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).
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
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
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
The French historian François Simiand once admonished historians not to ‘forecast the weather from your back garden’, warning against the tendency to seek for explanations in the local and immediate environment and the analysis of internal processes. This may be particularly true when it comes to small countries buffeted by events over which they have … Read more