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Tag Archives: Edinburgh International Festival


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Death of Actress Ronnie Masterson

Ronnie Masterson, one of the best-known Irish stage actors of her generation from the 1940s to the 1970s, dies at the age of 87 in Rush, County Dublin, on February 10, 2014. Following her stage career she builds a solid film and television career with RTÉ, and independent directors including Peter Kosminsky, Alan Parker and Neil Jordan.

Masterson is born in Dublin on April 4, 1926. She trains at the Abbey Theatre and first appears on stage there in 1944. At the Abbey, she meets and then marries actor Ray McAnally in 1951, and they remain married until his death in 1989, although they reside in different homes; her husband with Irish actress Britta Smith. McAnally and Masterson have four children: Conor, Aonghus, Máire and Niamh.

In the late 1960s Masterson and McAnally leave the permanent and pensionable security of the national theatre to set up their own company, Old Quay Productions. The company brings contemporary American and British theatre to Irish audiences, including Alan Ayckbourn‘s Relatively Speaking, Edward Albee‘s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Bill Naughton‘s Alfie, and Robert Patrick‘s Kennedy’s Children.

Kennedy’s Children nearly bankrupts the company, having to be pulled early in a 14-week run, when playgoers in Dublin mistake its title as an adverse comment on the children of assassinated and revered U.S. president John F. Kennedy, whereas the play is actually a series of monologues exploratory of U.S. society in the Vietnam War era. They are rescued by two giants of Irish independent theatre, Phyllis Ryan of Gemini Productions – whose Eblana Theatre the couple had hired- and John B. Keane, who has just published Letters of a Matchmaker , a novel written as a series of letters between a rural matchmaker and his clients.

Film and television work follow, including many episodes of RTÉ soap opera Glenroe, in which Masterson plays Madge O’Regan, and in 1988 her first film, The Dawning, an adaptation of Jennifer Johnston‘s story The Old Jest, which wins first prize as best film at the Montreal World Film Festival and where she acts opposite Anthony Hopkins, Trevor Howard and a young Hugh Grant.

Masterson’s best film work is probably as a memorable Grandma Sheehan in Alan Parker’s screen version of Frank McCourt‘s Angela’s Ashes in 1999, where, in her own words in an interview with her grandson, Aonghus Óg McAnally, she says, “Without doubt I had the best script.”

Other notable film roles include Fools of Fortune, The Real Charlotte and Kosminsky’s dramatisation of the events which led to the Stalker inquiry in Northern Ireland, Shoot to Kill, where she plays Mrs. Tighe opposite her old Abbey colleague Peadar Lamb, as Mr. Tighe.

Speaking to The Irish Times , Lamb remarks how, as a young actor at the Abbey in 1949, Masterson had been a “striking” Kathleen Ní Houlihan in W. B. Yeats‘s play, her height, green eyes and vivid red hair perfect for the part.

Lamb, who serves for many years with Masterson on the committee of Irish Actors’ Equity Association, pays tribute also to her work for other actors: “She didn’t waste words, but spoke very strongly when she did speak.” RTÉ producer Laurence Foster also pays a tribute to this aspect of Masterson’s career on the SIPTU website.

Masterson also plays in the Edinburgh International Festival and in many Dublin Theatre Festival productions. She appears on many series broadcast on RTÉ, BBC and ITV and tours extensively in the United States in her own one woman shows.

In November 2005, Masterson is in the United States again, this time to take the lead role in The Sea Captain, a short film directed by her son, veteran television producer Conor McAnally.

Masterson dies on February 10, 2014, at Rush Nursing Home in Rush, County Dublin. She is buried at St. Fintan’s Cemetery, Sutton, Dublin.


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Death of Irish Dramatist Seán O’Casey

Seán O’Casey, Irish dramatist and memoirist, dies of a heart attack in Torquay, Devon, England on September 18, 1964. A committed socialist, he is the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.

O’Casey is born John Casey at 85 Upper Dorset Street, in the northern inner-city area of Dublin on March 30, 1880. He is a member of the Church of Ireland, baptised on July 28, 1880 in St. Mary’s parish and confirmed at St. John the Baptist Church in Clontarf. He is an active member of Saint Barnabas until his mid-twenties, when he drifts away from the church.

As O’Casey’s interest in Irish nationalism grows, he joins the Gaelic League in 1906 and learns the Irish language. At this time, he Gaelicises his name from John Casey to Seán Ó Cathasaigh. He also learns to play the Uilleann pipes and is a founder and secretary of the St. Laurence O’Toole Pipe Band. He joins the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and becomes involved in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, established by James Larkin to represent the interests of the unskilled labourers who inhabit the Dublin tenements. In March 1914 he becomes General Secretary of Larkin’s Irish Citizen Army. On July 24, 1914 he resigns from the ICA, after his proposal to deny dual membership to both the ICA and the Irish Volunteers is rejected.

In 1917, his friend Thomas Ashe dies in a hunger strike and it inspires him to write. He spends the next five years writing plays. O’Casey’s first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, is performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This is the beginning of a relationship that is to be fruitful for both theatre and dramatist but which ends in some bitterness. It is followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926).

The Plough and the Stars is not well received by the Abbey audience. There is a riot reported on the fourth night of the show. His depiction of sex and religion offends some of the actors who refused to speak their lines. W.B. Yeats intervenes and describes the audience as “shaming themselves.”

In 1928, Yeats rejects O’Casey’s fourth play, The Silver Tassie, for the Abbey. It is an attack on imperialist wars and the suffering they cause. The Abbey refuses to perform it. The plays O’Casey writes after this include the darkly allegorical and highly controversial Within the Gates (1934), which is set within the gates of a busy city park based on London’s Hyde Park. It closes not long after opening and is another box office failure.

Over the next twenty years, O’Casey writes The Star Turns Red (1940), Purple Dust (1943), Red Roses for Me (1943), Oak Leaves and Lavender (1945), Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), The Bishop’s Bonfire (1955), and The Drums of Father Ned (1958). In 1959, O’Casey gives his blessing to a musical adaptation of Juno and the Paycock by American composer Marc Blitzstein. The musical, retitled Juno, is a commercial failure, closing after only 16 Broadway performances. Also in 1959, George Devine produces Cock-a-Doodle Dandy at the Royal Court Theatre and it is also successful at the Edinburgh International Festival and has a West End run.

On September 18, 1964, at the age of 84, O’Casey dies of a heart attack, in Torquay, Devon. He is cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium.