"I don't want to fit in," said the small, slim 22 year old actress to the managing director of the Abbey Theatre. Ernest Blythe had shown Phyllis Ryan the path to redemption. She would have to leave but "a lengthy sojourn in the Gaeltacht" becoming fluent in Irish and learning about Irish history, would sort her out so that she could fit in better. Phyllis gave him her answer and she was out.
If she hadn't had the knocks she's had, believes Phyllis Ryan, whose autobiography, The Company I Kept, has just been published by Town House, she might never have achieved so much. Ernest Blythe sent a woman who would alter the course of Irish theatre history into the world that day.
As a producer with her own Gemini Productions, she breathed the first life into John B. Keane's The Field and Big Maggie, for instance, as well as Hugh Leonard's Da. She encouraged Leonard in his adaptations of Joyce, The Voices Of Shem and Stephen Dee, although Joyce was still considered blasphemous by vocal members of the community. She brought the Irish premieres of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof to an unsuspecting Gas Company Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. She persuaded Carolyn Swift and Alan Simpson to revive Williams's The Rose Tattoo, which had led them into a shameful and ridiculous court case because the dropping of a condom - actually, a small paper disc - was considered an "obscenity".
Would she have done any of this if her marriage hadn't been such a complete disaster, wonders
Phyllis, as she settles into her 70s? "Trauma and tragedy works for you and against you. I might have sunk into quite a happy marriage and done very little."
SHE fell in love with a handsome young stage manager, Sean Colleary who like her, wanted to go into the world of theatre and change it. Before long, she found herself on her wedding night, in a hotel room in Greystones, terrified of sex and not knowing what to do. Sean announced that it was their duty to consummate the marriage. "He turned out the light and with many endearments and no idea in the world how to handle this most important night of our lives, "we did our duty", she writes "and I cried in the darkness to think that love could hold such terror and pain."
The marriage disintegrated, when Sean became ill with a nervous disorder and, not being able to cope with his inability to pro vide, he went to London to work. Phyllis had two children, Jacqueline and Gregg, but from the time her husband went to London she was, like thousands of others, and unofficial single parent.
As he lay dying in London years later, he explained how pride had kept him away and said he wanted to come home; but it was too late, and one of the strong moments in the book is the administration of what Phyllis feels was a lethal injection to put him out of his misery.
She says she still doesn't know if she knew the injection was going to be lethal. How does she feel about that? "Good," she says. "I didn't want him in pain.
She has had to make her peace with her God about this, about her separation, about her long affair with a married man, the journalist Liam Mac Gabhann: "I couldn't do much about God but put him on my side. I thought He's a lonely man too and He'll understand."
PHYLLIS Ryan was repeating her mother's history in the most extraordinary way. May Ryan had fallen in love, when she was a young woman, with a British army officer and had married him, against she wishes, of both families, in the tense Civil War period. Phyllis never knew him and she was told he was dead but she never believed it. She used to wait at tram cops for him to step off.
Some years later, "Uncle Joe" materialised and it was only after he had married her mother and was living in the house, that Phyllis's sister Doris revealed that he was not their uncle but their stepfather. Doris also knew that their mother and father had, in fact, separated and a nurse filled in some details: "She said he was a charming and handsome man and that they were both hot headed, and when my mother came home to find him "at it" with another woman, she wouldn't tolerate any explanations. She said he married again and had two more daughters called Doris and Phyllis, which makes me think that maybe he was missing us."
How her mother managed divorce and re marriage in Ireland in the 1930s is shrouded in mystery but Phyllis thinks she may have gone North: "She was way ahead of her time. She had already written Vatican Two," says Phyllis. Her new book is, in no small way, a tribute to May, described as "Mother", as if she was a parent to us all. May would have lost her front of house job in the Olympia Theatre if she had been known to be married, and she was working hard at night to qualify as a chiropodist, which she soon achieved.
Phyllis brought up her children in her mother's home in Palmerston Road with her old "minder", Lizzie, and her children's minder", Etta, with Uncle Joe a benign male presence, like in some golden hued Woody Allen film: "Palmerston Road was full of happiness," she says. "My life had more ups than downs. There's a great glow after having survived." She writes that the theatre became the real world for her at an early stage and the real real world, with all its pain and complications, only impinged slowly. At the age of 11 she was introduced to Michel Mac Liammoir by an actress friend of her mother after a show in the Gate, and fell in love with him and with theatre. By the age of 12 she was pleading with Ria Mooney at the Abbey School to let her in, and at 13, Mooney opened the door to her.
THERE were disasters. Once, during Lennox Robin son's Drama At Inish, she rushed in off cue, dropped her tray, and roared: "Give me back my baby!" - no one had yet mentioned the said off spring. But there was so much excitement and there was a love affair with the much older Hugh Hunt, who was brought in to "revolutionise" the Abbey.
Heard that before? The element of deja vu in her portrait of the Abbey is extraordinary. Still an Abbey shareholder, she believes in the National Theatre's role as a "centre of excellence", and that Patrick, Mason has reclaimed, a lot of territory lost by a succession of "not quite the right people for the job".
What the Abbey lacks is money, she says: "The Peacock should lie growing new plays. This is where Frank McGuinness came from, and Bernard Farrell and Marina Carr, above all oh, she's a great girl!"
She favours the funding of the Abbey directly by the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht. Her criticism of arts councils in the past is swingeing but she allows that today's council has many worthwhile members as well as "grace and favour" appointments. She still feels that potential clients of the council should not be members and that the council should be forced to give proper reasons for its decisions.
The old days of companies like Gemini, which was in production 46 weeks of the year without subsidy, are gone, she says, due to rising costs and the fact that people will not work for half nothing any more. The theatre can no longer support itself - "subsidy is there and we must live with it" - which makes the future bleak for commercial theatre and variety: "And the whole beginning of all of us is variety, clowns, Harlequin."
But Phyllis sits on the edge of a Gresham Hotel couch, like a beady eyed little bird ready to fly again; she is in rehearsal as a warrior and as a "mad old lady" for a production of Yeats's Cuchulainn plays at the RHA Gallagher Gallery, directed by Michael Scott - all the more fascinating, as she remembers W.B. from her days in the Abbey.
With the book out of the way, she is looking for the rights for a book, she wants to adapt for a Gemini production next year: "Shades fro the past point me to the future, she ends her memoir, "their inspiration urging me forward."
