This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 28 July 1918, Ireland
Died: 22 April 2006
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Mary Margaret Hickey
O’Malley, Mary (Margaret) (1918–2006), theatrical director and activist, co-founder of the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast, was born Mary Margaret Hickey in Mallow, Co. Cork, on 28 July 1918, the posthumous daughter of Daniel Hickey and his wife Annie (née Lysaght). Her father died of tuberculosis, and her mother had to bring up her children on her own in Youghal, Co. Cork; one of Mary’s brothers lived almost entirely with grandparents. She was very close to her elder brother Gerard Hickey (d. 1961), who helped pay for her education at local convent schools and then as a boarder in St Michael’s Loreto convent school in Navan, Co. Meath. Her mother moved to Dublin to be near her son Gerard who worked as a civil servant and was interested in the theatre and archaeology. On leaving school Mary took office jobs in the city and was dazzled by the culture and intellectual pretensions of the artists and wartime emigrés she met with her brother and on her own; she mixed especially with theatre people, and also sought to be involved with socialist politics. In September 1947 she married the psychiatrist Pearse O’Malley (see below) in University Church, St Stephen’s Green, and then took up residence in a large house in south Belfast.
If she had not met Pearse O’Malley at a dance in Dublin in 1943, it is unlikely that her life would have been spent in Belfast (which she considered a cultural desert). Despite having had a protestant grandfather, she had no interest in the outlook and traditions of northern protestants and denied the validity of the political status quo. She felt strongly that it was her responsibility to try to inculcate into the citizens of Belfast, despite their obvious reluctance, the cultural values and political ideals that had brought about independence in the south. Not all members of the catholic middle class appreciated her purposes, and most protestants were at best baffled by her occasionally vociferous appeals, but her efforts to realign Belfast’s cultural orientation never flagged.
In December 1951 she and her husband hosted a Christmas party at which she and some friends put on one-act plays. She found the experience of organising stage business and directing actors so fulfilling that she brought together a coterie of acquaintances and theatrical enthusiasts to work on ambitious amateur productions in the O’Malley home, initially before audiences not much more numerous than the casts. Audience members very often took part onstage or helped backstage in other productions. In the early 1950s, before the advent of television, amateur drama was particularly strong in Ireland, in the north as well as in the Republic, but O’Malley turned her face resolutely towards the south. Under her direction, the Lyric Theatre produced only a handful of locally written pieces. The policy of the little theatre from its inception was to take the poetic and symbolic dramas of W. B. Yeats as its basis and also as a touchstone; the theatre undertook to produce an annual Yeats play, and other plays that did not in her opinion measure up to the Yeats canon were rejected out of hand. Over the years, she directed twenty-three productions of Yeats plays. ‘Hail Mary full of Yeats’, Micheál MacLiammóir is said to have greeted her, encapsulating O’Malley’s catholic background and nationalist enthusiasms.
She first confronted the unionist establishment as a member of Belfast city corporation for Smithfield Ward, topping the poll for the moderately radical, anti-partitionist Irish Labour Party in 1951; despite her initial somewhat naïve optimism, she found it hard to operate within party structures, and resented the amount of time and energy that had to be devoted to politics. She did not stand again after serving one term as a councillor, and instead concentrated on her ‘poet’s theatre’, which became increasingly ambitious in its productions of Irish and international classic plays. By the early 1960s she and her husband Pearse had established a drama school and an academy of music, as adjuncts to the theatre, to improve the skills of the amateur actors. They held art exhibitions and founded a literary journal and a craft shop selling Irish-made items.
As the O’Malleys’ cultural programme became increasingly complex and demanding, it was decided that the theatre needed to move out of the O’Malley family home on Derryvolgie Avenue to a permanent and larger base, and fund-raising began. The new Lyric Theatre opened on Ridgeway Street in the Stranmillis area in 1968, just as the Northern Irish troubles were beginning, and was immediately in difficulties. New formal and legal arrangements had had to be put in place, and the O’Malleys, already dismayed by their loss of control, reacted angrily to the establishment insistence that the British national anthem should be played on the opening night. For the O’Malleys, on the occasion that should have been the pinnacle of their success, this was completely unacceptable, and they resigned from the board of trustees of the theatre on which so much of their money and energy had been lavished for seventeen years.
Eventually they both returned to involvement, and until 1978 Mary continued to direct plays and to attempt to maintain her vision of drama as cultural leverage; however, other people were now involved and official funders had to be placated. The story of the Lyric Theatre over the next ten years is a narrative of internecine strife and struggle with external forces (which included the Northern Ireland Arts Council and the actors’ union Equity). The events after 1968 highlighted the tensions between unionist and nationalist, amateur and professional, private and public, north and south, socialist and elite, pride and prejudice, and transplant and native which shaped the O’Malleys’ lives and their theatre. As the troubles went on, and new internal arrangements developed, the coterie theatre that the O’Malleys had nurtured in their own drawing room gradually turned into something quite different. With fittingly dramatic irony, the Lyric Theatre perhaps became the de facto national theatre of Northern Ireland, an outcome completely at odds with its founders’ ambitions.
Her career could well form the basis of a dramatic work, structured almost like a Greek tragedy. She prided herself above all on her unwillingness to compromise her ideals. Her stance is summed up in her autobiography in a quotation from Ibsen: ‘compromise is the prince of lies’. But her failure to adapt to her situation and to allow necessary change led to her losing, more or less, the theatre that she had created thanks to her uncompromising idealism. Her 1990 autobiography, despite a title which might be interpreted as being rather uncomplimentary to her adopted milieu, Never shake hands with the devil, is mostly fair to opponents as well as fair to most supporters; it shows almost no bitterness but cannot hide disappointment.
When she wrote her autobiography, the O’Malleys were living in retirement (since 1976 in Co. Wicklow and later in south Dublin). In 1969 she received an honorary MA from QUB and was appointed a shareholder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where for twenty years, as forcefully as a second Lady Gregory, she worked with and against the most influential figures in Irish drama.
She and Pearse had three sons. She died in Dublin on 22 April 2006 after a long illness. O’Malley papers are in the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway, and a bronze portrait bust of Mary O’Malley was placed on permanent display in the newly rebuilt Lyric Theatre when it opened in May 2011.