How one of the world s biggest musicals found its star in Dublin
Updated / Friday, 8 Jan 2021
15:57
Genevieve Lyons: audiences prefered to go to Dun Laoghaire to see Lyons as Sally Bowles than go to see Harris in the same role on the big screen . Photo: NUI Galway Archives
Analysis: Genevieve Lyons played a central role in Irish theatre in the 1950s at a time the country was undergoing much cultural change
The 1950s in Ireland is often typified as a lost decade. While there are many valid reasons to support this, it can also be seen as a decade of cultural transition. For example, a new generation of theatre-makers emerged with new ideas, energy and a vision for Ireland’s cultural renewal. But who were they? And how are their efforts remembered today?
Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre
by Ruud van den Beuken
In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that led to the creation of an independent yet in many ways bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den