Remembering Molly MacEwen: Sue Harries and Alasdair MacEwen in Conversation

Abstract

Molly MacEwen’s design career took off after serving as Micheál mac Liammóir’s apprentice at the Dublin Gate during the mid-1930s and following her design work on the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. MacEwen went on to make a significant contribution to Irish and Scottish theatre design that has received little recognition in existing theatre scholarship. Illustrated by images of materials from (for the most part) the Scottish Theatre Archive’s Molly MacEwen collection (1948-1961), this article comprises an introduction to MacEwen, followed by a composite of selected conversations from interviews with MacEwen’s niece, Sue Harries, and nephew, Alasdair MacEwen. We learn of MacEwan’s familial and personal links to continental Europe, her unrequited devotion to mac Liammóir, and her successes in designing at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and for the Edinburgh International Festival after leaving the Gate in 1947 to work in Scotland. The dialogues in this article also reveal that MacEwen was a very shy and retiring woman, and that the men with whom she worked – including Edwards, mac Liammóir, and Tyrone Guthrie – took her for granted and possibly diminished the extent of her work. This situation, combined with gender inequalities and the collaborative nature of MacEwen’s design roles, may have led to her work being overlooked at the time and in pertinent publications on design and theatre. This article seeks to go some way towards recovering MacEwen’s important achievements for theatre history. Key Words: Molly MacEwen, Dublin Gate Theatre, Scottish theatre, design, women in theatre, Edinburgh International Festival, Michéal mac Liammóir