk will give a general overview of what’s involved in cataloging a literary archival collection and describe the experience of cataloging the John McGahern collection in particular.  The drafts and other material relating to John McGahern’s 1979 novel The Pornographer will be looked at in detail.  As well as drafts of the published novel the archive includes drafts of some unpublished short fiction which was incorporated into the novel and also several drafts of a film script for an adaptation of the novel which was never produced.  The Pornographer was particularly well received in France and at one point it seems there was a plan for a French director to direct the film adaption.

John McGahern appearing on French Television

The annual summer school is a must for McGahern scholars and the full programme and further details is available here.

To see more of the archive holdings of the James Hardiman Library, view our digital online guide.

'Macbeth' as Gaeilge - Siobhan McKenna and the Bard

 

As the literary world salutes William Shakespeare on his birthday today, these items from the Theatre collections of the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway show the works of the Bard were never far from the stages of the West.

[James Hardiman Library Archives,

Siobhan McKenna Papers, T20/368]

From 16th to 23rd November 1941 Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe, the Irish language theatre based in Galway, staged a production of Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Translated by S.L O Suilleabhain and directed by Walter Macken, it had been planned that the Taoiseach, Eamonn de Valera, would have attended the opening night. Established in 1928, An Taibhdhearc had found a new lease of life from 1939 with the appointment of Walter Macken as director, who also took the lead in this play. Macken is one of the best loved writers, novelists and literary drivers from the West and his immense contribution is evident throughout the papers and archives An Taibhdhearc. (Full catalogue here)

Siobhan McKenna had just started her Arts degree in University College Galway and had acted in An Sciursa Bhan by Karl Capek in the previous June and in An tImpire Mac Seoin by Eugene O'Neill in September, but this production of 'The Scottish Play' was her first major role with the theatre. Later, when Siobhan went for auditions in the Abbey in 1945, Ernest Blythe asked her for an impromptu speech in Irish; it was, in fact, one from this role she performed. 

[James Hardiman Library Archives,

Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe Collection, T1/D/76.]

 



[James Hardiman Library Archives,

Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe Collection, T1/D/76.]

McKenna, a fine Shakesperian actor, spent a season at Stratford-on-Avon in 1952. She played a captivating Viola in ‘Twelfth night’, directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie (qv) at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in 1957, and a one-woman Hamlet in the manner of Sarah Bernhardt off Broadway in 1957, which critics panned; but her Lady Macbeth, opposite Jason Robards, at Harvard University in 1959 was of star quality, ‘putting in the greatest mad scene seen in the U.S. since Callas's Lucia di Lamermoor’ (Time).

Extensive records are present in the papers of Siobhan McKenna on her time spent in Stratford-on-Avon and indeed on her personal life and professional career in general. The full catalogue can be seen here.

Theatre Archive Document for April - Arthur Shields and the Abbey Theatre in America 1932-33

Our theatre archive document of the month for April comes from the Arthur Shields (1896-1970) archive and the Abbey Theatre tour of North America, eighty years ago this year.

Arthur Shields

The papers of actor, director and revolutionary Arthur Shields provide a truly personal, textual and visual insight into the life, career of Arthur Shields, as he worked in theatre for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, in America on the Abbey Tours of the 1930s and his later film career and that of his brother Barry Fitzgerald (William Shields, 1888-1961).

Shields was the son of Adolphus Shields, labour organizer, writer for The Freeman’s Journal, and friend of James Connolly and William O’Brien. His mother was of German ancestry, and the parents were by upbringing Protestant—in practice, the family were secular and socialist.  

Shields had three wives, two of whom acted for the Abbey Theatre: Basie McGee, who acted under the name 'Joan Sullavan,' and Una 'Aideen' O'Connor. His third wife Laurie Bailey Shields, an American journalist, was instrumental in collecting additional material for the archive after Arthur's death

The brothers Shields were close friends of Sean O’Casey, and took instrumental roles in the first productions of his ‘Dublin trilogy.’ Arthur Shields was through the 1920s and 30s, the Abbey’s chief ‘handsome lead’; his brother Barry Fitzgerald was the company’s most popular comic actor. Arthur Shields frequently directed plays for the Abbey, and more particularly for George Yeats's 'Dublin Drama Leagure'. In the 1930s, when the Abbey undertook a succession of half-year tours of North America, it was Arthur Shields who handled their management on the road.

These tours won the Abbey a fond welcome in towns and cities across the continent. Broadway producers and Hollywood directors also expressed their interest. John Ford, the great Irish American film director, met with the company in Hollywood, and decided to use some members in The Informer(1935) and all the main players in The Plough and the Stars (1936). Thereafter, Barry Fitzgerald remained in the USA as a film star. Arthur Shields was cast in subsequent movies by Ford. He also was invited to direct plays by Paul Vincent Carroll on Broadway in the late 1930s. By the end of the decade, he and his partner Aideen Shields had left the Abbey for the USA.

It is from these papers relating to the 1932-1933 tour of North America that we focus on this month and highlight the Abbey Tour which took place eighty years ago this year.

T13/A/82

Proposed and temporary itinerary for the 1932-1933 Abbey tour of North America. Covers the period from 10 October 1932 to 10 May 1933. 2 identical copies present.

 

T13/A/90

Letter from W.B. Yeats, The Waldorf Astoria, New York addressed to Arthur Shields. Yeats writes that he was of the strong opinion 'that it would be better as far as possible to drop "Words upon the Window Pane" out of our American repertory' because Yeats felt that American audience didn't have sufficient knowledge of Swift's works. 30 October 1932.

 

 An online exhibition of digitised material from the Shields Archive is available here  

The Shields archive catalogue can be accessed in full here

 

April Book of the Month - John Daly, 'Fein-Theagasc Gaedheilge' (Dublin, 1846)

John Daly (1800-1878) was born in Farnane, Co. Waterford, was educated through hedge-schools and taught Irish at Wesleyan College, Kilkenny. He moved to Dublin and set up as a printer and bookseller in Angelsea St. He commissioned and published Edward Walsh translations as Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844), as well as publishing this book, Self-Instruction in Irish, in 1846. He was founding secretary of the Ossianic Society, 1853; retained contact with Gaelic poets and scholars such as Patrick Farham in Dingle, Co. Kerry, and Art Mac Bionaid, in Forkhill, Co. Armagh.

 

Daly corresponded with Nicholas O’Kearney who edited Feis Tighe Chonáin for the Ossianic Society founded in his Anglesea St. house in 1853; issued Michael Kearney, trans., The Kings of the Race of Eibhear (1847), being the poem of John O’Dugan [Seán Mór Ó Dubhagáin]; commissioned and published Mangan versifying the prose translations in The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849), 1st Series [George Sigerson’s edition being the second]; also Irish Miscellany: Being a Selection of the Poems of the Ulster Bards of the Last Century (1876) and Key to the Study of Gaelic (Boston 1899).

This book was bought in 1880 by Douglas Hyde, and contains hand-written notes on points of Irish grammar at the back done by Hyde himself. Founder of the Gaelic League, An Craoibhin Aoibhinn was instrumental in bringing the work of Irish language scholars such as Daly to a wider audience. This book is part of the Éamon de Buitléar collection which was recently donated to the James Hardiman Library here at NUI Galway. Éamon’s father served as A.D.C. to Douglas Hyde when he was the first President of Ireland.
 

James Joyce and the Topographical Symphony of the Fourteen Tribes of Galway

The 17th century pictorial map of Galway 

One of the most interesting items in our archival collection is a 17^th century pictorial map of Galway.  The item attracted the attention of James Joyce who in 1912 described the map:

The strangest and most interesting historical document in the city archives is the map of the city made for the Duke of Lorraine in the seventeenth century, when His Highness wished to be assured of the city’s greatness on the occasion of a loan requested of him by his English confrere, the happy monarch.  The map full of symbolic expressions and engravings....The margins of the parchment are heavy with the heraldic arms of the tribes, and the map itself is little more than a topographical symphony on the theme of the number of tribes.  Thus the map maker enumerates and depicts fourteen bastions, fourteen towers on the wall. Fourteen principal streets, fourteen narrow streets and then sliding, seven gardens, seven alters..., seven markets and seven other wonders.

The list of 14 'Bastions'

Joyce’s source for this historical background is clearly Hardiman’s History of Galway, more recent scholarship has cast doubt on the link between the map and the proposed treaty with the Duke of Lorraine.  Certainly the map makes symbolic use of the numbers seven and fourteen.  As well as many of the features of the map appearing in groups of seven and fourteen the map includes a piece of Latin verse which reads in translation:

Rome boasts seven hills,

The Nile its seven'fold streams,

Around the pole seven radiant planets gleam;

Galway, Rome of Connacht, twice equals these;
 She boasts twice seven illustrious families;

The Rome of Connacht? Gate with a flag reading SPQG

This is the earliest known reference to the fourteen tribes of Galway. What is the significance of this symbolic use of the numbers seven and fourteen?  Other than the obviously Christian religious significance of the number seven  and a general Renaissance era neo-platonic interest in mathematics and numerology we are not really sure.  If any budding Dan Browns out there can have any ideas about the hidden message of seven and fourteen we’d love to hear them, if you can tie it into the storming of the Bastille on the 14 of July 1789 so much the better.

Read more of the story behind this fascinating map in this month’s edition of History Ireland .

You can access the map on line at: http://archives.library.nuigalway.ie/citymap

#2 of the 14 Bastions which appear on the map

The coats of Arms of four of the fourteen tribes of Galway which appear on the margins of the map 

The History and Delineation of the Horse

                                                                         

 Book of the Month

John Lawrence - The History and Delineation of the Horse

(London, 1809)

A project has been underway by staff in our Information Access and Learning Services division to upgrade the catalogue information relating to many of our special printed collections and work has just been completed on the Kings Inns collection.

This volume was chosen to represent the fifty books in that collection.  The James Hardiman Library was one of a number of Irish libraries to purchase books which were offered for sale by the Honourable Society of the Kings Inns in 1973. The sale provoked major controversy in the Irish cultural world at the time and the purchase by other Irish Libraries with financial support from An Taisce, was an attempt to retain important rare books in Ireland.

Lawrence’s History and Delineation of the Horse is one of the best known works by an English author who wrote extensively on horses and animal husbandry. He was among the foremost proponents of improving the treatment of animals. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that he was consulted by Richard Martin, MP for Galway [“Humanity Dick”], before the latter introduced his “bill on the better treatment of cattle” in parliament.  The book treats extensively of the history of the horse with particular reference to its development as a domestic species. Published in  a century which saw the formalisation of racing and “The Turf”, there is much commentary on the development of racehorse breeds, a topic that will no doubt exercise the minds of many in Ireland and Britain during the month of March, when the annual Cheltenham racing festival takes place!

Find out more….

The entry on John Lawrence can be found in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The print edition is available at 920.041OXF in the Reference Collection on the Ground Floor or it is available online to NUIG users only.

For more details about the controversy concerning the sale of the Kings Inns Library see Colum Kenny. Kings Inns and the Battle of the Books, 1972: cultural controversy at a Dublin library (Dublin, 2002). 026.34 KEN in the Special Collections Reading Room.

You can view the Special Collections homepage here