The American tours of the Dublin Players, 1951–58

By Peter W. Halligan

Professor Peter Halligan, whose first cousin once removed Maureen Halligan founded the Dublin Players with her husband Ronald Ibbs, sheds light on a now largely forgotten Irish off-Broadway theatre company. Between 1951 and 1958, the Dublin Players toured widely across the US, captivating audiences with renditions of classical Irish plays.

In the early 20th century, Irish theatre in America provided a powerful medium for Irish playwrights and theatre companies to communicate new, emerging notions of Irish identity. In his lecture tours of America in the 1930s, W.B. Yeats advocated the use of theatre to reflect the “actual life of Ireland herself to the analysis of the stage”. Unlike the better-known Abbey Theatre tours by the Irish Players, this article will focus on the Dublin Players – a small, less well-known off-Broadway theatre company that performed at hundreds of American universities, colleges and regional theatres between 1951 and 1958.

While playing few large commercial theatres, the extensive American tours of the Dublin Players were successful artistically and financially – judging from audience reports, levels of re-engagement and reviews. Described by Ed Sullivan (1901–74), the popular and influential TV variety show host who first introduced Elvis Presley to live TV, as “one of the finest acting companies that ever came to this country”, accounts of the Dublin Players remain largely absent from the history of American Irish theatre.

Created by one of Ireland’s few husband-and-wife actor and actress managerial teams, the Dublin Players was established by Ronald Ibbs and Maureen Halligan, both members of Lord Longford’s Gate Theatre company since the mid-1930s.

The troupe was created when Ibbs and Halligan were invited to tour the US in 1951 by Eric Bentley (1916–2020), the celebrated American-based theatre critic and William Becker (1927–2015) from the International Theatre Exchange. Unlike earlier touring companies, the Dublin Players comprised both Irish and British actors from the Gate, Abbey and Old Vic Theatres and performed a range of classical Irish and British plays by Shaw, Wilde, O‘Casey, Ibsen, MacLiammóir, Synge, Coward, Chekhov, Robinson, Sheridan, Goldsmith and Fry.

The troupe, comprising between 13 and 15 players, saw many of its tours – which covered east and west coast states – last 6–9 months, with performances at several American university campuses and regional theatres becoming annual events. Standard fare productions included Pygmalion, Arms and the Man, The Devil’s Disciple, Juno and the Paycock, and Shadow and Substance.

Given the extensive travel involved, the company’s performances were characterized by a focus on acting, rather than extensive or expensive stage sets. In an interview in March 1956 with The News-Palladium (Benton Harbour, Michigan), Ibbs explained:

“We make tremendous demands upon the audience imagination … we have removed the scenic effect which so often is a distraction to play before the drapes and thus to concentrate attention upon the acting … For the same reason we have removed surplus and superfluous properties utilising a minimum of furnishings, all on the theory that ‘the play is the thing’. Thus, we have audience participation in a very high sense, but we find that audiences like it. Everybody has imagination and likes to use it … In a couple of winks and with a little encouragement from us, they are part of the action from beginning to end.”

American response

Performances by the Dublin Players attracted attention and praise from newspaper critics and columnists across the US, all of which provided for a growing number of engagements year-on-year, with more than 100 coast-to-coast city performances in the US and Canada in 1954–55. Variety, the leading American trade magazine, rated the company as “top entertainment”. They were considered one of the best acting companies to have come from Ireland since the Abbey Players and received offers from local radio, television stations and theatres.

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Ed Sullivan appearances

A performance that raised the profile and national awareness of the company and its tour in the US was their debut appearance on the CBS show hosted by Ed Sullivan in 1952.

By the early 1950s, television had become the dominant medium for entertainment and news in the US – all of which allowed variety acts from music, dance and theatre to reach significantly larger audiences. Originally titled Toast of the Town and later, from 1955, The Ed Sullivan Show, the programme, broadcast live from New York, was the pre-eminent Sunday night television variety show for millions of Americans. From 1948 to 1971, the show introduced many of the biggest and up-and-coming names from music and acting to the American public with performances by The Beatles, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, The Temptations and The Beach Boys, as well as occasional performances from Broadway stars of musicals like My Fair Lady and West Side Story.

Remarkably, the Dublin Players secured three appearances on this exclusive live variety show in 1952. On each occasion, they first addressed viewers in Irish.

Their first appearance was arranged by Eddie Dowling, their theatrical promoter, for Sunday, 16 March, just before St Patrick’s Day. The company performed a scene from Cathleen Ni Houlihan, one of Yeats’ most popular plays – it marked its first live broadcast on television. On 17 March 1952, Ben Gross, the radio and television columnist for the New York Daily News, wrote:

“It is seldom that one hears the English language spoken with the lilting music of the Dublin Players who presented a scene from Yeats’ symbolic drama … during the Ed Sullivan show last night. Here was pure poetic beauty conveyed by inspired artists. The actress who portrayed the title role gave one of the most moving performances I have ever seen. Congratulations to Eddie Dowling for bringing this company to New York.”

Dowling, a former actor and leading US theatre promoter, stated in an interview with the Daily News on 4 May 1952 that the Dublin Players’ performance on the Ed Sullivan show in March had resulted in “thousands of letters singing their praise”. According to Dowling, that appearance secured at least a dozen offers for other television shows, and within three weeks of their TV debut, one half of their coast-to-coast tour had been booked.

The response to this March performance was such that Sullivan invited the troupe back again twice more in 1952. Their second appearance was a month later, on 27 April. Although billed as performing Riders to the Sea, the Dublin Players performed scenes from Wilde’s comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. Writing in the Daily News on 28 April, Gross stated that,

“For although the Irish players did not break into song, their speech even in the brittle Wildean dialogue was music to the ears. They speak more beautifully than any group I’ve ever heard on the air. I much prefer them when uttering the lilting lines of Yeats, Synge or O’Casey, but they were perfect in this drawing room comedy segment … Dowling deserves huzzahs for bringing this group to America.”

Their third and final appearance in 1952 took place on 10 August, when the company performed a scene from Pygmalion.

As part of their way of “selling Ireland abroad”, the Dublin Players in 1954 were often photographed in traditional Irish costumes. These were supplied by Bord Fáilte (the Irish Tourist Board). According to the Irish Press in 1954:

“The players hit on the idea because on previous tours they found that Americans wanted to see something distinctly Irish in addition to the plays they staged. Waterford Glass and Irish tweed featured in several of their photographs.”

Meeting the mayor of New York

In October 1954, the Dublin Players were formally welcomed by New York’s Mayor Robert F. Wagner at a ceremony in City Hall, at which they received the key to the city of New York – a symbol of civic recognition and achievement. In return, at City Park in New York, Ibbs presented Mayor Wagner with a scroll in Irish, which named him an honorary founder of the Dublin Players.

The annual American tours came to an end in 1959 after eight successful years.

The actors

Over their eight American tours (including a short summer tour as the Young Ireland Theatre Company in the summer of 1951), members of the Dublin Players included:

Patricia Berry, Charles Blair, Mary Brady, Gerald Burke, Edward Byrne, Paula Byrne, Helena Carroll (daughter of playwright Paul Vincent Carroll and co-founder of the New York-based Irish Players repertory company in 1955), Christopher Casson (son of actors Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Thomas Casson), Kay Casson, David Clarke (second son of stained-glass artist and book illustrator Harry Clarke; a painter by profession, David also designed the scenery and acted as stage manager), Marjory Clarke, Michael Laurence Clarke (David’s brother and son of Harry Clarke), Rory Coe, Alex Digman, Bryan Doyle, Michael Dunne, Ann Elsden (appeared in the films Made in Heaven and Walt Disney’s The Sword and the Rose), Kathleen Feenan, Eric Ferguson, Maurice Good, Sunniva Halligan (Maureen’s younger sister), Aileen Harte (remembered for her role as Philomena Feeney in the RTÉ television drama series Tolka Row), Ken Huxham (known for his role in The Twilight Zone, 1959), John Kelly, James Kenny (who played featured roles at the Gate and Abbey Theatres), Dermot MacDowell, Josie McAvin, Jack McGowran, Dermot McNamara (co-founder of the New York-based repertory company Irish Players in 1955), Gervaise Mathews (from the Gate Theatre, voted Dublin’s best actress for her performance in Mrs Warren’s Profession and recipient of the Times Pictorial Trophy), Lollie May, Jenny Mundy-Castle (formally of the Penguin Players), Geoffrey Murphy, Maura Murphy, James Neylin, Shivaun O’Casey (daughter of Sean O’Casey), Seamus O’Gorman, Nora O’Mahoney, Grania O’Shannon, Milo O’Shea, Godfrey Quigley (co-founder of the Globe Theatre Company based in Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, in 1954), Gladys Richards, Phyllis Ryan (former leading actress from the Abbey Theatre and later founder of independent production companies Orion and Gemini Productions in Ireland in the late 1950s), Maureen Toal, Brian Vincent (a former member of the Gate and Abbey companies), Harry Webster (former actor-manager of the Abbey Theatre, who specialized in presenting plays by new Irish authors) and Julia Worth (an English actor from Stratford-upon–Avon).

Some members joined the Dublin Players for only a couple of years, while others left after returning to Ireland following the annual tour. After 1959, a small number stayed in the US to pursue their careers. Ibbs and Halligan returned to Ireland and continued performing on stage and screen in Ireland and the UK.

Legacy and the University of the Incarnate Word

In 1964, Halligan and Ibbs went back to America to join the Incarnate Word College (IWC) in San Antonio, Texas, as artists-in-residence. The college was looking to recruit experienced actors to develop its theatre programme, establish a resident company and help build a new theatre facility that could serve the campus and the community.

Over the next three decades at IWC – later University of the Incarnate Word (UIW) – Halligan and Ibbs built the theatre programme into one of the leading college theatre programmes in the area and, in the process, introduced a range of Irish and English playwrights to generations of young American students. They were also instrumental in fundraising and planning for the university’s Halligan-Ibbs Theatre/Dance Center.

Ronald Ibbs died in April 1990 after a long battle with cancer. After his death, Halligan, who had been appointed Professor Emerita of Theatre at Incarnate Word, continued to make regular appearances with UIW’s Extended Run Players. In 1992, she received a Globe Award for her special contributions to local theatre and was inducted into the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame. Maureen Halligan died in 2008 in San Antonio.

Despite being relative unknowns in 1951, the Dublin Players cultivated a growing reputation during their annual tours of the US, foreshadowing the expansion of American regional theatre in the early 1960s.

If you have any additional information about the Dublin Players or anyone mentioned here, please share it with us in the comments below – we’d love to hear from you.

Peter W. Halligan is a former academic from Dublin who, since retiring, has been researching and writing up various aspects of his family history.

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