The Theatre Royal— a palace of cine-variety

The Theatre Royal’s short 27-year lifespan (it opened in 1935) is testimony to the rapid social change and revolution in entertainment that took place during the last century. The same […]

Its own art department

The theatre had its own art department, which in the 1940s was under the direction of the Limerick painter Fergus O’Ryan. O’Ryan was joined in the early ’40s by a […]

Organ players

Of the Theatre Royal’s organ-players (Alban Chambers, Gordon Spicer, Norman Metcalfe and Tommy Dando), Norman Metcalfe’s career spanned a trajectory from church organ to cine-variety to television, where he worked […]

countdown to 2016 : A Soldier’s Song/ Amhrán na bhFiann

In the early years of the twentieth century the common ‘marching songs’ for nationalists were T.D. Sullivan’s God Save Ireland and Thomas Davis’s A Nation Once Again, both of which […]

Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s

The French historian François Simiand once admonished historians not to ‘forecast the weather from your back garden’, warning against the tendency to seek for explanations in the local and immediate […]