Theatre Royal Way: Dublin’s new street has old memories
The gigantic cine-theatre was a buzzing centre of Dublin's cultural nightlife.
While researching my Irish Times story about College Square, I did a dive into the venue that stood on the same site between 1935 and 1962. The Theatre Royal was a gigantic cine-theatre with a stylish Art Deco façade, and a Moorish-inspired auditorium palatial with high arches and marble staircases. It offered day-long events, combining intermittent film screenings with live music, spectacle, comedy: the smorgasbord of cine-variety.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of stories in living memory relate to the 1950s onwards. That was the peak of the Louis Elliman management, the impresario who also managed the Gaiety Theatre and opened Ardmore Studios. For the Royal, Elliman travelled to Hollywood to secure concerts by American music artists like Judy Garland and Nat King Cole.
The early years of the venue tend to be less remembered. Between 1935-1939, a man named J.E. Pearce was Chairman of the Royal, but it was John McGrath who oversaw operations as Resident Manager. With a background working in cinemas, McGrath was also interested in show business: he was manager for the Irish professional wrestler Danno O’Mahony, a flash-in-the-pan success who defended a championship title in Yankee stadium. Danno popularised the rope-manoeuvre the “Irish whip,” and made an appearance at the Royal in October 1936, where he demonstrated his moves against his brother.
There is a sense that the McGrath years sailed on choppier waters. (Elliman was a prude by comparison, and, according to an Irish Times profile in 1955, was “known to comics for the sour-sounding monosyllable “Out!” with which he annotated a “blue” gag”). Those programmes sound sensationalist and chaotic when read aloud today – a mix of Hollywood Golden Age stars seen in the flesh, alongside stunt performers, impressionists, musicians (Rachmaninoff!) and black minstrel acts. There was also a theatre protest and a high-profile cancellation by a trans-Atlantic boxing star.
The protest by black audience members against Clarence Johnstone
The Irish theatre protest no one remembers. On 25th March 1936, the Irish Times reported that 20 people “mainly of West African nationality” in the auditorium had disrupted a concert by two African-American singers.
One of the singers, Clarence Johnstone, had carved out a career in England, and received racist abuse for having an affair with a white woman married to a well-known orchestra director. From the stalls, the protestors explained they were protesting Johnstone because of a newspaper interview where he condoned the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. They also made clear they were happy for the other singer, Jules Blesdoe, to sing solo.
Blesdoe was one of the first black actors to secure regular employment on Broadway, and had starred in Show Boat: the inescapable, early-century musical produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, following the passengers of a show boat sailing the Mississippi river. Playing a weary dockworker, Blesdoe was the first actor to sing “Ol’ Man River,” an oracular song that, not dissimilar to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” could always “say the names” of oppressed black people without ever saying them.
It’s unknown if Blesdoe sang “Ol’ Man River” that night when left to carry on the concert solo, though it was probably the most famous song in his repertoire. It is unknown if the song could have stirred the audience concerned for the people of Ethiopia forced to persevere: “I'm tired of living and I'm / Feared of dying / But ol' man river / Keeps rolling along.”