Imagine hearing from a neighbour that the theatre in which your child is rehearsing for pantomime has gone on fire. That’s what caused the father of Charlotte O’Byrne to bolt from his house in Mahony’s Terrace in Cork’s inner city wearing his slippers.
It will be 70 years ago on the night of December 12th, 1955, that a devastating fire broke out in the city’s prime entertainment venue, the Cork Opera House.
As a tiny tot from Eileen Cavanagh’s stage school, O’Byrne recalls running up the stairs of the theatre with the other children to the dressingrooms, for her tap dancing shoes, clothes and coat. “As we did so, there was an iron door between the backstage and the auditorium and there was smoke swirling around it, into the wings,” she told Declan Hassett, author of Make ‘em Laugh.
“I failed to find my taps ... We rushed down the stairs, out the stage door and into Half Moon Street.”
READ MORE
While the Victorian building on Emmet Place was destroyed due to an electrical fault that ignited the largely wooden structure, nobody was injured. ‘Sleeping Beauty’ had to remain comatose but in the face of the loss of the venue, the public enthusiastically supported fundraising efforts for the rebuilding of the theatre.
It reopened in 1965, following benefit performances at venues across the city – and the intervention in 1963 of Charles J Haughey, then minister for justice. He proposed a change to the funds of the Suitors Bill. This would allow dormant funds within the Accountant of the Courts of Justice to be used towards the rebuild of the opera house. To abandon it would have been seen as a national loss.
Underscoring just how important the Cork Opera House is to the people of Cork, an exhibition of memorabilia associated with the venue continues at Cork city library until Saturday.
Entitled Send It Home, it celebrates the venue’s 170 years since it opened as The Athenauem on Anglesea Street, dedicated to the promotion of science, literature and the arts.
As the Cork Opera House, it played a pivotal role in the celebration of opera during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Harold Johnson, a former chair of the Cork Opera House wrote in the 1978 brochure for the spring season that in the days of the touring opera companies, the city’s involvement with opera was intense. He said it was the custom to greet the opera principals at the railway station.
Popular singers like Fanny Moody were escorted in open student-drawn landaus (four-wheeled carriages) to the Victoria Hotel. And from the balcony, they would sing to the public gathered below on Patrick’s Street.
“It wasn’t unusual during the opera season for the docks and a number of factories to come to an unofficial standstill early in the afternoon as workers went to queue for gallery, pit, stalls, early doors,” observed Johnson.
For the Send It Home exhibition, the public was invited to share artefacts and memories of the theatre. More than 1,300 individual pieces were contributed, forming the foundation of the new Cork Opera House Archive. A curated selection of these items offers a window into 170 years of cultural history.
To be an arts snob in Cork is to have ‘notions'
Among the items featured are programmes dating as far back as 1909, a plaque pulled from the rubble after the fire, pantomime scripts and photographs from various eras of the theatre’s history. The signed photographs are of everyone from Luciano Pavarotti to Peter O’Toole and locally famous panto dame of old, Billa O’Connell and the current dame, Frank Mackey.
There is an air of faded glamour about the exhibition; It’s a repository of old items that require a leap of imagination to conjure up in the mind’s eye the sometimes glitzy shows that enthralled Corkonians over the years. From the revue style variety show Summer Revels starring Cha and Miah (Frank Duggan and Michael Twomey, with the latter also directing) to operas, ballets and pantomimes, there is a plethora of memories waiting to be stoked – even if only stirred by yellowing newspaper cuttings.
Some garish satin costumes are on show. A potted history of the 1,000-seater theatre is provided. It includes a figure of 280 shows a year taking place there these days. That makes for a quick turnover of acts.
Commercial nous is of course important to get bums on seats. Tribute acts imitating the music of bands such as Meat Loaf and Abba are a big feature of the current Cork Opera House programme as well as stand-up comedy.
The tension between high art and popular acts was played out in arts critic Robert O’Donoghue’s Theatre Survey in the Cork Examiner sometime in 1974 when he wrote: “I am still accused of automatically knocking what is commercially successful. Indeed, I am on the record time and time again as having enjoyed along with the audience shows of no fundamental significance whatsoever.”
To be an arts snob in Cork is to have “notions”, prompting the put-down to “get off the stage”.
