Introduction

In January 1931, the Dublin Gate Theatre produced the three-act tragedy Bride by “Ulick Burke”, pseudonym of Lilian Lucy Davidson (1879-1954), who had already made a name for herself as a painter and art teacher. The play received critical acclaim, but its script does not survive, and Davidson’s other excursions into writing were sporadic and had modest success. A comprehensive essay about her life and career by Katherine Cahill published in 1999 misattributes some written works to her while omitting others. The entry for Davidson in the Dictionary of Irish Biography perpetuates these mistakes and erroneously credits her with co-founding the Torch Theatre Company in Dublin in 1935, under the name “Jennifer Maude” (Doyle 2009). However, that credit should go instead to Jennifer Davidson (1909-1993), who acted at the Torch Theatre under that pseudonym, until the company folded in 1937. My aim in what follows is to set the record straight and to throw light on the achievements of both Miss Davidsons at an uncertain time for women in Irish public and professional life. Looking at their precarious careers and their connections with each other and with people associated with the Abbey, Gate, Queen’s, and Torch theatres also reveals the intimate relations that existed between the various entities that made up the Dublin theatre world of the 1930s.

Lilian Davidson (“Ulick Burke”)

According to her obituary in the Irish Press (31 March 1954: 4), Lilian Davidson was an accomplished painter of rural scenes, mainly of the West of Ireland and County Wicklow, as well as of portraits, including an oil painting of Jack B. Yeats (1938), which was bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland upon her death. She had a high reputation as an art teacher. Her work was frequently exhibited in Dublin, and in 1940 she was made an associate member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. In her article about Davidson, Cahill outlines her artistic career and attempts to throw some light on her writing – an aspect of her work that, by the time she died in 1954, had been largely forgotten. Cahill notes that Winifred Letts, Davidson’s friend and herself a writer of poetry, fiction, and drama, whose play Hamilton and Jones had been produced by Lord Longford at the Gate Theatre in 1941, complained in a letter to The Irish Times that the paper’s obituary of Davidson had only focussed on her painting: “there was no mention of her gifts in literature” (The Irish Times, 3 April 1954: 7). Cahill lists the works Davidson produced under the pen name “Ulick Burke”: her poetry collection Donegal Rhymes, published in 1927; her play Bride, produced by the Gate Theatre in 1931; and her short story “Her Only Son”, published in The Bell in 1942. But she also erroneously credits her with writing three acting monologues published in Chicago between 1916 and 1918. These, however, apart from being rather too early, were written by Lillian Davidson, whose first name has a different spelling, and employ a folksy and humorous American vernacular that would be completely alien to Davidson, whose own art in both word and image is rooted firmly in the Irish countryside. Cahill’s error has been perpetuated by the entries for Davidson in the Dictionary of Irish Biography and Wikipedia, which also claim she wrote “monologues” (Doyle 2009; “Lilian Davidson”).

Davidson did write other works for the stage, but they remained unpublished and unproduced. Her abiding interest in the theatre is evident from the memories of some of the students who attended the art classes she gave at her home in Earlsfort Terrace, located not far from the Harcourt Terrace residence of Gate Theatre founders Micheál mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, known affectionately as “the Boys”. According to Betty Sullivan, “the Dave”, as her pupils called Davidson, “would be interested in the current production at the Gate Theatre and her friends Edwards, McLiammoir [sic] and other members of the company” (Cahill 1999: 44). Mo Irwin recalled that Lilian’s sisters “would drift in and talk about the theatre while we were at class” (The Irish Times, 4 April 2015: C16). We only know about some of Davidson’s writings because she entered them into competitions. In 1928, “L. Davidson” won the silver medal in the Tailteann Games Drama Competition for her three-act tragedy For Information Received. In their encomium, the adjudicators offered qualified praise: “The story is a powerful one which works up to a grim and tragic climax. Your characters are well drawn; you have a sense of the dramatic, and your stage craft, though not perfect, is good” (Irish Independent, 15 August 1928: 8). The gold medal was won by the theatre critic and dramatist David Sears for Juggernaut, which was turned down by the Abbey Theatre twice, both before and after it won the competition, and was produced at the Peacock by the Gate Theatre in March 1929. Davidson’s play did not make it to the stage, and its script does not survive. In 1935, she entered the Gate Theatre’s One Act Play Competition and once more came second, with The Diarists. The winner was M. Eamonn Dubhagan with The Dancers’ Dilemma. Although Lord Longford expressed the hope that some of the plays would be presented that season, there is no evidence that this occurred (Irish Independent, 9 October 1935: 10). Dubhagan’s play was published in the 1940s by J. Curwen and Sons of London, but Davidson’s drama has left no trace.

Lilian Davidson began her writing career as a poet. In 1927 she published her collection Donegal Rhymes with Claude Stacey of London – which advertised itself as a purveyor of novels, good verse, and children’s books – under the pseudonym “Ulick Burke”. It is not clear why she chose to write under this nom de plume, a name historically associated with the earls of Clanrickarde, since there was already an established writer of that name, Ulick Ralph Burke (1845-1895), a lawyer, historian, and the author of two novels, Beating the Air (1879) and Loyal and Lawless (1880). It is unfortunate that it is he, rather than Davidson, who is recorded as the author of Donegal Rhymes in the catalogues of the National Library of Ireland and WorldCat. Yet there is no mistaking the identity of the volume’s author, who dedicated it to “N. and M., those kindly critics” (Burke 1927). These were Davidson’s sisters Nan (Annie), who worked as a commercial clerk, and Mabel, a hospital clerk, with whom Lilian shared a home in Dublin. As some of Davidson’s former pupils later recalled, the sisters became “frail” and “dependent” on her, and she eventually “became the bread winner for the three of them”, but often struggled to make ends meet (Cahill 1999: 45 n.10). According to Cahill, all three remained unmarried and lived together their entire lives; they are also buried together, in an unmarked grave in Dublin’s Mount Jerome cemetery, along with their aunt Sarah, with whom they had lived after the early death of their parents.

Cahill notes that Davidson began a series of paintings of peasant subjects in County Donegal in the 1920s, and the poems in Donegal Rhymes must have sprung from the same source of inspiration. The influence of Jack B. Yeats is much in evidence in the paintings, although “she is of more sombre cast” (Cahill 1999: 36) and favours a palette of darker colours. The poems are equally cheerless in tone and subject. Each individual poem tends to focus on a suffering individual who is marginalised by age, mental or physical infirmity, abuse, or bereavement: a mother grieves a drowned son; an elderly widow bemoans the cruelty of youth. The pathos is often overblown, as in the poem about “Poor little Meggy Ann”, a child found abandoned “beneath the ass’s car”, who is “black and blue the way they have her beat” (Burke 1927: 8), or about the mother who berates those who would call her child a “dirty slobbering idiot”, even though it was “the will of God / Has him the way he is” (Burke 1927: 11). In “Eight O’Clock”, a widow woman’s only son is condemned by a judge to be “hanged by the neck” (Burke 1927: 24); Davidson would later develop a similar theme in the story “Her Only Son”. Loneliness pervades all the poems, yet there is also a sense that human company is more often a source of sorrow than happiness: “Who was it said that men were kind? / They lied”, she writes in “The Lie” (Burke 1927: 7). The collection’s opening poem, “Contentment”, suggests that, if such is to be found at all, it is in self-sufficiency: “me having nothing, living by my lone / An’ wanting nothing else that’s known” (Burke 1927: 1).

Arguably Davidson’s greatest success as a writer came in 1931, when the Gate Theatre produced her play Bride, directed by Edwards and with settings by mac Liammóir. Ulick Burke’s script subsequently won the gold medal in that year’s Tailteann Games Drama Competition. The silver medal went to E.W. Tocher (Denis Johnston) for The Moon in the Yellow River, which was staged at the Abbey Theatre in April 1931. In her 1954 letter to The Irish Times, Winifred Letts notes that Bride was also accepted for production by a London theatre, but that “one of those frequent hitches occurred, and the production was stopped” (3 April 1954: 7, 10). The action of Bride takes place in the present day (i.e. 1931) in the West of Ireland, leading the Irish Independent (13 January 1931: 5) to note “the authoress’s debt to the peasant school of Abbey Drama”. This confirms, as Richard Pine reminds us, that the Gate and the Abbey had so much in common in the early years that it was impossible to distinguish between “Abbey” authors and “Gate” authors (1984: 51). Nevertheless, Joseph Holloway remarks in his diary that, on the play’s opening night on 12 January 1931, he overheard a gentleman remark “that the Gate was never intended originally to be the producer of discarded Abbey plays”, since its role lay in “Shakespeare and translations of foreign plays” (NLI Ms 1939). Pine, however, argues that the Gate, in producing Irish drama, was not so much “a refuge for ‘Abbey rejects’” as “an overflow or a safety valve, with a distinct relationship to the Abbey”, producing, as Hilton Edwards had it, work outside the scope of the Abbey’s policy (1984: 51). What that meant in this case can perhaps be gauged from mac Liammóir’s lecture on “Problem Plays in the Lives of Irish People” presented at the 1938 Abbey Theatre Festival, in which he summarised the essence of Bride as the “fatally real problem of sexual ignorance and the pitiless savagery of rural virtue” (The Irish Times, 22 August 1938: 8). Whether the Gate was adequately equipped to present plays about rural Ireland is another matter. In his diary, Holloway remarks upon the mishmash of stage-Irish accents adopted by the Gate actors performing Bride, who “appeared to be speaking in a foreign tongue” rather than an Irish brogue, leading him to conclude that “an Irish dialect play is completely beyond the resources of the Gate” (NLI Ms 1939).

The script of Bride is not preserved in the Gate Theatre archive, but the plot of the three-act tragedy can be reconstructed from newspaper reviews and Holloway’s description in his diary. Mrs Gorman, a hard old widow, owns a heavily mortgaged farm she hopes to save by making a match between her son Michael and Maggie Kavanagh, the daughter of a wealthy neighbour. Her plans are thwarted when Michael, away in Dublin, marries Bride, a young and penniless servant girl. Mrs Gorman, bitter and filled with anger towards the new daughter-in-law, goes to live with her daughter Hannah and her husband James Conroy on their nearby farm. In act 2, Bride realises that James is the man who, in the past and before she met Michael, had seduced and then deserted her. Bride persuades James to put up the necessary money to pay off the debt on Mrs Gorman’s farm. In act 3, Hannah’s initial feelings of goodwill towards Bride turn to suspicion and contempt as she accuses her of stealing her husband’s affections. Left without allies and afraid of losing Michael should the truth come out, Bride disappears, until her body is discovered in a bog, where she has drowned herself. Cahill suggests that the plot of Bride “foreshadowed John B. Keane’s better-known Sive” (1999: 39), which was first performed in 1959, but the theme of a match between an older man and a younger, often vulnerable or compromised woman, was quite prevalent in plays of the time, such as T.C. Murray’s Autumn Fire (1924), and Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche (1936). Holloway thought the ending of Bride was reminiscent of The Woman (1929) by Margaret O’Leary (who was in the audience on the play’s opening night). In O’Leary’s drama, the passionate Ellen who, like Bride, is poor, and who has a bad reputation, is courted by the widower Maurice, who is looking for a wife to take care of his two small children. Ellen eventually leaves Maurice’s farm, and he belatedly realises she has walked off in the direction of the dark water of Poulgorm, where her grandmother had drowned herself in the past.

The Irish Independent (13 January 1931: 11) gave Bride a mixed review, noting that it “had its moments of tenseness and almost of inspiration” but was marred by the author’s attempt to introduce some comic relief, “for her talen[t] clearly does not run in that direction”. The reviewer went on to say that the play presents “a grim and sombre story which would tax the powers of a more experienced dramatist than ‘Ulick Burke’, and it is an achievement that she carries it through so well”. Holloway thought that Bride did not hit its stride until act 3, but he did find the final incidents “most impressive”. He records in his diary that much applause followed the play’s conclusion, when the players took several bows and the author, “a tall thin lady”, took a call by herself and then with Edwards and mac Liammóir (NLI Ms 1939). The reviewer for The Irish Times who opined that “Ulick Burke in ‘Bride’ exhibits a knowledge of his material” (13 January 1931: 4) was clearly not paying attention. A headshot of the lady in question is included in Bulmer Hobson’s The Gate Theatre, Dublin, which describes Bride as “a powerful play in the peasant tradition” (Hobson 1934: 38). The same photograph appears to have formed the basis for Davidson’s self-portrait “The Golden Shawl”, which was bequeathed to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery after her death. Holloway may not have known Davidson when he saw her take a bow on stage, but she would subsequently paint his portrait, which now hangs in the Abbey Theatre.

Ulick Burke’s final publication was a short story. In 1942, she won the second prize of £5 for “The Only Son of His Mother” in a contest organised by the Friends of the Irish Academy of Letters in connection with the Book Fair in the Dublin Mansion House. The judges included Lynn Doyle and Lennox Robinson. Terence de Vere White won the first prize of £10 for “Wise Man’s Son”. His story was published in The Bell in September 1942 while Davidson’s appeared in October of that year, under the revised title “Her Only Son”. The story is told from the perspective of an old woman waiting in a court room to be called as a witness in the trial of her son Christie, who is led into the dock “grimacing and muttering to himself” (Burke 1942: 44). Confused and overwhelmed by the proceedings, the widow’s entire focus is on her son: “Him that had never left me side all the long years he was growin’ to be a lad” (Burke 1942: 42). In the course of the story, it transpires that Christie is on trial for assaulting a young girl; and although his mother, shaking with indignation, mentally accuses the witnesses of holding a grudge against him, she cannot help but recall the time when she herself had been threatened by him with an axe, for which she takes the blame: “Wasn’t it me own fault too, the way I had him raised forgettin’ to bring him his sugar stick from the town” (Burke 1942: 45). When her turn in the witness box arrives, she is unable to utter a word when the judge confronts her with the fact that Christie had imperilled her “on more than one occasion” (Burke 1942: 46). Afterwards, she is allowed a moment with her son, but he strikes her hand away and willingly makes his way to a waiting van that will carry him to the “County Asylum”. When the old woman realises that he will not be coming home with her, she runs after the vehicle until it vanishes, whereupon she collapses. The ironies of the story are grim. The boy who, in his mother’s view, could not stand to be confined within four walls but “must have the door wide to the world”, yet who also “wouldn’t sleep only in the one room with meself” (Burke 1942: 43), apparently prefers the closed ward of a psychiatric hospital to the stifling and clinging presence of his mother who, it seems, helped turn him into the pathetic monster he became.

Phyllis Boumans and Elke D’hoker have noted that only a small minority of writers published in The Bell between 1940 and 1954 were female, and that the magazine, edited by Seán Ó Faoláin, perpetuated “the idea of authorship and literary authority as an essentially male domain” (2022: 205). Davidson’s male pseudonym may reflect an awareness of this bias against women in the Irish publishing world in general. Stories published in The Bell overwhelmingly presented male experiences, and female characters tended to be domestic “types” such as “the superstitious grandmother, the caring or overbearing mother, and the stubborn widow” (Boumans and D’hoker 2022: 210). Cahill observes that Davidson’s art was not in the vanguard of modernist painting but maintained the “somewhat narrow, Victorian focus” that was typical of the style acquired by those seeking a teaching qualification (1999: 36). “Her Only Son” reflects similarly conservative values and does not challenge the portrayal of female characters that prevailed in The Bell.

The Torch Theatre

Cahill contends that Lilian Davidson “was among the founders of the Torch Theatre” in Dublin (1999: 44). The Torch was opened in February 1935 by the actor and director Charles L. Keogh and his wife, the actress Evelyn Lund, in a building on Capel Street that had previously housed, successively, the Capel Theatre, a coffee palace, and the headquarters of the United Trades Council and Labour League. It possessed “an astonishingly large stage, with the traditional ‘hole-in-the-wall’ proscenium” (The Irish Times, 16 February 1937: 6). In his youth, Keogh had trained as an actor with Frank Benson’s English touring company, but he was back in Dublin at the time of the Rising. In 1916-17, he worked in the front office of the Abbey Theatre, where his older brother Augustus was the general manager, and appeared as an actor there in several plays (Keogh 1992: 59). In the 1920s, Keogh acted at the Queen’s Theatre with William Macready’s company, which “put on a new play every week” (de Búrca 1973: 19). The Queen’s was known as the home of Irish melodrama, and its plays often celebrated Irish historical characters such as Robert Emmet and Father Murphy. By 1934, however, it had been turned into a cine-variety theatre, which presented a programme of films in alternation with a mix of variety acts. As Keogh’s daughter Dorothy later recalled (The Evening Herald, 8 October 1949: 5), her father intended to put on “only old Irish melodramas” at the Torch, clearly seeking to fill the gap in the market left by the recent changes at the Queen’s, and she noted that these “always proved more successful than any other type of play”. An inset to the programme for Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn, the Torch Theatre’s opening production, whose presentation “recalled the atmosphere of the melodrama of Dublin stage productions in earlier times”, declared that it was the theatre’s aim “to present the plays of another day without exaggeration, for the benefit of the dunderheaded; without apology for the appeasement of the genteel, and without a whimsical gesture for the flattery of the very aware” (cited in The Irish Times, 28 February 1935: 4). The Torch’s first season also included Boucicault’s The Shaughraun, Archibald Carlyle’s East Lynne (based on the novel by Ellen Wood), Paul Kester’s Sweet Nell of Old Drury (or Nell Gwynne), Frank Dalton’s Wolfe Tone, and Ira Allen’s Father Murphy, all of which had also been staged at the Queen’s in the previous decade (de Búrca 1973: 22).

In The Lost Theatres of Dublin, Philip B. Ryan claims that the Torch entered its second year with two new directors in addition to Keogh and Lund: “Lilian Davidson (stage name Jennifer Maud [sic]) and Hugh H. Hyland, a former manager of the Gaiety” (1998: 194). This information is replicated in the entry for Davidson in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. Cahill, also listing Lilian Davidson among the directors, suggests that her role at the Torch involved “designing sets and programmes, and no doubt making literary contributions as well” (1999: 44). Davidson did indeed create the settings for the Torch production of James Bridie’s The Anatomist in the theatre’s opening season, which The Evening Herald (29 April 1935: 7) called “very attractive” and The Irish Times (29 April 1935: 5) thought “unusually well-designed”. In the absence of an archive for the theatre, it is difficult to ascertain whether and to what extent she designed other materials, but her name does not appear in any other reviews of the substantial number of plays the theatre produced during its brief existence. She certainly did not contribute any dramas. More crucially, Lilian Davidson was also not “Jennifer Maude”, for “Jennifer Maude” was the stage name of Jennifer Davidson. Ironically, Cahill had interviewed “the late actress and friend of Lilian Davidson, Miss Jennifer Davidson” (1999: 35), in 1988 as part of her research into the painter’s life, but evidently did not make the connection between the actress and the Torch Theatre.

Jennifer Davidson (“Jennifer Maude”)

Jennifer Davidson was the daughter of Craig Davidson, a barrister-at-law, and his wife Ethel (née Goddard), whose father, Norris Goddard, was the heir to Donard Demesne, an estate in County Wicklow. Goddard was a prominent solicitor who, with his son-in-law, set up the Dublin law firm of Goddard and Davidson. In the 1901 census, Ethel’s occupation, as well as that of her mother and grandmother, was recorded as “Lady”. Jennifer was born in Dublin on 10 August 1909. The register of births records her full name as Jennifer Maude Elinor, although the 1911 census gives it as Jennifer Maude Eleanor. Her father died in 1922 of pulmonary tuberculosis, aged 45; in the following decades, his widow (“Mrs Craig Davidson”) was extremely active in her local protestant church and the community, organising and attending charitable and cultural events – frequently accompanied by her daughter – and giving lectures on art and literature. She often moved in the same cultural circles as Lilian Davidson. Jennifer Davidson received her secondary education at Bellevue House School in Sutton, Co. Dublin, where the family resided, and subsequently trained at the Abbey School of Acting. Her brother Norris (1908-1998), who would inherit Donard House, went on to become a filmmaker and television producer. Jennifer first appeared at the Peacock Theatre in November 1930, in a student production of Paul Vincent Carroll’s two-act peasant drama The Watched Pot. The reviewer in the Irish Independent (18 November 1930: 8) felt she “struggled with an extremely difficult part”, but “certainly put spirit into her portrayal of a peasant virago”. In September 1932, still using the name Jennifer Davidson, she played Mrs Sharpe in the Abbey Theatre production of Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back, alongside Charles L. Keogh and Evelyn Lund. In May 1934 she appeared at the Abbey as Mollie Riordan in Lennox Robinson’s one-act Church Street, and later that year took part in the Abbey’s radio production of J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea.

The press took note of Davidson’s success. The Dublin Evening Mail (25 July 1934: 7) gave her a little vignette alongside her better-known brother Norris, “the distinguished Irish film director” who had “first introduced Mr. Robert Flaherty, the producer of ‘Man of Aran’, to the Aran islanders”. Jennifer Davidson, the paper noted, “whose acting at the Abbey Theatre is well-known”, had also “played in the Gate Theatre and in the ‘Q’ Theatre in London”; moreover, she “plays the violin and sings and recites”. Norris Davidson had started his career in cinematography in 1930, when, together with Mary Manning (1905-1999), who was already a movie critic, he produced four films under the aegis of Irish Amateur Films, which were screened at the Peacock Theatre (see Casella 2015). Like Jennifer Davidson, Manning had trained at the Abbey School of Acting before moving on to the Gate Theatre in the early 1930s, where she performed in plays, edited the house magazine Motley, and contributed three dramas: Youth’s the Season…? (1931), Storm over Wicklow (1933), and Happy Family (1934). During this same period, Norris Davidson published two novels, Galore Park (1934) and The Soft Impeachment (1936). After serving in the Irish Navy during the Second World War, he joined Radio Éireann as a scriptwriter in 1947 and in 1961 became a television producer. What is striking about Jennifer Davidson, Norris Davidson, and Mary Manning, and what they have in common with Lilian Davidson, is their versatility and the way they expressed their artistic ability in a variety of different mediums. To this list one might also add Hazel Ellis (1909-1986), who trained at the Abbey School of Acting before joining the Gate Theatre in the early 1930s, where she performed in plays and contributed two dramas, Portrait in Marble (1936) and Women without Men (1938) (see Lanters 2022). While Cambridge-educated Norris was eventually able to move into a steady career, however, the women struggled to translate their considerable talents into anything other than short-lived or precarious success.

From the Torch Theatre’s inception in early 1935, Jennifer Davidson, now acting under the stage name Jennifer Maude, threw in her lot with the new enterprise and became one of the company’s leading actors. In spring 1935, The Evening Herald (2 May 1935: 2) reported that she had been granted “a music and dancing license for the Torch Theatre” by Dublin’s Circuit Court. The likely reason why it was she who applied for the license rather than the older and more experienced Charles Keogh was revealed in 1949 by Keogh’s daughter Dorothy, who recalled that, in establishing the new theatre, her father had been “[b]acked financially and with great enthusiasm by his friend, Jennifer Maud [sic] Davidson” (The Evening Herald, 8 October 1949: 5). In 1936, when Davidson was asked about the ownership of the Torch Theatre by “Quidnunc” (Patrick Campbell) of The Irish Times, she replied that the owner wished to remain anonymous, leaving “Quidnunc” to muse: “I was not aware, judging by the struggles of other Dublin theatrical ventures, that there was anyone here sufficiently well financed to run a theatre in Capel Street” – the Torch being a “fine premises” albeit “situated in a depressing quarter of the city” (The Irish Times, 9 September 1936: 4). The truth can be deduced from a report that had appeared in The Irish Times a year earlier (5 July 1935: 2) describing a large garden party hosted by Mrs Craig Davidson at her Sutton home. Noting that she was “assisted by her daughter, who is now one of the principal actresses at the little Torch Theatre”, the article went on to reveal that Mrs Davidson herself had become “much interested” in the Torch Theatre, which she had “so generously assisted”.

On 11 November 1935, Jennifer Davidson applied to the Department of the Taoiseach for a patent for the Torch Theatre, outlining its activities as “the performance of legitimate drama, National and domestic, of strict propriety”, and stressing that any profits would be used for “the improvement of the theatre and for securing better conditions for the artists” (“Torch Theatre, Patent”, record 13984). The patent would eventually be issued on 26 February 1937 and, in language reflecting the moral climate of the decade, granted “Miss Jennifer Maude Elinor Davidson permission to organise the performance of plays and dramatic representations”, provided they were “in every respect decent and becoming and not profane, blasphemous, indecent, obscene, seditious or otherwise obnoxious”. The patent also stipulated that “the trustees and the tenant […] shall reject out of the said Company all scandalous [and] disorderly […] persons”, and would permit “no indecency of dress, dance or gesture” on the stage (“Torch Theatre, Patent”, record 13989). The only other Dublin theatres “to be granted letters patent for the first time following Irish independence” were the Gate and the Olympia, also in the 1930s (Osborough 2015: 122).

The Torch Theatre mounted five productions in its second season, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective drama The Speckled Band, as well as Nell Gwynne and “the stirring Irish drama” Father Murphy (The Evening Herald, 3 December 1935: 8), all starring Jennifer Maude. The Christmas pantomime, in which Keogh played the Dame and Maude the Fairy Queen, was called Ireland’s Own, and featured “a scene laid in the Gaeltacht, in which Gaelic is the only language spoken by the artistes”, for which they were repeatedly applauded (The Evening Herald, 25 December 1935: 6). The Torch presented seven plays in spring 1936. In September of that year, after a hiatus of three months during which the theatre was refurbished, and with a company now composed of thirty players, it reopened under the directorship of Keogh, Davidson, and Hyland, with the objective “to give first-class repertory seasons of drama, comedy, and farce” (The Evening Herald, 1 September 1936: 8). The season comprised no fewer than nine plays, a mixture of British and Irish dramas and comedies, all of which received favourable reviews, as well as a pantomime entitled The Rose and the Ring. “Patrons of the Torch Theatre certainly cannot complain of lack of variety or quality in the entertainment provided by the enterprising management”, the Irish Independent proclaimed (3 November 1936: 10). The programme was clearly ambitious, but the theatre’s 200 seats were not always filled. David Sears (Irish Independent, 8 December 1936: 12) cautioned his readers that the Torch “deserves better support than it has received to date. Dublin is not so well served with legitimate theatres that it can afford to neglect good work”.

The theatre opened its spring season in January 1937 with Oscar Wilde’s early play The Duchess of Padua. Sears felt that the work suffered from “unnecessary verbiage” that should have been trimmed, and – perhaps more damningly – expressed the view that the company did not perform it “with the verve and vigour such melodrama requires”. He gave Jennifer Maude her first bad review for playing the murderous Duchess as a “sentimental drawingroom Miss” (Irish Independent, 2 February 1937: 11). In March, Elswyth Thane’s The Tudor Wench played to a theatre “only filled to a third of its capacity” (Irish Press, 16 February 1937: 2) and received mixed reviews. The April offering was Parnell, written by the American author Elsie T. Schauffler and revised by Margaret Rawlings. Reminiscing about Dublin’s lost theatres in a letter to the Editor published in the Irish Independent (24 February 1975: 6), Séamus de Búrca noted that Parnell was “a big success” at the Torch although the play “should have been done by the Abbey or the Gate”, except that it was “unpopular for its sympathetic portrait of Kitty O’Shea”. (The Gate did produce Parnell in 1942.) Having received its patent in February 1937, the Torch Repertory Company went on tour in mid-April, after its final Dublin performance. During a week’s engagement in Clonmel, County Tipperary, the players gave a “remarkably fine performance” of Parnell, followed by Nell Gwynne and Alfred Sangster’s The Brontës (Nationalist and Munster Advertiser, 21 April 1937: 3). Ryan records that Parnell was the final production by the Keogh-Davidson company, which “never returned to the Torch” after its tour (1998: 195).

Kitty Clive wrote in The Irish Times (5 March 1937: 4) that it would be unreasonable to expect the Torch to maintain the same standard as the National Theatre, and that perhaps “the little company was too ambitious” in its desire to excel. Charles Keogh’s daughter Dorothy reminisced in 1949 that her father had produced all the plays presented at the Torch Theatre, and that “a lot of hard work and plenty of disappointment and heartbreak went into the running of it” (The Evening Herald, 8 October 1949: 5). It was difficult for theatres to make ends meet; while the Abbey benefited from a state subsidy granted in 1925, in 1930 the Gate Theatre also got into financial trouble and was only rescued when Lord Longford bought into the company as a shareholder. After the demise of the Torch Theatre, Jennifer Davidson gradually disappeared from the public eye. In August 1937, she took part in a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on Radio Éireann. In April 1938, she was the guest on RTÉ’s radio show “My Twelve Favourite Records”. In May of that year, she featured alongside other former Torch actors in “My Second Best Bed”, a play by F.J. Whitford about Shakespeare’s last will and testament, produced for Radio Éireann by Charles Keogh. Her next recorded radio appearance was not until 18 January 1947, when she was in the cast of an RTÉ adaptation of Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field. After this, she disappeared from the professional circuit. Her mother died in March 1947, and likely left her a legacy. Charles L. Keogh also died in 1947; his widow Evelyn Lund appeared in many television drama and comedy series in England between 1955 and 1967. She died in London in 1968.

Conclusion

Although Lilian Davidson’s output as an author is small, likely because there was little money in writing, and not all texts survive, she clearly considered herself a writer as much as a painter. She was a member of the Irish PEN Club from its inception in 1935, and in 1941 was elected to its executive committee. She was also an active member of the Women Writers’ Club, founded in 1933, and designed “the striking symbol which appears on the club’s notepaper” (Irish Independent, 28 November 1958: 12). In 1937 – when the president of the Club was none other than Mrs Craig Davidson – she was listed among a “group of writers” who petitioned Éamon de Valera to revise sections of the draft Constitution which allowed for discrimination against women (Brady 2021: 62). Lilian Davidson remained active as a teacher and painter until her death in 1954, but glimpses into Jennifer Davidson’s later life are sporadic. She moved to Newcastle, situated at the foot of Slieve Donard in County Down, the county from which her paternal grandparents had hailed, where she remained involved in theatrical production at a local level. In 1958, according to an advertisement in the Belfast Newsletter (31 May 1958: 6), she produced the Lord Mayor’s Show, “Our Story on Floats”, presented on behalf of the Ulster Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Her name crops up again in the Sunday Independent (8 January 1961: 14), when the paper reported on the enthusiasm and quality of the Newcastle amateur dramatic society: “The producer is a former Dublin professional actress, Miss Jennifer Davidson, who for a number of years acted with the Abbey Theatre, and later toured with a repertory company”. In 1970, “Miss Jennifer Davidson, of Newcastle”, provided a trophy for the best play in the mixed cast group of the Women’s Institute’s Drama Festival held that year in Derry (Derry Journal, 21 April 1970: 3). She eventually moved to Delgany, County Wicklow, where she died on Christmas day, 1993.

Jennifer Davidson and Lilian Davidson were both passionate about their art and worked hard to succeed in a difficult sociopolitical and economic environment that was particularly unfavourable for women. Always drawn to contests, at the Women Writers’ Club’s 1941 meeting Lilian Davidson participated in a friendly competition to capture proverbs in rhyming couplets, and won approbation for her entry, “Behold how soon are benefits forgot / That which hath been, not being, is not” (The Evening Herald, 25 February 1941: 4). The rhyme could serve as the motto for her own efforts as a writer as well as for Jennifer Davidson’s short-lived career as a theatre professional.