Mary O'Malley: Mary O'Malley, who has died aged 87, provided much of the energy which created Belfast's Lyric Theatre a half-century ago, and the raft of cultural activities around it. A striking personality, she personified the Lyric through its first decades and won the loyalty of many who had their first successes on its stage.
The Lyric Players gave their first performance in 1951, in the consulting room at the Lisburn Road home of O'Malley and her husband, the late Patrick Pearse O'Malley, a psychiatrist in the Mater hospital. Though both were passionate about theatre, it was Mary O'Malley's apparently limitless energy that distinguished the new venture. Her most famous graduate, the film star Liam Neeson, described this week how she retained that quality into old age.
He had spoken to her last on the phone when nominated for an Academy Award for Schindler's List. "I could hear her letting out little whoops of delight and happiness," he said. Her love and pride in the theatre had been infectious. "She became a sort of mother to us all. She gave me my professional start in the Lyric and believed in whatever raw talent I had."
Cork-born and a graduate of University College Galway, Mary Hickey set up home in Belfast having married the Co Armagh-born Pearse O'Malley. Both strong nationalists, they found Belfast constraining but discovered like minds in theatre circles, becoming part of a group which developed into the Lyric Players. Their son, Conor, said this week that his mother disliked being credited as the driving force behind the Lyric, and saw herself only as the catalyst for the energy of about 150 people.
Nonetheless it was Mary O'Malley's vision of a "poets' theatre" and conviction that the Abbey had neglected Yeats which helped dictate choice of plays for many years. The couple's financial backing and ability to house the new theatre made it possible. In 1952 the O'Malleys moved to a bigger house with a hayloft in Derryvolgie Avenue, off the Malone Road. The converted hayloft held 90 and housed the Lyric for 16 years. It became Lyric legend that sitting in the front row of the audience, feet away from the actors, meant suffering a fine spray of spittle from one stalwart in particular, given to lip-smacking emphasis.
But there was much to praise. Founder-member Sheila Flanagan acted in many of the earliest plays but also designed costumes, multi-tasking like most others. "The beauty of Mary above all was her single-mindedness," she said. "She had a dream that we didn't have. She was the woman who dragged us along." O'Malley also won a council seat as an independent Labour candidate, outraged by conditions for women and babies in particular, in what was still the Workhouse in the City Hospital near her first Belfast home. She held the seat for one term only but maintained friendships with campaigners Dr Mary Hickey and Renée Calvert.
Within five years the Lyric had staged 32 plays, opened a drama school, and established the literary magazine, Threshold, with O'Malley as first editor and the poet John Hewitt poetry editor. Art exhibitions, poetry readings, recitals and publishing followed. Threshold, subsequently edited by the poets Séamus Heaney and John Montague among others, was still appearing 10 years later, an issue in summer 1967 carrying the plaintive appeal inside the back cover: " Help the new Lyric Theatre to do all that we wish to do - another £30,000 is wanted. Please do help."
John Hewitt's friendship with the O'Malleys and other Catholics helped deprive him of the post of director of the Belfast Museum, on the casting vote of a unionist chairman. He had been "branded both as communist and pro-Catholic", he wrote later. His "For Mary O'Malley and the Lyric Players" described "the little band upon their little stage, tempered to shew, by that dark woman's mood, O'Casey's humours, Lorca's sultry rage, the Theban monarch's terror, gouged and blind".
The Lyric eagerly produced many O'Casey later plays, banned in the Republic and refused by the Abbey; Chekov, Ibsen, Strindberg and Brecht, Aristophanes as well as Goldsmith, Sheridan and Shaw. By the late 1960s they had moved into the custom-built building near the Lagan. Austin Clarke laid the foundation stone, and the Ridgeway Street theatre opened in October 1968 - the same month as the Duke Street march in Derry which many take as the starting point of the Troubles.
O'Malley had an initial spat with the Arts Council, who wanted to have the British national anthem, God Save the Queen, played at each performance. It was played at the opening performance, then not for another year.
The early years were blighted by the Troubles, audiences shrinking from night-time journeys through dangerous streets, but the Lyric's boast was that it never closed. It went on to stage classics and modern work from abroad as well as premieres by writers Jennifer Johnston, Marie Jones, Gary Mitchell, Graham Reid and Martin Lynch. Actor and director Sam McCready, another of the earliest O'Malley group, was artistic director briefly and with great success.
Stella McCusker, Conleth Hill, Ian McElhinney, Ciaran Hinds, Frances Tomelty and Adrian Dunbar are among those who started their careers or had early important roles in the Lyric. Stella McCusker spoke warmly this week of Mary O'Malley's dynamism, adding ruefully that she also recalled her instruction before a performance to cover her arms, "not your finest asset". The O'Malleys left Belfast for Dublin several decades ago. The Lyric has had an uneven history, but has recently secured a large share of the funding needed to build a new £12 million multi-stage complex on the same site. Liam Neeson's awareness of what he owed O'Malley helped secure him as the theatre's patron which in turn assisted fundraising.
O'Malley died in Dublin after a long illness. Her husband died in October 2004. They are survived by their sons Kieran, Donal and Conor.
Mary O'Malley, born 1918; died April 22nd, 2006