ACTOR BOSCO Hogan describes Tomás Mac Anna as a "great mentor". Mac Anna cast Hogan in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boyin 1969. However, beyond the professional opportunity of performing in Behan's play in Paris, Hogan has a personal reason to be grateful to Mac Anna for giving him the role.
“There was an actress called Leslie Lalor also in the show. I had known her a bit before, but two weeks in Paris cemented the relationship.” The couple has been married ever since.
Hogan credits Mac Anna with helping to start the careers of many others, including Joe Dowling, Niall Buggy and John Kavanagh. “He was incredibly innovative. He generated tremendous energy and enthusiasm, which made people get up off their backsides.”
Actor Máire Ní Ghráinne agrees with Hogan. “He started the careers of hundreds of actors, and infused us all with energy,” she says. “He was very caring; the pater familias of so many actors. And the scope of plays he directed was amazing, from panto, European plays such as Lorca and Brecht, to the old plays of Seán O’Casey.”
Ní Ghráinne particularly remembers the opening night of Tom Murphy’s Famine at the Peacock, which Mac Anna directed. “He created with the author such a feeling of awfulness and despair that at the end, nobody clapped. There was complete silence. And after the actors left the stage, the audience stayed on in their seats, unable to move.” She also recalls Mac Anna saying: “‘I wish I’d been able to fill the theatre with the smell of rotting potatoes’, but we’re delighted he didn’t.”
In a statement, Fiach Mac Conghail, director of the Abbey Theatre said: “Tomás Mac Anna gave his creative life and work to the Abbey . . . he changed the course of the national theatre and infused it with a vital theatrical energy. He was a generous man who helped and nurtured the careers of many actors, writers and directors. His passion for the theatre along with his personal high standards of artistic excellence will continue to have a profound and long-lasting effect on the Abbey.”
– ROSITA BOLAND
