Archives and Special Collections - University of Galway Library: May 2021

Thursday, May 6, 2021

Remembering Tom Hickey - From the Archives

Defender of the Faith by Stuart Carolan,
Abbey Theatre Archive,
2004.

The passing of actor Tom Hickey has been met by an outpouring of tributes from those who worked with and who knew him across a range of Irish theatres and companies and in television, over the past five decades. Accounts of Hickey’s career in the theatre, from being a central and founding member of the Focus Theatre in Dublin in the 1960s, to starring performances at Ireland’s major theatres, live long in the memory of all those fortunate to have seen him perform throughout his career.

Within the theatre archive collections of the Hardiman Library, numerous performances by Hickey are documented and digitally preserved today and for future generations. Archives of the Abbey Theatre, the Gate Theatre, and of the Druid Theatre Company, all carry wonderful memories of one of Ireland’s most talented and best-loved performers.

London Assurance by Dion Boucicault. Gate Theatre Archive, 1993.

The archives hold thousands of production photographs from Hickey’s many performances, as well as play programmes, prompt-scripts, press material and many other records that document Hickey’s many roles at the Abbey, The Gate and with Druid. As well as these items, there are hundreds of hours of digitised video recordings of some of Hickey’s most famous roles. Some examples include the recording of The Great Hunger at the Abbey Theatre in 1983; Tom Murphy’s The Gigli Concert at the Abbey in 1983 and later revivals in 1991 and in 2004; Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996) and By the Bog of Cats (1998); Brian Friel’s Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) and Thomas Kilroy’s Christ Deliver Us! from 2010. At the Gate Theatre there are recordings of Hickey’s performances in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1988); Aristocrats by Brian Friel (1991), Bernard Farrell’s Stella by Starlight (1998) and Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People (2011).

In the Druid Theatre Archive, there is a full recording of Hickey’s celebrated role as Red Raftery in Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill. Other Druid archive records include production photographs, programmes and press material from Hickey’s roles in John B. Keane’s Sharon’s Grave (2003) and from the double-bill of The Playboy of the Western World and The Shadow of the Glen (2008).

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Tom Hickey, Sharon's Grave, 2003
Druid Theatre Archive.

Overall, there are fifty fully digitised recordings of Hickey’s performances across the archive collections of the Hardiman Library. These images are a small sample of the indelible mark that Tom Hickey left to all those who were part of his audience for over fifty years and how the archive collections of the Hardiman Library, NUI Galway, will ensure Hickey’s many starring roles will be preserved for the future.