Hubert O’Grady (1841-1899)

Life
b. Limerick, trained as upholsterer, acted Conn to acclaim in Dublin revival of The Shaughraun, 1876-77, during seven weeks at the Gaiety; remained a Dublin favourite, and d. pneumonia, Liverpool, 19 Dec. 1899. His play The Famine, set in land-league rent-striking Ireland, with prologue set in Famine of 1845 (premiered Queen’s, Dublin, 26 April 1886); others are The Eviction (1879); Emigration (1880) and The Fenian (1888); also Wild Irish Boy (1877?). DIW

 

Works
Stephen Watt, [guest] ed., & intro., Hubert O’Grady Special Number’, Journal of Irish Literature, XIV, Nos. 1 & 2 (Jan-May 1985), includes plays Emigration and Famine, and an essay by Watt, ‘The Plays of Hubert O’Grady]; also O’Grady’s obituary appeared in The Irish Playgoer, Dec. 28 1899, with a photograph of him in the role of Sadler, the villainous timekeeper in The Famine (Watt, ibid., plate 9).

 

Criticism
  • Robert Hogan, ed., Journal of Irish Literature, No. 14 [Hubert O’Grady Number, ed. by Stephen Watt] (Jan 1985) - works [as supra] and a bibliography of his plays.
  • Chris Morash, ‘Sinking down into the Dark’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 3, 1 (Spring 1997), pp.75-86, 77ff. [commentary on O’Grady’s 1866 play The Famine].
  • Christopher Fitz-Simon, "Hubert O’Grady: reformer disguised as a gommoch" [chap.], in Buffoonery and East Sentiment: Popular Irish Plays in the Decade prior to the Opening of the Abbey Theatre (Carysfort Press, 2011).

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Commentary
Stephen Watts, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater (Syracuse UP 1991), quotes preface of the Fenian [as infra], and remarks: ‘But newspaper reviewers thought that politics were unblushingly mixed with romance and that the whole - as in the notice given to Eviction by the Evening Herald of 22 Dec. 1899 - was “a sermon preached from behind the footlights [appealing] to popular feeling in a curiously successful fashion”’. (p.57-58.)

 

Quotations
The Fenian - Preface: ‘This drama is simply a Romantic Irish Love Story and has nothing to do with Patriotic, Political or Social evils. It takes its title from the fact that the scene is laid in Ireland - and is supposed to take place during the Fenian movement which gives the opportunity for the villain the accuse the hero (Lieut. Tracy) of complicity with the Fenians.’

 

Notes
Pop. dram.?: O’Grady was called the most popular of popular dramatists by a disparaging Peter Kavanagh (The Irish Theatre, 1946), a verdict that is expressly challenged by Cheryl Herr in Intro., For the Land They Loved (1991).

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