Dan Donovan's 40-year life in theatre is 'effectively the cultural history of Cork in the 20th century', writes Brian O'Connell
A single bar from a gas heater keeps the room tepid. The real warmth, though, comes from the memories, stretching back over 60 years, of a cultural life nearing its encore. Wagner and Bach swap places on the record player, while the bookshelves are laden with tattered hardbacks, from Corkery to Chekhov, Lady Gregory to Alan Bennett. To the side, a faded picture shows a group of men in dress suits outside a theatre, all waxed hair and wide eyes. Dan Donovan enters the room with a large red folder under each arm, and a trail of old programmes and newspaper clippings littering his path. He looks fresh for a man of 82.
Delving into the red leather, he digs out the first professional production poster for John B Keane's Sive. "There it is," he says, holding up an A4-sized print, "one of the few originals left anywhere, and you can still see the bit of twine we used to hang it up with."
Donovan had been an active fixture on the local amateur dramatic scene in Cork in the late 1950s, when two situations collided and changed the course of his life. "James N Healy left his pensionable job at Ford, and a publican in Kerry called John B Keane wrote a play called Sive," he explains.
While Healy would later emerge as a hugely influential figure in his own right, at the time he was an unemployed musical director facing an uncertain future. He turned to Donovan for advice. "He came to me asking what should he do about work. A friend of mine had seen this play down in Kerry, and said we should go down and see it. It had been rejected by the Abbey, so was on the market. I said to James this might be the kick-start his career needed. So he went down to Kerry to see it, and afterwards asked John B for it. In fairness to John B, he took a leap of faith in James and the journey began from there."
On June 29th, 1959, the Southern Theatre Company, which Donovan co-founded, presented Siveat the Father Mathew Hall in Cork, the first of 255 performances.
The "summer of Sive" as the cast called it, led to the formation of a continuous professional working theatre group in the city, and Dan Donovan, who played Mike Galvin in the original production, became integral to that process.
"John B at the time was one of the last powerful voices of a tough, primitive and often harsh life," Donovan says. "He found a way to dramatise these narratives, which allowed the wild parts to remain wild. It also made room for all that local theatre had to offer, and which had come to the fore decades earlier with the Abbey peasant plays. Yet John B found a voice to express it in a different way, and I suppose my relationship with theatre and the arts in Cork was strengthened because of that."
NEXT WEEK, CORK will honour one of its foremost cultural sons, when Donovan's contribution to the arts is formally recognised in a new publication by the Everyman Palace Theatre and Collins Press, Dan Donovan: An Everyman's Life. Also planned is a one-off celebration in the Everyman next Monday, where Senator Eoghan Harris will conduct a public interview with Donovan, and excerpts from past productions will be performed. The book itself is intended as an oral memoir of Donovan's life, as well as an important social and cultural snapshot of Cork as it struggled for identity in the later half of the 20th century. While the question-and-answer format of the narrative makes it a somewhat cumbersome and disjointed read, it is nevertheless an important record of a city's artistic emergence and one man's loyalty to a sense of civic duty.
As Everyman artistic director Pat Talbot asserts, "The thinking behind the publication is an acknowledgement of the extraordinary contribution Dan has made to theatre, going back over 40 years. His story is effectively the cultural history of Cork in the 20th century."
Donovan's intellectual awakening began under Daniel Corkery at University College Cork. Having received a scholarship to attend third level, he was fortunate enough to be influenced by Corkery during the great master's last three years of formal teaching.
"His greatest skill was that he was an inspirational teacher and a wonderful man," Donovan says. "He had this incredible ability to get a class going, and was constantly stopping and asking questions of the class. If you answered in haste, he'd often remark, 'Well, now, you might want to think about that'. He was always pressing students forward to use their judgment and exercise powers of thought. We got on extremely well, and long after I left UCC he continued to be an influence. I often visited him, as did many others, when he moved out of the city in his last years."
In the immediate post-war years, a fledgling arts scene was beginning to emerge in Cork with the likes of Joan Denise Moriarty, Aloys Fleischmann, and literary heavyweights such as Sean O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor, probing their intellectual and artistic relationships with the city. Donovan was a driving force during this period, and responsible for bringing world theatre to Cork, at a time when the city was under-exposed to outside influences. An appetite existed for new work, and seasons of Beckett, Ibsen and Chekhov held as much appeal as musical whimsy or farce.
"I remember we did a Beckett season in the early 1960s, and it got great houses," he says. "I was surprised, to be honest, because the productions included Endgameand Krapp's Last Tape, which are fairly dark plays."
Several amateur groups had the idea of bonding together, and, under Donovan's guidance, the association would eventually lead to the Everyman Theatre Group and, in later years, the restoration of the Palace Theatre on MacCurtain Street and the emergence of the present-day Everyman Palace Theatre.
His influence was felt in other disciplines too, as he played significant roles in the development of both of the Cork Film Festival and the Cork Choral Festival.
Much of his involvement came from a strong sense of civic duty as opposed to any carefully planned artistic vision. That type of civic duty and volunteering spirit, which accompanied early endeavours, is noticeable by its absence from the fast-paced demands of 21st-century life, Donovan feels.
"When I think back to the 1950 or 1960s, people committed to all sorts of things during their free time, for the general good," he says. "This wasn't just confined to the arts but also could be seen in sports or political bodies. I think all those kinds of ideals have gone out the window, and society has suffered a great loss with the departure of that attitude."
DONOVAN HAS ALSO noticed a radical shift in the type of theatre currently popular among audiences, due in large part to the increased influence television has exerted over society. Yet, despite the pressures from a range of new media, he is quick to point out that theatre hasn't gone away, and takes much solace in the fact.
"I'm glad to see that theatre has stood the test of time, albeit in a rather different format," he says. "The influence of TV has been enormous, and we now have the one-man show, or a small group play with limited intake, shorter scenes, and more coarse language and situations than we were used to in the past. For an old-timer like me, the sense of a play being fully written is not as important, and you now seem to have scripts for scripts' sake. But that's what the market demands. In my view, though, the range of possibilities in theatre has contracted enormously."
Looking ahead to the launch of the book, Donovan is quick to deflect attention away from his individual achievements, and place his efforts within a broader social movement and continuing artistic progression.
"It all began with my 80th birthday, when I was wheeled out for various commemorations. I was always gabbling away about the past, and the history of Cork theatre. So the Everyman decided to commission the book and keep clear a link to the era I was involved in. I was happy to be part of that and for readers to see me as part of a long tradition, and not a bolt out of the blue in the history of Cork's cultural life."
