Variety is the spice of life – Oliver O’Hanlon on Cork’s Everyman Theatre

Cork’s Everyman Theatre is housed in a building that is almost 130 years old. Over that time, the purpose-built theatre has had a few different uses and its share of ups and downs. It opened to great fanfare in 1897 as a variety hall, was used as a cinema, before being reinstated as a theatre in recent times.
The Cork Palace Theatre of Varieties was promoted by a group of businessmen that included the theatre impresario Dan Lowrey (also spelled Lowry). The company prospectus, issued in August 1896, made much of Lowrey’s theatrical management background and business acumen. He was involved with the Star of Erin Music Hall in Dublin (Olympia Theatre) and the Empire in Belfast.
Lowrey wanted to erect a “Variety Theatre of the most up-to-date character” capable of accommodating 1,500 patrons. It was to have “chaste and ornate” interior decorations, with upholstery and furniture of “an elegant character”.
As managing director, Lowrey was convinced of its viability and success. He demonstrated his faith in the new venture by agreeing to forfeit all remuneration in any year that the shareholders did not receive a dividend of at least 6 per cent.
Built on King Street (now MacCurtain Street) at a cost of £19,000, it was designed by Henry Brunton. The Scottish civil engineer had spent some years building lighthouses in Japan. He lived in Cork during the theatre’s construction.
When reporting to shareholders on the progress of the building, the chairman said that he hoped that it would be “the prettiest, most commodious and best equipped place of amusement in Ireland”.
It opened to a packed house on April 19th, 1897. Hundreds were turned away at the door, such was the demand for admittance. Prices ranged from £1 for a private box to six pence for a balcony seat.
Ten acts performed before an audience that included the lord mayor, who was seated in one of the boxes. On the programme were various singers, dancers, ventriloquists, comedians, and acrobats, as well as a full orchestra and a Professor Jolly with his Cinematographe.
Described as “a series of animated photographs”, one of the pictures showed the tsar and tsarina entering Paris. It was one of the first motion-picture apparatuses and is said to have left the audience “pleased and astonished”.
The theatre closed for the summer season that year and when the company published its accounts, it reported a loss of £306.
In a newspaper advert from October 1897, a variety of acts were promoted. These included Fred H Leslie’s Wonderful Dogs, which was a troupe of trained dogs. Also on the programme were the Two Emeralds, described as “Charming Duettists and Clever Dancers”, Professor J Thornbury, a ventriloquist and mimic, and Miss Katie Lawrence, a performer who featured in Ulysses. These were travelling acts that performed in music halls all over Britain and Ireland.
Despite the variety on offer, the initial venture floundered and the company was put into liquidation in November 1898. In December, a leave of six months was granted to keep it going with a view to a sale. The board fought to restructure the debts but was not successful.
It was advertised for sale by the liquidator in January 1899. It continued to attract audiences and performers under new management. One of the most famous actors to perform there was Charlie Chaplin, who performed there in 1912, a short time before he found fame and fortune in America.
Audiences were looking for new forms of entertainment and it ceased to be a theatre in 1930. Renamed the Palace Cinema, it advertised itself as “The House with the Perfect Sound”. It showed new releases from England and America. According to John McSweeney in his book on Cork cinema history (The Golden Age of Cork Cinemas), one of its early successes was Chaplain’s City Lights, with 10,000 people seeing it in the first week alone.
The Palace also hosted groups that had an interest in cinema from beyond the mainstream. In 1940, a branch of the Irish Film Society was based there. The Cork Film Society was founded in the 1950s to show films that would not normally appear in the commercial cinemas. It was also based there.
However, tastes changed and in later years the older one-screen cinemas could not compete with new multiplexes. The Palace closed in June 1988. The last film to be screened there was Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The building needed work when it was taken on by the Everyman Theatre Company in 1990.
They had been based in other halls in the city and Dan Donovan, who was on the board, remembered the saving of the building as “painful and laborious”, given all the administration it entailed. Today, the Everyman stands as the only historic theatre to survive intact in Cork.