Ervine is born in Ballymacarrett, Belfast on December 28, 1883. He is considered to be the founding father of modern Northern Irish drama.
Although accepted to study at Trinity College, Dublin, circumstances force Ervine to leave school at the age of 15 to begin working in an insurance office.
Two years later, Ervine immigrates to London, where he discovers a love for the theatre. He begins his writing career with Mixed Marriage (1911), an Ulster tragedy, and produces three plays between 1911 and 1915. In 1915, after a meeting with William Butler Yeats in London, he becomes the director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It is, however, not a happy appointment as his personality and politics clash with the management of the theatre.
Ervine then joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and fights in Flanders, losing a leg in the conflict. Returning home, he feels increasingly alienated by nationalism and more attracted to the unionism of his family background. He becomes a vehement detractor of the south, describing Ireland in a letter to George Bernard Shaw as brimming with “bleating Celtic Twilighters, sex-starved Daughters of the Gael, gangsters and gombeen men.”
Ervine is a distinctively Ulster orientated writer, focusing on a naturalistic portrayal of rural and urban life. His most famous and popular work amongst his Northern Irish audience is Boyd’s Shop (1936), which becomes one of the Ulster Group Theatre’s stalwart productions. The play is a classic of the homely yet sincere Ulster genre and centres around the struggles of the folk that Ervine grew up with in his grandmother’s shop on the Albertbridge Road. Ervine creates in Boyd’s Shop a template for Ulster theatre that is to dominate until the advent of Samuel Thompson‘s Over the Bridge.
Ervine’s reactionary unionism and anti-southern hatred becomes more pronounced as he ages and eclipses his more subtle characteristics and abilities as a writer. Although many of his novels and plays are at times clouded by his prejudices, they are also very often capable of tremendous feeling and humanity showing he is a writer of note.
St. John Greer Ervine dies at the age of 87 at Fitzhall, Ipling, Sussex on January 24, 1971.
O’Brien is the youngest child of “a strict, religious family.” From 1941 to 1946 she is educated by the Sisters of Mercy, a circumstance that contributes to a “suffocating” childhood. “I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all pervasive. I’m glad it has gone.” She is fond of a nun as she deeply misses her mum and tries to identify the nun with her mother.
In 1950, O’Brien is awarded a licence as a pharmacist. In Ireland, she reads such writers as Leo Tolstoy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1954, she marries, against her parents’ wishes, the Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moves to London. They have two sons, but the marriage is dissolved in 1964. Gébler dies in 1998.
In London, O’Brien purchases Introducing James Joyce, with an introduction written by T. S. Eliot. When she learns that James Joyce‘s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is autobiographical, it makes her realise where she might turn, should she decide to write herself. In London she starts work as a reader for Hutchinson, where on the basis of her reports she is commissioned, for £50, to write a novel. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II.
This novel is the first part of a trilogy of novels which includes The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books are banned and, in some cases burned, in her native country due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. Her novel A Pagan Place (1970) is about her repressive childhood. Her parents are vehemently against all things related to literature and her mother strongly disapproves of her daughter’s career as a writer.
O’Brien is a panel member for the first edition of the BBC‘s Question Time in 1979. In 2017, she becomes the sole surviving member.
Other works include a biography of James Joyce, published in 1999, and one of the poet Lord Byron, Byron in Love (2009). House of Splendid Isolation (1994), her novel about a terrorist who goes on the run, marks a new phase in her writing career. Down by the River (1996) concerns an under-age rape victim who seeks an abortion in England, the “Miss X case.” In the Forest (2002) deals with the real-life case of Brendan O’Donnell, who abducts and murders a woman, her three-year-old son, and a priest, in rural Ireland.
Deane is born on December 2, 1879, in New Ross, County Wexford, and grows up in Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin. His family lives close to the families of both Bram Stoker and his wife, Florence Balcombe, and his mother had been acquainted with Bram Stoker in her youth.
Deane enters the theater as a young man, first appearing in 1899 with the Henry Irving Company, of which Stoker is stage manager for many years. Even before he forms his own troupe in the early 1920s, he has been thinking about bringing Dracula to the stage. Stoker had attempted this in 1897 but the verdict from Irving consigned it to the waste-paper basket. Unable to find a scriptwriter to take on the project, Deane writes the play himself in a four-week period of inactivity while he is suffering with a severe cold. He then contacts Florence Stoker, Bram’s widow, and negotiates a deal for the dramatic rights.
To stage the production, Deane is required to submit the completed script to the Lord Chamberlain for a license under the Theatres Act 1843. The play is censored to limit violence – for example, the count’s death cannot be shown to the audience – but is approved on May 15, 1924.
Deane re-imagines Count Dracula as a more urbane and theatrically acceptable character who could plausibly enter London society. It is Deane’s idea that the count should wear a tuxedo and stand-up collar, and a flowing cape which conceals Dracula while he slips through a trap-door in the stage floor, giving the impression that he has disappeared. He also arranges to have a uniformed nurse available at performances, ready to administer smelling salts should anyone faint.
Deane’s play premieres on August 5, 1924, at the Grand Theatre in Derby, England. Despite critics’ misgivings, the audiences love it. Although he originally intended to play the title role himself, Raymond Huntley plays the role of the Count and Deane fills the role of Van Helsing. It is a huge success and the production tours England for three years before settling in London, where it opens at the Little Theatre in the Adelphi on February 14, 1927. It later transfers to the Duke of York’s Theatre and then the Prince of Wales Theatre to accommodate larger audiences.
When the play crosses the Atlantic in 1927, the role of Dracula is taken by the then-unknown Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi. For its United States debut, Dracula is rewritten by the American playwright John L. Balderston. The show runs for a year on Broadway and for two more years on tour, breaking all previous records for any show put on tour in the United States. It is the Deane/Balderston interpretation upon which the classic Tod Browning film Dracula (1931) is based.
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.
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.
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.
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)
McMaster is born as Andrew McMaster on December 24, 1891, the son of Liverpool-born Andrew McMaster, a master stevedore, and Alice Maude (née Thompson). A number of sources make the erroneous claims, based on details supplied by McMaster himself, that he is born in 1893 or 1894 or even 1895 in County Monaghan in Ireland, but according to the Birth Register and the 1901 Census he is actually born in 1891 in Birkenhead, England. Like his future brother-in-law, Micheál Mac Liammóir, who is born in London as Alfred Willmore but who claims to have been born in Cork to Gaelic-speaking parents, McMaster reinvents himself as Irish and claims for himself the town of Monaghan as his birthplace, and Warrenpoint, County Down, as the scene of his earliest memories.
At the age of 19, McMaster gives up a career in banking to pursue one on the stage. He moves to Ireland and tours the country with the O’Brien-Ireland theatrical company from 1910 to 1914. Success quickly follows with his appearance as Jack O’Hara in Paddy the Next Best Thing at the Savoy Theatre in 1920. From 1921 he tours Australia in this and other plays, and in 1925 forms his own company, the McMaster Intimate Theatre Company, a “fit-up” company to tour in the works of Shakespeare, mainly in Ireland but also in Britain and Australia, touring with his theatrical company until 1959. One of the last actor-managers “of the old school – and an epitome of the type,” on occasions McMaster persuades a “big name” to act with his company as a draw for audiences, and Frank Benson (1928), Sara Allgood (1929) and Mrs. Patrick Campbell appear with him.
In 1933 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon McMaster appears as Hamlet opposite Esme Church as Gertrude, Coriolanus, Macduff in Macbeth, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet, and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. His greatest roles are as Othello and as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, to which he adds King Lear in 1952. Just before World War II he and his company appear at the Chiswick Empire in a Shakespeare season. He tours the United States as James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill‘s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1956. Having “a great organ voice,” Harold Pinter, who acts in his company in Ireland from 1951 to 1953 and calls him “Perhaps the greatest actor-manager of his time,” later describes McMaster as “evasive, proud, affectionate, shrewd, merry.” In his brief biography Mac (1968), Pinter recalls, “Mac gave about a half dozen magnificent performances of Othello while I was with him… At his best he was the finest Othello I have seen. [He] stood dead in the centre of the role, and the great sweeping symphonic playing would begin, the rare tension and release within him, the arrest, the swoop, the savagery, the majesty and repose.”
McMaster’s only film role is an uncredited appearance as the Judge in Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960).
In 1924 McMaster marries the actress and designer Marjorie Willmore, the sister of Micheál Mac Liammóir. They have two children, the actors John Christopher McMaster and Mary-Rose McMaster.
McMaster dies at the age of 70 at his home in Dublin on August 24, 1962. He is buried with his wife in Dean’s Grange Cemetery in County Dublin.
McMaster’s biography, A Life Remembered: A Memoir of Anew McMaster, by his daughter Mary-Rose McMaster, is published in 2017. Harold Pinter also publishes a short biography, Mac, in 1968.
seamus dubhghaill 