THE years which followed the second World War were bad ones for Irish drama. As if mirroring the general dispirited feel of the period, theatre was poor, unadventurous and still trying to live off the memory of past glories, real or imagined. Because there was so little money, production standards were abysmal and everyone was underpaid to the point of penury. Apart from a few fit up companies and the occasional tour from Dublin, there was virtually no professional theatre outside the capital.
Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, the white hopes of the period between the wars, had fallen on hard times. Financially crippled by a series of loss making productions, they had also fought with their partner, Lord Longford, and existed in uneasy exile from the theatre they had founded, putting on occasional productions wherever they could. Meanwhile the Abbey, under Ernest Blythe, a politician with a nationalist agenda and very little feel for drama, was approaching the nadir of its fortunes. This was to come in 1951 when the old theatre went up in flames, and lasted until Tomas MacAnna took over as Artistic Director in the Sixties.
But as always happens, there were stirrings in the darkness. Many theatre people were unhappy with the way things were. The Pike, a tiny theatre in Herbert Lane, was starting to do exciting new work, and the Globe, a company of actors most of whom had studied at the Brendan Smith Academy, were also achieving high standards in a little theatre situated improbably in the Gas Company showrooms in Dun Laoghaire. But the service they did to Irish theatre was as nothing compared to that of Phyllis Ryan, who followed them and who has now told her story in this invaluable and entertaining book.
Phyllis Ryan is the daughter of a Dublin mother who worked front of house at the Olympia and of a rather shadowy Northern Protestant father, who disappeared while she was still a baby, having been caught by her mother "at it" with another woman. Her early life seems to have been a happy one, with the vanished parent replaced by a kindly "uncle".
Inevitably, given her background, she went to the theatre from an early age, progressing from pantomime to Mac Liammoir with whom, in common with much of the female population of Dublin, she fell instantly in love - a waste of time if ever there was one. While still a schoolgirl she was admitted to the Abbey School of Acting, then run by Ria Mooney, and graduated into the company proper when she was only 17.
Though that theatre's golden age had passed, there were still many fine, even great, actors in the company, among them F.J. McCormick, Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields, and Maureen Delany. Later, their successors were all too often ground down into giving performances that were bored, boring and careless, but at that time the National Theatre must still have been a good place to learn one's trade. Our heroine seems to have taken to it from the first, anyway, falling for the young Hugh Hunt, who had been brought over from England to direct - she always appears to have had a thriving romantic life. She appeared in a number of plays and scored a major hit in Shadow and Substance by Paul Vincent Carroll, in which she played a young girl who sees visions. But all this came to an end when Ernest Blythe became Managing Director. Determined to establish and Irish speaking theatre, he set about getting rid of everyone from the company without that language and the young actress found herself out of a job.
Though he certainly didn't know it, either then or later, Blythe had done the Irish theatre a good turn. For a while Phyllis Ryan worked as a freelance actress, getting married also to Sean Colleary, a stage manager at the Gate. "Why do so many lovely girls marry impossible men?" asks Robert Graves in a poem and, certainly, it's hard to know why this one did. She became pregnant after a disastrous wedding night and shortly thereafter the husband left for England, from where he would come home only occasionally (enough to get her pregnant a second time) until his early death.
It was a difficult business raising a family without a father in the Ireland of those times, but Phyllis Ryan is not a person to baulk at difficulty. Her best days were still ahead of her and came with the founding in 1957 of her own company, Orion, with a Christmas revue. (This was the age when revue was a staple of Dublin theatre and here I must confess an interest - many of those mounted by Phyllis Ryan's companies were written in whole or part by me).
By 1959 Orion had become Gemini, in partnership with the actor Norman Rodway, and the rest, as they say, is history. The new plays mounted by Gemini were legion and it is no exaggeration to say that they included the work of virtually every major Irish playwright of the period, with the exception of Brian Friel. The jewels in the crown were undoubtedly John B. Keane, virtually all of whose plays received their first, hugely successful, productions from Phyllis Ryan, and Hugh Leonard, who for more than a decade contributed a new play yearly for the Dublin Theatre Festival, most of them hits.
Gemini's high point was probably when Leonard's adaptation of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, entitled Stephen D and directed by Jim Fitzgerald, having swept all before it in Dublin, went on to equal acclaim in the London West End - a much more difficult feat for an Irish play then than it is today. (A late Leonard play, Da, also staged by Gemini, was to win Tony Awards in New York, but not in the production seen in Dublin).
With these hits, inevitably, there were some misses and some changes. Rodway, along with a number of others from the cast of Stephen D, stayed in England afterwards and was rarely seen thereafter on the Irish stage.
For Phyllis Ryan, too, there was the business of raising her children and taking care of her ageing mother. She began, too, a long lasting love affair with the journalist Liam MacGabhann, clandestine because he was already married.
She was appointed the first Artistic Director of the Irish Theatre Company, set up to tour professional drama outside Dublin. It was an admirable venture and, for a while, successful but was eventually killed off by the Arts Council after incurring substantial losses. These, as Miss Ryan points out, rightly, I think, were due to the presence on the board of a strong representation from Irish Actors Equity, who voted rises for their members far beyond the company's ability to pay.
Virtually everyone of interest in the Irish theatre of the mid 20th century makes an appearance in these pages, and if one has a quibble it is that they are sometimes dealt with somewhat snidely. All in all, however, this is a book that tells it as it was. Gemini Productions still exists, albeit less actively than it once did. Long may it and its indefatigable founder flourish.