The best medicine – Brian Maye on actor and comedian Harry O’Donovan

Harry O’Donovan, actor, comedy scriptwriter and stage manager, formed one of the most successful partnerships (with Jimmy O’Dea) ever seen in Irish theatre that lasted almost 40 years and their music-hall-style comedy and humour lit up the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s for many Irish theatregoers. He died 50 years ago on November 3rd.

He was born on February 7th, 1890, at St James Terrace, Botanic Road, Glasnevin in Dublin, one of five children of Michael Donovan, a clerk in the GPO, and Elizabeth Maley, who was from Boston.

After attending a local national school in Drumcondra, in which he had little interest as he often skipped classes, he became apprenticed to a painter.

But theatre was in the family blood: one brother, Frank, became a very successful actor, and another, Kevin, was manager of the Pavilion Theatre in Cork. Following participation in amateur dramatics, in 1908 Harry gave up his apprenticeship in painting and decorating to join the Eddie Mac touring company, a so-called “fit-up” that travelled the country offering variety entertainment (O’Donovan’s “turn” was dancing on roller skates).

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After some years, he set up his own company but the turbulent War of Independence years put paid to touring theatrical companies and by the end of 1921, with his company disbanded, he struggled to make a living, managing Dublin’s Grand Central Cinema for a while and getting some acting parts in the Abbey Theatre.

Radio Éireann’s forerunner, 2RN, began broadcasting in 1926 and scripts that he sent in for comedy sketches proved successful and became a regular venture, and the Olympia Theatre also took revues from him.

Meeting with Jimmy O’Dea in 1927 was to prove of enormous significance for both men as it “began one of the most fruitful partnerships in the history of Irish theatre,” according to Bridget Hourican, who wrote the entry on O’Donovan in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. “The quiet pipe-smoking O’Donovan found the perfect interpreter of his work in the ebullient, mercurial O’Dea,” she said. They formed O’D Productions, which lasted nearly 40 years until O’Dea’s death in 1965, which also marked the end of O’Donovan’s writing career for the stage.

Their first show, Look Who’s Here, featured in the Queen’s Theatre, Dublin and the Palace Theatre, Cork in 1928. Hourican says that apparently O’Donovan had to sell his piano to cover the show’s costs but he was well recompensed by its success. He performed supporting roles, as well as writing the material, but O’Dea was the star on the stage. They had a second successful revue that year, Now We’re Here, staged at the Olympia, and that Christmas they produced their first pantomime, Sinbad the Sailor, at the same theatre. “O’Donovan eschewed the standard pantomime practice of using set gags unrelated to the plot, and instead made the comedy intrinsic to the storyline,” according to Bridget Hourican.

He had married the mezzo-soprano Eileen Hayden in 1924 and their son, Terry, was born just before the opening of the pantomime.

O’D Productions attracted big crowds to their shows and were soon sought by record companies. They experienced their main success with Parlophone Records. Sixpence Each Way was their best seller, a series of comedy sketches featuring their greatest creation, Biddy Mulligan, an elderly, sharp-tongued street trader. The song “Biddy Mulligan, the Pride of the Coombe”, was written by Seamus Kavanagh in collaboration with O’Donovan and was made famous by O’Dea, who also performed, among others, “The Charladies’ Ball” and “Daffy, the Belle of the Coombe”, which was about Biddy’s daughter. Tours of England followed in 1930 and 1931 and led to a film, Jimmy Boy, in 1936, but it had little success.

Having performed Christmas pantomimes for the Olympia for many years, they were given summer shows in the Gaiety for Horse Show week from 1937.

Their shows at the Gaiety continued twice yearly for nearly 20 years and in 1937, a film, Blarney, written and directed by O’Donovan, proved more successful than their first cinema venture.

It was a spoof thriller, set near the Border, and was reviewed favourably by the Irish papers but less so by the British.

However, the BBC hired O’D Productions in 1941 to produce Irish Half-Hour, a light-entertainment show that ran until 1948 because the Dominions Office considered it helped morale during the war.

Strangely, they got more work from the BBC than from Radio Éireann but the latter broadcast Cinderella in 1949, The O’D Story in 1954 and a comedy series, Meet the Mulligans, followed.

O’Donovan retired after O’Dea’s death in 1965 and suffered ill-health before his own death eight years later. Bridget Hourican believes his writing could appear lifeless on the page, needing O’Dea’s improvising talents, which may explain why it has not survived, “but during the 1930s and 1940s it occasioned some of the liveliest, wittiest and certainly most popular shows on the Dublin stage,” she concludes.