A 50th anniversary year opens for the Everyman Theatre Company at the Everyman Palace in Cork with the presentation of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. The production celebrates the variety and vitality of half a century of theatre-making spread over three different venues, the last of which was once described by the late Cyril Cusack as "perhaps the loveliest theatre in Ireland".
It was not always thus, for Everyman’s first location was the modest Little Theatre in the CCYMS hall in Castle Street. This was where the trinity of John O’Shea, Dan Donovan and Seán Ó Tuama first fixed their daring gaze on O’Shea’s proposal to bring Cork’s several amateur drama groups together under a single production regime. What emerged from their shared vision was a succession of national and international plays in a public programme of commitments: and all the promises were kept.
Fifty years represents a lot of promises, and when Gerry McLoughlin opened in The Year of Magical Thinking at the Everyman Palace in 2010 there had to be a sense of gratitude not only for her performance but for the reminder of continuity, given that McLoughlin had worked with Everyman since the 1970s. Perhaps some of the audience at An Inspector Calls in 2007 might have been aware that director Michael Twomey, designer Jim Queally, actor Alf McCarthy and costume designer Sheila Healy are among the stalwarts who kept Everyman productions going for a very long time. Age, however, has not withered them; certainly it hasn't withered Everyman's hold on centre stage, as shown by its award-winning co-production with the Cork Operatic Society of Pagliacci in 2012 or of the wondrous Orpheus in September.
Year by year the seasons were intended, as Eoghan Harris once described it, “to rattle Cork’s brains”. Harris was an early acolyte; over the years others either passed through or remained in Everyman’s environment. People such as Donall Farmer, Pat Butler, Dermot Crowley, Fiona Shaw and designer Bob Crowley all went on to create fine professional careers, some of international brilliance. Supported by stage, technical and front-of-house volunteers, there were some who could double, or even triple, their skills in an actor/director/ designer pattern set by John O’Shea and Dan Donovan. The company flourished with the talents of the recently deceased and much mourned Donn McMullin, the late designer Patrick Murray, and the late Rachel Burrows of Ashton Productions.
The words "now gone" haunt these paragraphs, and to avoid the danger of reading like a report for the War Graves Commission, a happier listing should glow with the unforgettable: Bill Golding as the Player King in Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard; Mick McCarthy and Heather Underwood in The Promise by Aleksei Arbuzov; Donall Farmer in Poor Bitos by Jean Anouilh, Rachel Burrows in The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, Pat Butler in Hugh Leonard's Stephen D, the impact of Total Eclipse by Christopher Hampton. All these, with playwright Ó Tuama's Compantas Chorcai and the resonant beauty of young Bob Crowley's set and poster design for The Silver Tassie, along with impressive visiting productions, make, a catalogue of the subversive, the conventional and above all the new. Cork was, undoubtedly, having its brains rattled.
From Castle Street the Everyman moved first to the 450-seat Fr Mathew Hall and then, in an arrangement brokered between Abbey Films Ltd and Everyman’s Lachlainn Ó Cathain in 1988, to the now renewed Victorian glamour of the Palace theatre. Assisted both by the Irish Arts Council and the city council, Everyman developed a separate administrative structure which allows the Everyman Palace to originate co-productions and residencies and to operate both as an associate and host venue for visiting companies.
There’s more to come, for the Everyman of the Little Theatre’s dusty stage continues its theatrical as well as its physical legacy in the gilded functional charm of the Everyman Palace theatre. And as nostalgia is an unreliable archive, it’s reassuring to know that the Cork City Library is building a comprehensive Everyman database going right back to its origins 50 years ago.
An Ideal Husband runs at the Everyman Palace Theatre from January 15th to 25th