The Thomas Kilroy Collection - listing underway!



Thomas Kilroy in 1968, promoting the Dublin Theatre Festival

We can now formally announce the name and nature of the fifth theatre archives collection currently being listed at NUIG - namely the archives of novelist, playwright and academic Thomas Kilroy. It has been officially deposited in the James Hardiman Library just today, and to mark the occasion, a public interview was held here on campus: the Irish Times reported on this last Saturday. The collection contains 41 banker's boxes of papers, a few photographs, and some audiovisual material, and I have been chipping away at this rather quietly since the last summer. It means that as I blog, I usually fall back on material I saw a few months back, but hope that won't take the freshness out of it for yourselves – as far as archives can ever be "fresh"! 


Donal McCann in Tea and Sex and Shakespeare
(The Abbey Theatre, 1978)

The bulk of the archives is made up of drafts of Kilroy's novel (The Big Chapel, 1971), drafts of his plays for the stage (of which 16 have been produced to date), and drafts of his work for television and radio. Besides that, there is some illuminating (if not luminous) correspondence with agents, actors, and fellow writers: naming just a few, there are Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Mary Lavin, John McGahern, Desmond O'Grady, Frank McGuinness... The rest of the archives is made up of things from Kilroy's work for the Field Day Theatre Company, for the Abbey Theatre, as well as other material from the academic side of his life. If that sounds interesting, please stay tuned.
Vera Orschel