Lyric Players Theatre (Belfast, Northern Ireland)

The Lyric Players Theatre was founded in 1951 by Mary and P. Pearse O'Malley. The group originally had no permanent home. Instead plays were performed in private residences or other theaters, such as the Abbey Theatre. In 1952, the Lyric Players had a theater built on Derryvolgie Avenue in Belfast. They focused primarily on poetic drama, especially the works of Irish playwrights such as W. B. Yeats and Sean O'Casey. In the late 1950s, the theater was expanded to include first a drama school and later a children's theater. An in-house quarterly literary journal, Threshold, was established in 1957, edited by Mary O'Malley, with John Hewitt as poetry editor. The theater moved locations in 1965 to Ridgeway Street, where it still operates as of 2026. Poet Austin Clarke placed the cornerstone for the new building.