The Theatre Royal— a palace of cine-variety

In its day, the façade of the Theatre Royal was considered to be a fine example of art-deco style, but its impact was lost in a west-facing aspect on Hawkins Street. Architectural commentators said that the atmospheric ‘Moorish’ interior motifs jarred with the art-deco exterior. (Irish Arts Review)
In its day, the façade of the Theatre Royal was considered to be a fine example of art-deco style, but its impact was lost in a west-facing aspect on Hawkins Street. Architectural commentators said that the atmospheric ‘Moorish’ interior motifs jarred with the art-deco exterior. (Irish Arts Review)

The Theatre Royal’s short 27-year lifespan (it opened in 1935) is testimony to the rapid social change and revolution in entertainment that took place during the last century. The same site had played host to the ‘first’ Theatre Royal (burned down in 1880), the Leinster Hall (built in 1886) and the Theatre Royal Hippodrome (demolished in 1934).

Read more

Its own art department

The theatre had its own art department, which in the 1940s was under the direction of the Limerick painter Fergus O’Ryan. O’Ryan was joined in the early ’40s by a teenage assistant, James Mahon. The theatre’s scene dock and art department had absorbed the old premises of the Freeman’s Journal in Townshend Street. Set design, … Read more

Organ players

Of the Theatre Royal’s organ-players (Alban Chambers, Gordon Spicer, Norman Metcalfe and Tommy Dando), Norman Metcalfe’s career spanned a trajectory from church organ to cine-variety to television, where he worked on the RTÉ quiz show Quicksilver. The prototype for that quiz, Double or Nothing, was first staged at the Theatre Royal in 1942. The Englishman … Read more

countdown to 2016 : A Soldier’s Song/ Amhrán na bhFiann

In the early years of the twentieth century the common ‘marching songs’ for nationalists were T.D. Sullivan’s God Save Ireland and Thomas Davis’s A Nation Once Again, both of which were identified with the Irish Parliamentary Party.   By 1907 Peadar Kearney (Peadar Ó Cearnaigh) wanted to write something more rousing and original. Along with … Read more