Sara Allgood’s Memories: Untold Stories of the Abbey Theatre and Early Hollywood

Sara Allgood, Abbey Theatre actress, Hollywood contract player, Inghinidhe na hÉireann member, and early film performer, wrote this autobiography, entitled Memories, towards the end of her life, encouraging readers to acknowledge the roles of performers and theatre-makers in the creation of the Abbey. The book allows readers into the worlds of late nineteenth-century Dublin, the early Abbey, the Easter Rising, both World Wars, Hitchcock’s first films, and early to mid-century Hollywood.

In her engaging voice, Sara Allgood shares intimate memories of well-known Abbey and theatrical figures like William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, J. M. Synge, Willie and Frank Fay, and Sean O’Casey; her account stresses the roles of important working-class contributors to the Abbey like Ellen Bushell, the charwoman, and Sean Barlow, stage manager. Allgood’s Memories tells the story of the Abbey from the perspective of a young North Dublin woman who had to sneak out after work to attend rehearsals; her account recovers connections between the early nationalist and feminist movements in Dublin, the founding of the Abbey, political activism, and British and American film. Allgood sees the denizens of the Abbey as we have not seen them before and brings us into her childhood home as well as the sets of 1940s Hollywood films. Her Memories will allow theatre, film, and political historians, students, and general readers to hear a new and refreshing voice that will inspire many to reconsider what they know of the Abbey, Dublin, and early film.

Elizabeth Brewer Redwine, Lecturer, Department of English, Seton Hall University

Dr Brewer Redwine specializes in Global Irish and Anglophone Studies with a focus on performance, gender, and authorship. A lecturer in the English Department at Seton Hall University, her recent publications include a 2021 monograph with Oxford University Press, Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre, and an edited collection with Amrita Ghosh, Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning. In addition to the Sara Allgood Memories project, she is at work on a wide-ranging study of anticolonial performance entitled ’Acting Against Empire’.