Recalling Drama Days

Next week is a nostalgic on in the life of Kay Guinane, Circular Road, mother of four, playwright, award winning actress and national prize winning cake-maker. For when the Sligo Drama Circle’s production of “Night Must Fall” opens in the Hawks Well Theatre on Tuesday for a five night run, Kay Guinane will be remembering 1956. Then, as a member of the local Bernadette Players, she took part in the play’s first presentation in Sligo directed by the late Gerry Westby. Other members of the cast were Mary Watson, Eithne Dolan, Pearse Devins and the late Tom Palmer and Ena Horan. “We later took the play to he Cavan Drama Festival where Joseph Tomelty awarded us 99 marks out of 100. We were pipped for second place in the All-Ireland final”, Kay said this week. Kay Guinane and her late husband Jim, a teacher in Summerhill College for almost twenty years, came from Limerick to Charlestown in 1941. In 1944 they moved to Sligo and it was then that Kay joined the Unknown Players as she had been involved in concerts and plays all her life with her mother, a national school teacher, and her six sisters in Rathkeale, Co. Limerick.

“The first play I did in Sligo was “The Righteous Are Bold” with the late Charlie and Margaret Hughes”, Kay said. “In the cast were Paddy Thornton, who had the most beautiful baritone voice I ever heard, Dan Mc Cormack, Mary Mc Govern, Padraig Foran and Jill Noone. We took the play to drama festivals in Enniskillen, Cavan and Galway. Charlie and Margaret Hughes kept the flag flying for amateur theatre in Sligo in the toughest of times and I feel there should be some little recognition of the work they did for drama. I loved the Unknown Players. They did beautiful plays like ‘The Barretts of Wimpole Street’ and ‘Pygmalion’ which we would rehearse in freezing cold in the Town and Gillooly Halls. We did a lot of concerts across the border travelling on the bus train to Enniskillen. My husband was before his time because he took care of the children for me when I took part in plays and feiseanna. I won the Perpetual Dramatic Cup six times at Feis Shligigh and Feis Ceoil with different sketches.”

Other Sligo people with whom Kay acted were Aileen Harte, Alfie Rochford – his Shylock was fantastic – Walter Mc Donagh who produced the Colleen Bawn in 1961 as a tribute to Charlie and Margaret Hughes, Brian Bohan, Eddie Mc Dermottroe, Joan Fitzpatrick, Doreen Tracey, Michael Feeney, Vivian Francis, Dan Molloy, Catherine Lappin, Ronald Perry, Maria Mc Dermottroe, Lottie Burke and Mary Owens. “I hope I will be forgiven if I omitted any of my actor friends”, Kay pleaded. “But I must mention Jim Wynne, producer and founder member of the Unknowns – I wish some group had kept on the name. There was also Fr. Kerrigan in Summerhill College who produced marvellous Shakespearean plays – John and Tom Mullaney were the best Shakespearean actors I have ever seen on stage”. Kay later joined the Bernadette Players formed by Gerry Westby who produced such plays as ‘Rebecca’ and ‘Jane Eyre’. He also produced ‘Sight Unseen’, the story of Lourdes, at the Holy Well, in 1958. “It was magic”, Kay recalled. “The lighting, the work of Kevin Murray, was beautiful, and the natural slope of the Holy Well was ideal for the play. People came in bus loads and we did ten performances and matinees during which the rain poured down. But we kept on. I also joined the Passing Players and the Sligo Drama Circle. With the Players we won an All-Ireland and a one-act play ‘The Passing’ and every festival on the circuit with that play and ‘The Pot of Broth'”.

Kay has made many television appearances and was an Alderman of Sligo Corporation for one term in 1973. “I could not afford to go forward again”, she said. In the early ’80s, through the Widows Association, Kay raised up to £6,000 for various charities. “When I was hospitalised it all fell through, but it is one of the achievements of which I am very proud”. Kay has four children. “They are a wonderful family but sadly their father, who died in his early fifties, did not live to see them married”. Before finishing her reminiscences Kay made special mention of the Burns and Palmer productions formed by Joe Burns and the late Tom Palmer, Jenny Ballantyne-Koss and Seamus Maguire who accompanied her on the violin while she recited ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’ in Lisadell House during RTE’s first outside broadcast. “That night, with Kathleen Watkins heading the bill in the presence of the late Lady Gore Booth, was the most exciting of my dramatic career”, Kay said.

By Mary Gaffney, The Sligo Weekender, February 8th, 1991