Life
1918-2006 [née Mary Margaret Hickey]; b. Mallow, Co. Cork; brought up singly by her mother after her father’s death from TB before her birth; moved to Dublin with her mother to be close to her brother Gerard, a civil servant and a constant support who contributed largely to her education; became involved in artistic circles in and worked at Abbey; m. Dr. Pearse O’Malley, a psychiatrist with the Mater Infirmorum Hospital in Belfast (of which he was first director), and moved with him to that city after marriage; formed the Lyric Players, 1951 at home on Derryvolgie Ave, on Malone Rd., ‘a poet’s theatre’ on verse-speaking principles of W. B. Yeats; produced At the Hawk’s Well and The Dreaming of the Bones by Yeats - to be followed by twenty-two more of his plays over the years; fnd. Threshold (1957-67), but failed to launch a dramatic verse movement by it; established a drama school as the Children’s Theatre;
also produced Robert Farren, Lost Light; Valentine Iremonger, Wrap Up My Green Jacket (on Emmet); moved to Derryvolgie Ave., and built a fifty-seater theatre and gallery on to the family home, 1952; produced 31 international plays; also produced Synge’s Deirdre, and Riders to the Sea; Donagh MacDonagh’s Lady Spider; Jack Yeats’s La La Noo; Friel’s the Enemy Within; Criotoir O’Flynn [Ó Floinn], Romance of an Idiot; Beckcett’s Endgame; Eugene McCabe’s King of the Castle; Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge; Wesley Burrows’ The Becauseway, as well as plays by O’Casey, who subscribed money on several occasions and permitted a production of The Silver Tassie while his plays were under personal embargo in Dublin;
The Lyric Company played at the Dublin Theatre Festival and Yeats Summer School, Sligo, 1962; in that year the portal stone of a new theatre was raised by Austin Clarke at Ridgeway St., nr. Stranmilis, on 12 July 1965; Clarke had produced all of Yeats’s plays and others including Jack Whyte’s The Last Eleven; the company moved the New Lyric Theatre in 1968 but the O’Malleys resigned from the board soon after, when the requirement to play the British national anthem was pressed on the Company; Liam Neeson appeared there successfully in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1976 - and subsequently became the theatre’s main financial patron besides the Arts Council (whose support comes and goes); a donation of £1m was made by Dr. Martin Naughton, a Northern Irish businessman, in 2007;
Mary O’Malley was awarded Hon. MA from QUB, 1969 and made a shareholder of the Abbey Th., Dublin; the O’Malleys retired to Wicklow in 1976, and later South Dublin; she wrote an autobiography in retirement (Never Shake Hands with the Devil, 1990); Mary died in Dublin on 22 April 2006; her husband died on 11 Oct. 2004; the O’Malley Papers are held in the Hardiman Library of Galway University.
Works
The O’Malley’s works were their theatre and its productions. Mary O'Malley wrote an autobiography as Never Shake Hands with the Devil (Dublin: Elo Press 1990), giving an account of a cultural nationalist suddenly planted in a Unionist-controlled city and dealing with the cross-currents of that society both before and during the Troubles.
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Criticism
Sam Hanna Bell, ‘Theatre’, in Michael Longley, ed., Causeway: The Arts in Ulster (1971), pp.72-94, espec. pp.84-85; [unsigned, presum. by James Simmons], ‘Mary O’Malley of the Lyric Players Theatre’, Honest Ulsterman, 1 (May 1968), pp.32-35; [q.a.], ‘Onlie begetter of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast’, Books Ireland (Feb. 1991), [citing ‘History of the Lyric’ by her son, viz., A
Poet’s Theatre (Dublin: Elo Press 1988)].
“Gate Theatre production withdrawn”, Belfast Newsletter (25 May 1955) [cutting in Sybil Le Brocquy Papers; held by family]: ‘CHANGES in the programmes of the Gate Theatre company at the Grand Opera, House, Belfast, were announced last night. / Elmer Rice’s “Not for Children” will be taken off after to-night’s performance. It will be replaced during the remaining three nights of this week by Maura Laverty’s “ Liffey Lane,” with which the company opened its present visit to Belfast. / “The Masquerade,” by Pirandello, which was to have been presented next week has also been withdrawn. It will be replaced by Maura Laverty’s “Tolka Row,” which the company presented when in Belfast last year. / Arrangements are being made for the “props” for “Tolka Row” to be brought from Dublin by road. / Referring to the changes in programmes, Mr. George Lodge, managing director of the Grand Opera House, told the “NewsLetter” last night that “Not for Children” had been “very badly received in Belfast.’ [more]
Notes
Kilkenny Cats: Mary O’Malley made an early contribution to the “Partition debate” in Kilkenny, organised by Hubert Butler, to that effect that the oppression of Catholics in Northern Ireland was not to be compared with fascism.
Laying the Foundations: Poem to Mary O’Malley by John Hewitt included in Programme for Laying of Foundation of Lyric Theatre Belfast, by Austin Clarke, 12 June 1965.
Namesake: A play, Once a Catholic by her English-born namesake and set in Willesden in 1954, giving a comic view of teenage under the auspices of the nuns, appeared successfully at the Grand Opera House, Belfast, March, 1997; there is a TV adaptation by the author herself.
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