![]() Photo from the Lyric archive at University of Galway. Photo from the Lyric archive at University of Galway.Īudience at Opening Night of Lyric Theatre, 1968. Behind Mrs Hughes is director Denis Smyth to her right George Mooney, Lyric actor, director and chronicler. The indomitable Mrs Hughes is in a sleeveless dress, in the front, far right. Among the Lyric Players, their friends and associates is Mary in the middle of the balcony with Sam McCready on her right, and Alice Berger Hammerschlag and Helen Lewis on her left. The last night at Derryvolgie Avenue in June 1968. She liked poetic dramas, but local taste was for realism and comedy. She was a socialist, but potential audiences were much more likely to be conservative. She would run out of the room as fast as she could when the first note of ‘God Save the Queen’ started. The task was made even harder by the fact that Mary was a nationalist in a Unionist city. ![]() Neither Mary nor Pearse had any experience of managing a fully professional theatre. But Mary’s ambitions were grand – and after many years of purposeful work in her tiny theatre, The Lyric Players Theatre became a non-profit association. ![]() Until 1960 it was a wholly amateur operation, subsidized by the earnings of Mary’s husband, the psychiatrist Patrick Pearse O’Malley, who provided active, lifelong support for her projects. After the play the public would gather for coffee – and sometimes even meals – in the O’Malley’s breakfast room and the actors would join them. There was a family feel to productions at Derryvolgie Avenue. It’s worth noting that Icaro took place with the actors on the same level as the audience, although eventually a stage was built with two shallow steps leading up to it from the auditorium. This initial outing convinced Mary that her stable could become a professional theatre even though it meant, for now, a weekend home invasion as the audience walked in through a side door, along the front hall, up the stairs, through a corridor and then down some stairs to get to their seats. privileged to see last night’s production must have felt grateful to these performers who call themselves the Lyric Players’. The press was invited to this first venture in her new playhouse and was complimentary about this ‘unusual play in an unusual city theatre’. Photo from the Lyric archive at University of Galway.Īudience area viewed from studio theatre stage. Interior of the fifty-seater studio theatre, 1950s. The cast included many who had already stepped out on the Ulsterville bay window stage and some new names, including the precociously talented Norman Stevenson, who was still at school. The production involved ‘all the arts – music, dance, setting and costume’. She and her children’s nurse had made the scenery her mother had helped with the costumes. She managed to move no fewer than twenty-two players around her tiny stage. Mary, being Mary, made her first production an ambitious one: Icaro, an Italian play she had helped to put on some years ago with the New Theatre in Dublin. The audience sat in the larger of the two rooms where there was just about enough space for fifty seats. The Studio, as her theatre was sometimes called was divided by folding doors, which were soon removed to make a stage that was deeper than it was wide – twelve by ten feet – and an auditorium. There, in Derryvolgie Avenue, she made a theatre out of a room above the stable where she created a fine company of actors, turned distinguished Ulster artists into set designers, found a choreographer and a composer and put on 140 plays in seventeen years. In 1951 she had begun to put on verse dramas in the bay window of the front room of her Belfast home in 1952 she moved to a bigger suburban house with a stable block at the back. So Mary tried another tack: she directed her considerable energy to asserting her own culture, in her own theatre – trying to add a wider, Irish dimension to theatre-going in Belfast.īelfast Corporation elections, 1952. ![]() But she found the Unionist monolith too hard to crack at that moment. She had encountered desperate deprivation in the ramshackle homes of her constituents in Smithfield and, as a socialist, laboured hard to alleviate it. She served for three years in the early 1950s as an Irish Labour councillor on the Belfast Corporation. She wanted to transform her Belfast world, politically and culturally. In 1947 she came up from the South of Ireland to live in a place which badly needed changing – the Unionist-dominated statelet of Northern Ireland. Mary O’Malley wanted to change the world.
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