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

Hollywood in Belfast

I came across this item bundled with some unproduced scripts in Mary O'Malley's papers. As you can see, it is an original script for the classic 1950 Bette Davis movie All About Eve. Unfortunately as of yet there is no indication of how Mrs O'Malley came to be in possession of the script - a note on the inside cover warns that failure to return it to Twentieth Century Fox will result in a $5 fine! While not being typical of the material in the Lyric Theatre archive, it's a fascinating item.

Sarah Poutch

Thomas Kilroy opens Cúirt Festival and explains the Galway Vibe

There were about fifty people in the foyer of the Galway Museum on Tuesday at 6pm, when Thomas Kilroy officially opened this year's Cúirt International Festival of Literature. He caused a few to laugh out loud (and a very few to frown a little), when he said that one of the attractions of the West of Ireland to artists and creative spirits was the way that the Irish language was never too far here, regarding and sometimes jostling its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, "knocking some of the rigidity out of English, getting the English language to throw off its clothes and run around all over the place naked." (More of this transcript is in the Galway Advertiser).


15 July 1989, John Updike to Thomas Kilroy

And then he mentioned two items from his archives:  a letter from John Updike, regretting he couldn't come to the George Moore symposium in County Mayo (1989), and another from Doris Lessing, whom Kilroy had met and invited to Cúirt in 1994, but who couldn't attend. Both express an interest in, and affection for the West of Ireland, and regret they cannot come. 

Kilroy also told us that Doris Lessing had at one difficult juncture in her life planned to stay in the West, but that after an unconclusive search (from Clare to Sligo) for a place to stay, she returned to London. Who knows what would have happened to her English if she had carried that plan out? The Cúirt Festival continues until Sunday.

Vera Orschel

Photographs from Unknown Productions - Can You Help?

One of the most difficult aspects of archivists' work is the task of trying to identify the people, places and events in photographic collections. I've been lucky with the Lyric archive to some extent as many of the photos have some manner of identifying note on the reverse. This will often be as short as a date or an actor's name, but that can be enough in most cases to help me in researching and discovering the image's provenance. Other photographs don't have notes, but may have distinctive set or costume design, or the photo may be taken of a recognisable scene.

In some cases though, the photo frustratingly remains a mystery. The slideshow above contains the images from my current 'unknown photos' folder. If anyone would like to hazard a guess at any of these, you can click on the slideshow to be brought to the Picasa web album where you can leave comments on any of the images!

Sarah Poutch

New exhibition of photographs from Garda Siochana Historical Society

A new exhibition presenting a photographic history of An Garda Síochána is now on in the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. The exhibition features a series of 48 incredible images from An Garda Síochána Historical Association which date as far back as 1909 and reach as far forward as the 1940s. The photographs chart the fascinating history of An Garda Síochána and include its precursors The Royal Irish Constabulary and The Dublin Metropolitan Police.


The exhibition is complemented by images of Gardaí from our own archives here in NUI Galway, taken from the Ritchie-Pickow collection. More material from the Ritchie-Pickow archive can be seen here: http://call.library.nuigalway.ie:8180/Pickow/index.jsp

The exhibition runs until 6 May 2011 and admission is free.

 For further information please see: http://url.ie/appn, http://url.ie/appq and http://url.ie/apps

First Night at the Lyric Theatre - 1968

The new Lyric Theatre opens in a couple of weeks (1 May). No doubt the opening night will be a fantastic experience, and a celebration of those who worked so hard to raise the funds to rebuild the theatre. This echoes the victorious opening night in 1968, when the Lyric’s first purpose built theatre opened. It’s difficult to imagine how Mary O’Malley, founder of the theatre, must have felt. What had been a labour of love for almost twenty years had finally come to fruition, and for the first time Lyric productions would be based outside of the O’Malley family home. To get an idea of the excitement of that time, here is a slideshow of some images from that night.

Sarah Poutch

Kilroy Making Theatre History

Thomas Kilroy's first play to reach the public was in fact a radio play, The Door, which won a BBC radio play competition and was broadcast in 1967 with Cyril Cusack in the main role. However, his first work for the stage, submitted to the Abbey in 1964, was The O'Neill (The Abbey, 1969). It cast into dramatic form a few episodes in the Ulster chief's fortunes, round about the Battle of the Yellow Ford (1598), and it was the first of Thomas Kilroy's "history plays" (seven of his original plays could be called that). He sought opinions about the draft play from the Abbey Theatre, from Hilton Edwards, Mary O'Malley, and Cyril Cusack, and got some interesting replies.

Cyril Cusack in Genet's
The Balcony,
1967

Cyril Cusack's letter is, in his own description, "ultra-cautious"; he does not think himself a good judge of a play, but despite all mincing of words he makes this comment on the play and on himself: "As it is, this is not the play I would ask, above all, to put on, and, alas, that is the only kind of play upon which I could possibly take a risk" (28 December 1964). An O'Neill could not beat him for mixing diplomacy with boldness.

Ernest Blythe, then director of the Abbey Theatre, reported that there were widely differing opinions on the Abbey board about the play. He himself committed himself as far as to say that "while O'Neill is not a play which might be expected to be wildly popular or a money-spinner and might indeed even provoke some public anger, we think it is far better than any previous play about O'Neill which has come to us and merits the most serious consideration" (24 May 1966).

However, despite such good feedback from The Abbey, The O'Neill suffered the fate of a quixotic journey via the desks of three successive directors and various others, before the Abbey finally produced it in May and June of 1969, with Dubliner Joseph O'Connor in the lead role. In the meantime, Kilroy's second play, The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche, was turned down by the Abbey in 1966 or early 1967, and then overtook The O'Neill by reaching the stage first (Dublin Theatre Festival, 1968).

Revival of "The O'Neill" on the anniversary of O'Neill's departure from Rathmullen

It's also noteworthy that when Brian Friel wrote his own play about Hugh O'Neill, Making History (produced by Field Day in 1988), he and Kilroy were in correspondence about it. There is an essay by Anne Fogarty about the way either dramatist makes sense of "The Great O'Neill" and of historiography. (Irish University Review, vol 32 no.1, Spring/Summer 2002) 18-32.
Vera Orschel