TOMÁS MAC ANNA:TOMÁS MAC Anna, a former artistic director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, was internationally acclaimed as a stage director for his work in many countries, including the US and the former Soviet Union, as well as Canada, Germany, Greece, Iceland and the UK. A Tony award winner, he directed the premieres of two Brian Friel plays. Borstal Boyand Galileowere among the productions of which he was most proud.
Honoured with a special tribute award at The Irish TimesTheatre Awards last year, his fellow director Joe Dowling said he was "one of the great heroes of Irish theatre". Actor Bosco Hogan praised his "incredible energy, his vision, his enthusiasm".
His successor at the Abbey, Patrick Mason, paid tribute to his “loyalty to the Abbey, and his great sense of what it stood for and what it needed”.
Born in Dundalk in 1925, he was educated by the Christian Brothers. Having worked as an assistant librarian and customs officer, he studied at the National College of Art, Dublin.
At the same time he was writing for the stage, inspired by reading a volume of Sean O’Casey’s plays in his teens. He joined the Abbey in 1947 as a scenic artist and set designer and moved into directing.
He continued writing, in Irish and English, and also acted. In 1951 he ventured into film, writing and directing Jack of All Maidswhich featured Jack McGowran.
The amateur drama movement was at its height in the 1950s and 1960s, and he regularly adjudicated at drama festivals around the country. At the New Ross, Co Wexford, festival in 1963, he said that if he was to be remembered at all in theatrical history, it possibly would be as the adjudicator who gave second place to John B Keane’s Sive some years previously.
In 1964 he directed Mairéad Ní Ghráda's An Triailwhich premiered at the Damer Hall. The Sunday Timestheatre critic Harold Hobson was highly impressed by the production and paid tribute to Mac Anna for "achieving miracles".
In 1966 he wrote and directed Aiséirí, the government-sponsored 1916 anniversary pageant staged in Croke Park with a cast of 800. Journalist Eileen O'Brien wrote in this newspaper: "To enjoy the pageant one must be able to enter the spirit of the thing, to booh [sic] General Lake, to weep for Robert Emmet, to cheer unrestrainedly for the French at the Races of Castlebar."
In 1970 his production of A State of Chassis, a satirical revue based on events in Northern Ireland, and which he co-wrote, was disrupted by protests on opening night. Afterwards he invited the protesters to join the cast for a party at his home in Howth.
In the same year, his Broadway production of Borstal Boywas awarded a Tony for best play.
He served three terms as the Abbey’s artistic director, one on an interim basis. Describing his role in 1974, he said he ideally saw himself as the leader, the inspirer and the welder of many and diverse talents – “not just of the actors and directors, but of all the creative people in the building”.
A few years earlier, he said it was time to look to the development of Irish-language drama. “By this we can present a new form of Gaelic drama, using the dramatic capabilities of the old artistic methods of the Irish – style, subject and thoroughly Irish.”
He believed theatre should be a platform for discontent. “The Abbey should be a platform for the national voice and spirit,” he said in 1968. “Its task should be to search for the voice of the present generation.”
His republican sympathies led him in the 1970s to publicly declare his support for IRA prisoners on hunger strike in British jails; in the 1980s he supported the H-Block campaign. And in 1991, he wrote a second Easter Rising pageant, this time sponsored by the Reclaim the Spirit of 1916 group.
He wrote many of the Abbey's pantomimes, and his plays include Winter Wedding(1956), Dear Edward(1973) and Scéal Scéalaí(1977). Glittering Spears(1983) is a drama documentary on O'Casey's The Silver Tassie.
He taught drama at several US universities, and in 2006 received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Boston College. A memoir Fallaing Aonghusawas published in 2000.
Summing up his life’s work last year, he said: “It was a wonderful experience, wonderfully invigorating and always a challenge. No apologies, no regrets. I had a ball.”
His wife Caroline, daughters Darina and Fiona and sons Ferdia, Niall and Naoise survive him.
Tomás Mac Anna: born March 7th, 1925; died May 17th, 2011