Carroll marries clothing designer Helena Reilly in Glasgow in 1923. They have four children, actress Helena Carroll, musician and producer Theresa Perez, journalist Kathleen Carroll and son Brian Carroll who resides in London. He is grandfather to Helena Perez Reilly and great grandfather to Paul Vincent Reilly. His brother, Niall Carroll, is a film critic.
Carroll founds two theater groups in Glasgow: the Curtain Theatre company, with Grace Ballantine and Molly Urquhart, in 1933 and the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in 1943. He remains the director and playwright in residence of the Citizens Theatre until his death.
The Wayward Saint is made into an opera in Germany in the 1960’s and his daughter Theresa commissions and produces an opera of his Beauty is Fled from the collection Plays for My Children which opens at Phoenix Symphony Hall in the 1970s as part of Theresa’s “Children’s Opera Series.”
Carroll dies at the age of 68 from undisclosed causes in Bromley, Kent, England on October 20, 1968.
Watchorn first comes to prominence in 1969 as the lead singer of The Quare Fellas, a Dublin-based ballad group. They evolve into the Dublin City Ramblers in the early 1970s and with Watchorn as their lead singer they have hits with songs such as “The Rare Ould Times” and “The Ferryman,” both of which are written by Pete St. John.
Watchorn also writes and sings the Irish Football Team anthem, “We are the Boys in Green” (Home & Away album), with The Dublin City Ramblers for the teams European Championship campaign in Germany and again for the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. The lyrics change slightly in both releases in 1988 and 1990.
In 1995, Watchorn leaves The Dublin City Ramblers and makes a number of solo albums. He joins The Dubliners in 2005, taking Paddy Reilly‘s place. He is well received throughout Ireland, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and the United States. He appears on their Tour Sampler EP in 2005, as well as the double album Live at Vicar Street (2006). He plays the banjo, bodhrán and spoons. He cites Luke Kelly, former lead singer with The Dubliners, as his favourite singer.
When The Dubliners announce their retirement in 2012 after finishing their 50 Years Anniversary Tour, Watchorn decides to keep on touring with former band members Seán Cannon and Eamonn Campbell and banjo player Gerry O’Connor under the name of “The Dublin Legends.”
On April 28, 2014, Watchorn posts a message on his website, stating that he has “decided to take a break from the music business for a while” and will not be touring the rest of 2014 with The Dublin Legends. He later admits this is due to ill health and that doctors had advised him that touring would do further damage to his health.
Watchorn’s distinctive and passionate vocals have made him a huge rock on the Irish folk scene. In his solo projects in the mid- and late-1990s, after his departure from The Dublin City Ramblers, he has session men who used to play alongside him and he uses the stage name “Patsy Watchorn, agus a Cháirde” (which means “and his Friends” in Irish).
Hogan is the third child of John Hogan, a carpenter and builder of Cove Street, Cork, County Cork, and Frances Cos, the great-granddaughter of Sir Richard Cox, Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1703 to 1707. As the family feels that she had married beneath her station, she is disinherited.
At the age of fourteen, Hogan is placed as clerk to an attorney, where he spends much of his time carving figures in wood. After two years, he chooses to be apprenticed to the architect Sir Thomas Deane, where his talents for drawing and carving are developed. He carves balusters, capitals, and ornamental figures for Deane’s buildings. At the completion of his apprenticeship in March 1820, Deane encourages him to consider taking up sculpture as a profession. For the next three years, he attends lectures on anatomy, copies casts of classic statuary in the Gallery of the Cork Society of Arts, and makes anatomical studies in wood of feet, hands, and legs. Among the first of his works to attract notice is a life-size figure of Minerva for an insurance building built by Deane.
In 1821, Hogan carves twenty-seven statues in wood for the North Chapel in Cork for the reredos behind the high altar. After subsequent cathedral renovations, these are now positioned in decorative plasterwork over the nave. He also does a bas-relief of the “Last Supper” for the altar. This work keeps him employed for about a year.
In 1823, the engraver William Paulet Carey visits Cork, and impressed with Hogan’s talent, begins to publicise his work in order to raise subscriptions for him to study in Italy. Hogan arrives in Rome, by way of Dublin and Liverpool, in 1824. He works in the galleries of the Vatican but cannot afford a studio. Additional subscriptions allow him to improve his situation, rent a studio, purchase marble, and hire models. Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen says to him, “My son, you are the best sculptor I leave after me in Rome.”
In 1829, Hogan visits Ireland, bringing several works with him. The Royal Arts Society provides a venue for an exhibition. The Royal Dublin Society awards him a gold medal.
Hogan’s best-known work and masterpiece are the three versions of the statue of The Dead Christ or The Redeemer in Death. Created in flawless Carrara marble, the first version (1829) is located in St. Therese’s Church, Dublin, the second (1833) in St. Finbarr’s (South) Church, Cork, and the third and final version (1854) is located in the Basilica of St. John the Baptist, Newfoundland. His other works include the Sleeping Shepherd and The Drunken Faun. He assures his international reputation in 1829 with The Dead Christ. Thereafter, his creations are snapped up by Irish bishops visiting his Rome studio.
In 1840, a monumental group in memory of Bishop James Warren Doyle, founder of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Carlow, is brought to Dublin and exhibited at the Royal Exchange. The statue of Bishop Doyle is in the Cathedral of the Assumption, as is a second Hogan work depicting the Holy Family.
Hogan marries Cornelia Bevignani in Rome in 1838. The figure of Hibernia, in Hogan’s work Hibernia with the Bust of Lord Cloncurry (1844), is reportedly modelled on his wife. A representation of this work is later used as the watermark on all Series A banknotes printed in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1970s. The couple has four sons and eight daughters.
With the revolutionary movement growing in Italy during the 1840s, and after spending twenty-four years in Rome, Hogan returns with his family to Ireland in 1848. At first, he finds little work in the aftermath of the Great Famine, but gradually commissions increase. He can be impatient with ignorance, intolerant of professional inferiority, and independent. He holds aloof from other artists and refuses to join the Royal Hibernian Academy.
Hogan has a stroke in 1855 and, though he recovers somewhat, his health begins to fail. By the year prior to his death, he can no longer work and his sons, John Valentine Hogan and James Cahill, assist at his studio and complete some of the work.
Hogan dies at his home at 14 Wentworth Place (later renamed Hogan Place), Dublin, on March 27, 1858. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
(Pictured: Scan of a drawing depicting the Irish sculptor John Hogan with his sculpture The Drunken Faun in background, published in the Dublin University Magazine, January 1850)
Fallon is born at Holles Street Hospital, Dublin, on January 30, 1939, the third of six sons of Padraic Fallon, the Irish poet and playwright, and Dorothea Maher. The family moves to Clonard, County Wexford, where he grows up. He has three surviving brothers, Brian, Ivan and Padraic, who have all had journalism careers. His early interest in literature and the arts is nourished by his father and elder brothers, and by contact with the cultured circle of writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals within which his father moves.
Fallon is educated at St. Peter’s College, Wexford, and Trinity College, Dublin. He begins painting in 1957 while at Trinity College, where he is studying natural science but is advised to pay more attention to his art. His interest in painting is probably inspired by the example of Tony O’Malley, a close family friend. As a compromise with his father, who does not see his talent, he also studies accountancy at night.
Largely self-taught in painting, he learns fundamentals of technique from Richard Kingston, to whom he is introduced by O’Malley. He largely paints landscapes in acrylic and gouache, in a manner heavily influenced by that of Jack Butler Yeats.
In 1964, Fallon visits O’Malley in St. Ives, Cornwall, where he had emigrated several years earlier, intending also to meet the Cornish abstract landscape painter Peter Lanyon, the chief creative force in the thriving artists’ colony centred on St. Ives. His arrival, however, coincides with Lanyon’s death from injuries suffered in a gliding accident. A gently sympathetic stranger amid the bereaved artistic community, he finds an immediate empathy and rapport with Nancy Wynne-Jones, a Welsh-born painter sixteen years his senior who had studied under Lanyon. They marry in 1966. They adopt two children in 1970, siblings John and Bridget.
Encouraged to take up sculpture, English sculptor Denis Mitchell becomes Fallon’s mentor in Cornwall, and with Breon O’Casey, he develops his sculpting. He becomes notable for his cast steel and bronze work, especially birds, horses and hares. He has his first solo exhibition in Newlyn in 1972, showing both painting and sculpture.
In May 1972, Fallon moves with his family back to Ireland, settling at Scilly House, on a hillside overlooking the harbour at Kinsale, County Cork. Removed from any centre of artistic activity, he devotes himself fulltime to a solitary development of his sculpture, refining his methodology and technique, and his skills in working various metals, beginning in 1974 to work in steel. In 1975, he first exhibits in Ireland at a solo show at the Emmet Gallery, Dublin, again showing both painting and sculpture, including his first steel sculptures to be exhibited.
Beginning in 1983, Fallon exhibits regularly with the Taylor Galleries, Dublin. Desiring closer proximity to Dublin art activities, and with their children attending university in the city, Fallon and his wife move in 1987 to Ballard House, Ballinaclash, Rathdrum, County Wicklow.
In the summer of 2007, some six months after his wife’s death, Fallon wis diagnosed with advanced metastatic lung cancer. He dies on October 3, 2007, at the Blackrock Clinic, County Dublin, and is buried beside his wife in Ballinatone churchyard, Greenan, Rathdrum, County Wicklow.
When Murphy is six, his family returns to Dublin, settling in the South inner-city district of Islandbridge. He first goes to school in nearby Inchicore, attending the Oblate Fathers’ primary school there, then moves to Ballyfermot, a working-class heartland of suburban Dublin, in his teens. There, he attends secondary school at St. John’s De La Salle College. After failing the Irish Intermediate Certificate he leaves school to pursue an apprenticeship in painting and decorating, taking his Junior and Senior Irish Trade Certificates, and the City and Guilds of London exams at the Dublin Institute of Technology, Bolton Street.
Murphy’s stage plays include Brothers of the Brush (Dublin, The Peacock, Dublin Theatre Festival 1993), which is awarded best new Irish play; A Picture of Paradise (The Peacock, 1997); The Muesli Belt (Dublin, The Abbey Theatre, 2000); Aceldama (1998); The Kings of the Kilburn High Road (Waterford, Red Kettle Theatre Company, 2000); The Castlecomer Jukebox (Red Kettle, 2004); and What’s Left of The Flag (Theatre Upstairs at The Plough, 2010), nominated for The Irish TimesBest New Play Award. His last play, with an all-female cast, The Hen Night Epiphany, premieres at the Focus Theatre, Dublin, in September 2011 and is published by Oberon Books. It has recently been translated into Hebrew.
Plays for radio include Mandarin Lime (BBC Radio 4, 1995), Peel’s Brimstone (BBC Radio 4, 1995), and The Jangle of the Keys (BBC Radio 4 1997). His awards include the Stewart Parker Trust Award in 1994. The play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road is adapted by Tommy Collins as the Irish language film Kings, and is selected as Ireland’s entry for best foreign-language film for the Academy Awards by the Irish Film & Television Academy.
Three of Murphy’s plays have been presented at the Acting Irish International Theatre Festival: Brothers of the Brush (2001 Festival, presented by the Tara Players of Winnipeg), The Kings of the Kilburn High Road (2005 Festival, first North American production, presented by the Irish Players of Rochester), and The Muesli Belt (2008 Festival, presented by the Toronto Irish Players).
A one act play, Perfida, premieres at Theatre Upstairs in July 2012. In October 2012, The Muesli Belt receives its United States premiere at the Banshee Theater, Burbank, California, and in 2013 The Hen Night Epiphany receives its U.S. premiere at the Wade James Theater, Edmonds, Washington. In June 2013 a new production of Perfidia is staged by Red Kettle Theatre Company at their new theatre in Waterford. In May 2017 his second Verabtim piece for the Abbey, looking at police corruption, A Whisper Anywhere Else, is produced at the Peacock theatre. His first Verbatim play for the Abbey, Of This Brave Time, commissioned to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising, tours the United Kingdom in 2016 and later returns to the Peacock stage for a short run. A new full length play, The Cartographer’s Pen, commissioned to mark the centenary of the drawing of the Irish border, opens at the Town Hall Theatre, Cavan, in May 2022.
Rosenstock’s father, George, is a doctor and writer from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, who serves as a medical officer with the Wehrmacht in World War II. His mother is a nurse from County Galway. He is the third of six children and the first born in Ireland. He is educated locally in Kilfinane, then in Mount Sackville, County Dublin.
Rosenstock works for some time on the television series Anois is Arís on RTÉ, then on the weekly newspaper Anois. Until his retirement he works with An Gúm, the publications branch of Foras na Gaeilge, the North-South body which promotes the Irish language.
Although he has worked in prose, drama and translation, Rosenstock is primarily known as a poet. He has written or translated over 180 books.
Rosenstock also writes for children, in prose and verse. Haiku Más É Do Thoil É! (An Gúm) wins the Children’s Books Judges’ Special Prize in 2015.
Rosenstock appears in the anthology Best European Fiction 2012, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, with a preface by Nicole Krauss (Dalkey Archive Press). He gives the keynote address to Haiku Canada in 2015.
Rosenstock has worked with American photographer Ron Rosenstock, Indian Photographer Debiprasad Mukherjee, Greek photographer Kon Markogiannis, Dublin photographer Jason Symes, French photographer Jean-Pierre Favreau and many more to create the new guise of a photo-haiku (or a haiga) – the interplay of visual aesthetic and literature.
John O’Callaghan, Irish musician and disc jockey who mainly produces trance music, is born in Navan, County Meath, on September 24, 1981. He also produces music under the aliases of Joint Operations Centre, Mannix, Henrik Zuberstein, and Stenna.
O’Callaghan has collaborated with fellow Discover Recordings artists such as Bryan Kearney, Neal Scarborough (as Inertia), Thomas Bronzwaer (as Lost World), and Greg Downey as well as, more recently, trance hero Leon Bolier. His best-known tracks are “Exactly” with Bryan Kearney, “Big Sky”, in collaboration with vocalist Audrey Gallagher of the alternative metal band Scheer, and “Find Yourself” (featuring Sarah Howells). He has received remixes by trance artists such as The Thrillseekers, Sean Tyas, Gareth Emery, Cosmic Gate, Markus Schulz and Indecent Noise. He has also worked with Heatbeat and Aly & Fila.
O’Callaghan formerly has the majority of his work released on Discover Recordings, the British record label set up by John Askew. Later, his work is released by Armada Music and its sublabels — primarily on Armind and Soundpiercing. The remix of his vocal trance production “Big Sky” by Agnelli & Nelson is voted “Tune of The Year” by listeners of Armin van Buuren‘s A State of Trance radio show in 2007.
In 2008, O’Callaghan enters the DJ Magazine 100 at number 60 and picks up two awards at the Irish Dance Music Awards, winning Best Producer and Best DJ. He also becomes the first Irishman to play Trance Energy. In 2009, he rises 36 places to 24th in the DJ Magazine 100.
In addition to numerous single releases, O’Callaghan has released a live album (Discover “Live As” Volume 2) and two artist albums, Something To Live For and Never Fade Away.
Never Fade Away is released in 2009 on the Armada Music label shortly following the single release of “Find Yourself.” “Find Yourself” is tipped a future favorite on A State of Trance. The track receives recognition from many DJs, including Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, Judge Jules, Matt Hardwick and Gareth Emery. The track also receives a remix from Cosmic Gate, which makes a lot of headway in many DJs’ set lists following its release. He also releases another single from the album, “Surreal,” which includes vocals from an artist known as Jaren. In 2010, O’Callaghan starts his very own sublabel on Black Hole Recordings called Subculture.
Shiels is born on June 24, 1881, in Milltown, Ballybrakes, near Ballymoney, County Antrim, one of seven sons of Robert Shiels, a railway worker, and Eliza Shiels (née Sweeney), who also has one daughter. The family soon moves to Castle Street, Ballymoney, where he attends the local Roman Catholicnational school. His elder brothers emigrate to the United States when young. With there being no chance of further schooling even if he wanted it, he leaves Ireland when he is 19 years old. He works as a casual labourer in many places in western North America: as a farmworker and miner in Idaho and Montana, and as a lumber camp worker in British Columbia, Canada. In 1904 he is employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway to supervise a gang of workers who are building a stretch of railway in Saskatchewan. In a serious accident, he is badly injured. Despite surgery on his back, he is never able to walk again, and he receives a disability pension from the railway company.
After a long convalescence in Canada, Shiels returns to his mother’s house in Ballymoney around 1908. He sets up in business in Main Street as a shipping agent and as an agent for the Canadian Pacific Railway, taking bookings from intending emigrants. He is encouraged by his parish priest, Fr. John Hasson, by a local solicitor, Jack Pinkerton, and by James Pettigrew, a teacher, to write short stories. To try to preserve anonymity in a small community, he at first uses the pseudonym “George Morshiel,” and is successful with Western stories and other short fiction. His friends urge him to try writing dramas, and in 1918 Away from the Moss is produced by the Ulster Literary Theatre in Belfast.
After further success there with two short plays in which Shiels is learning his craft, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin accepts a one-act play, Bedmates, which is performed in January 1921. With great regularity for the next twenty years, he writes twenty-two plays for the Abbey Theatre. His work forms the basis of the repertoire in the 1920s and 1930s and attracts large audiences. Plays such as The New Gossoon (1930) provide Dublin theatregoers with entertainment, but also help form the style of acting and production which for many years characterises the Abbey and its actors. Three of his plays, Paul Twyning (1922), Professor Tim (1925) and The New Gossoon, are later performed in theatres in London and are also published in a 1945 volume, which is twice reprinted. Professor Tim, produced by the touring Abbey Theatre, receives enthusiastic reviews in Philadelphia, and The New Gossoon appears successfully on Broadway in New York City in 1932, 1934, and 1937.
Shiels’s earlier work is perhaps easiest for audiences to enjoy. Comedies such as Moodie in Manitoba (1918) portray characters so realistic that north Antrim people believe with some alarm that it might be possible to identify who Shiels had in mind when he created them, and he is at first somewhat less than popular in Ballymoney. He superbly reproduces local language and thoroughly understands the local way of life. Plays he writes late in his career are first performed by the Group Theatre in Belfast, and in these productions (and in the radio versions broadcast by the BBC) his work becomes widely known, almost beloved, in the north of Ireland. During the first half of the twentieth century amateur drama groups throughout Ireland are much more important in local life than they have been since the advent of television. Probably all such societies have at some time staged a Shiels play, and this tradition continues. His plays contain amusing dialogue, carefully crafted plots, and usually more or less happy endings.
However, Shiels’s later works, notably The Passing Day (1936), first broadcast as a radio play, and The Rugged Path (1940), which breaks all records at the Abbey Theatre in a run of three months, tackle darker subject matter and feature characters still less sympathetic even than the rogues and hypocrites of the earlier work. In The Rugged Path and its sequel, The Summit (1941), he explores the moral crisis facing Ireland after the political changes of the 1920s. One critic sees in it an allegory for the contemporary struggle against Adolf Hitler. His view of life in the small towns and farms of Ireland is never in the slightest rosy-tinted, but in the symbolism of The Passing Day, he achieves “bitter intensity” (The Irish Times review, quoted by Casey).
Shiels’s modesty leads him to refuse an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), in 1931. He is reticent about his experiences and beliefs and does little to foster his own reputation. In one early interview he expresses the belief that Ulster theatre needs dramatic material that reflects the psychology and setting of the region. His own work, at its best, achieves this and more. The very qualities which make his work popular in the north of Ireland permit some metropolitan literary critics to dismiss his plays as “kitchen comedies.” However, with the passage of time, his importance as a chronicler of a vanishing way of life can be set alongside the recognition due to him as a prolific and gifted dramatist.
Shiels suffers from a lengthy illness, and though he undergoes an operation in Ballymoney in 1949, dies soon afterwards at his house, New Lodge, in Carnlough, County Antrim, on September 19, 1949. He is buried in the graveyard of Our Lady and St. Patrick in Ballymoney. In the month that he dies, the Group Theatre and Garvagh Young Farmers’ Club are both rehearsing Shiels plays, and there have since been many productions of his plays in the north and elsewhere. Ballymoney Drama Festival presents a portrait of Shiels to the Abbey Theatre, and a new production of The Passing Day is staged there to celebrate his centenary in 1981.
Warfield is a singer, songwriter, mandolin player and a founding member of The Wolfe Tones, performing with the band for nearly thirty-seven years, writing and recording over 60 songs. As a founding member, he is featured on every album recorded by the band from 1965’s debut album The Foggy Dew through to 1989’s 25th Anniversary.
In 1989, a contract is signed by Warfield, signing rights to an American distributor, Shanachie Records. The contents of this contract are apparently misrepresented to the other members of The Wolfe Tones, resulting in a clause that prevents them from recording any new material. Unable to reverse this agreement, they continue to tour, albeit without any new material. As of July 2017, Warfield has not spoken to his brother and former bandmate Brian Warfield since he left The Wolfe Tones in 2001.
A solo album, Legacy, is released in 1995 as he is still eligible to record under his own name. With Warfield on vocals and mandolin, the music on this album is performed by a new band, although he is still touring with The Wolfe Tones. Legacy is followed by Liberte’ ’98, Sons of Erin, Take Me Home To Mayo and Clear The Way. He also has a video Legacy and two books, The Songs and Ballads of 1798 and The Irish Songster of the American Civil War.
In 2001, after a show played in Limerick, Warfield leaves The Wolfe Tones to concentrate on his own career. Calling themselves “Brian Warfield, Tommy Byrne and Noel Nagle, formerly of The Wolfe Tones,” the remaining three go on to release You’ll Never Beat the Irish (2001) and the subsequent album Child of Destiny (2011).
Warfield has performed his music and songs at American Civil War events and commemorations at such sites as Gettysburg, Sharpsburg and Harrisburg with his band, The Sons of Erin. His 2002 release, Clear the Way, is the second in his Irish Songs in the Civil War series.
The ballad “Take Me Home to Mayo,” written by Belfastman Seamus Robinson as a tribute to Michael Gaughan, is recorded as a duet with Irish American Andy Cooney and is the title track of another 2002 Warfield release.
In 2003, following a complaint by an Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) politician, Roy Beggs, Jr., a radio channel dedicated to the music of Derek Warfield is removed from the in-flight entertainment of Aer Lingus. Beggs complains of the “Blatant promotion of militant, armed republicanism” by the playing of this music, saying it is the same as “the speeches of Osama bin Laden being played on a trans-Atlantic Arabian airline.” Aer Lingus removes the material from their flights stating: “It is something that should not have been on board and we removed it immediately we became aware of it.”
In March 2006, Warfield releases his ninth solo album, a 36-song double CD of Irish songs. On March 1, 2006, his wife Nuala dies, followed by the death of his eldest daughter on September 28, 2007.
Warfield now tours with his new band, Derek Warfield and The Young Wolfe Tones.
A biography of Robert Emmet in two volumes, although not written by Warfield, has been published by him, and a collaboration with Raymond Daly of Tullamore has resulted in the publishing of a critically acclaimed book of lyrics and histories of Irish songs called Celtic and Ireland in Song and Story.
Fay is the eldest son of four children of William Patrick Fay, a government clerk, and his wife, Martha Fay (née Dowling). He is educated at Belvedere College, Dublin, where he learns shorthand and typing, before leaving to become a secretary for an accountancy firm in Dublin. From an early age he has a passion for the theatre and immerses himself in books on the subject, becoming a drama expert. His brother, William George Fay, shares his enthusiasm and they take part in many amateur productions, setting up the Ormonde Dramatic Company in 1891.
Fay is an ardent nationalist and Arthur Griffith appoints him drama critic for his newspaper, the United Irishman (1899–1902), where he develops his ideas on how the theatre should be run. Initially in favour of plays in the Irish language, he soon abandons this as unworkable. In May 1901 he attacks W. B. Yeats for his faulty notions about theatre and even his work as a dramatist, ending with the fiercely nationalistic assertion that “there is a herd of Saxon and other swine fattening on us. They must be swept into the sea with the pestilent breed of West Britons with which we are troubled, or they will sweep us there.” Yeats’s and Lady Gregory‘s next play is Cathleen ni Houlihan.
In 1902, Fay writes a famous article advocating a national theatre company that will “be the nursery of an Irish dramatic literature which, while making a world-wide appeal, would see life through Irish eyes.” He is a member of his brother’s National Dramatic Society, which merges with the Irish Literary Theatre in 1902 to form the Irish National Theatre Society, the originating body of the Abbey Theatre. The following year Yeats declares that the national theatre owes its existence to the two Fay brothers. Fay soon abandons Griffith and begins to champion the cause of Yeats.
An excellent tragic actor, Fay can make audiences forget his less than five feet six inch stature through the power of his voice. When the Abbey Theatre opens on December 27, 1904, he stars in Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand as Cú Chulainn, a role he makes his own. He spends much time training the other actors. As an elocution teacher he has no equal. One play has Yeats leaving with his “head on fire” because of the quality of the voices on stage. Yeats dedicates his play The King’s Threshold (1904) with the words: “In memory of Frank Fay and his beautiful speaking in the character of Seanchan.”
Fay has a close but turbulent relationship with his brother William, whom he defers to in all theatrical matters except acting. Their heated arguments sometimes lead to blows. His temper is always volatile and he is prone to histrionics and fits of depression. After 1905, the Abbey Theatre becomes a limited company owing to the patronage of Annie Horniman, and the Fays lose most of their control, which results in much tension and bitterness. In 1907, Fay plays Shawn Keogh in the first production of The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge.
Disagreements with Yeats over the approach to choosing and staging of plays comes to a head late in late 1907 and the Fays resign on January 13, 1908. On March 13 they are suspended from the Irish National Theatre Society. They tour the United States with Charles Frohman before separating. Fay then tours England in minor Shakespearean roles and melodrama. Between 1912 and 1914, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett attempt to persuade him to become actor-manager of an Irish theatre. In 1918 he returns to the Abbey Theatre in two short-lived revivals of Yeats’s The Hour Glass and The King’s Threshold. He retires to Dublin permanently in 1921, teaching elocution and directing plays in local colleges.
Fay marries, in 1912, Freda, known as “Bird.” They live at Upper Mount Street, Dublin, and have one son, Gerard, who becomes a popular writer and memoirist. Fay dies on January 2, 1931, having never really recovered from the death of his wife, and is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery. He is credited with creating the Abbey Theatre style of acting, which becomes internationally known, and influences many other schools of acting. He wanted actors to behave as naturally as possible and to speak the lines as people would in real life, rather than with an exaggerated stage delivery. His training is a major influence on subsequent generations, as actors learned to “speak words with quiet force, like feathers borne on puffs of wind.”
(From: “Fay, Frank J. (Francis John)” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009) | Pictured: Portrait of Frank Fay by John Butler Yeats, commissioned by Annie Horniman for the opening of the Abbey Theatre, December 27, 1904)
seamus dubhghaill 