In 1957, at the age of 32, Anna Manahan found herself at the centre of one of the greatest controversies in Irish theatre history when she didn’t drop a condom on stage.

The alleged condom was in fact an envelope; the script she was playing, Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Rose Tattoo’, called for a condom to be discarded on stage, but condoms were then illegal in Ireland, so a piece of paper had to make do.

Such was the power of the theatre, however, that a Garda who was present in the audience, undercover, later testified in court that he had seen the prophylactic.

The bizarre episode seems comic in retrospect, but it nearly destroyed the life and career of the play’s director, Alan Simpson. Simpson and his wife, Carolyn Swift, ran a tiny but esteemed Dublin theatre called the Pike, and his production of ‘The Rose Tattoo’ for the inaugural Dublin Theatre Festival had won the praise of the leading London drama critics.

The play had earlier won the Tony awards for best play, in New York, and a film of it had won a number of Academy Awards. But in Dublin, somebody in authority decided it was offensive, and Simpson was arrested and charged with profiting from profanity. It took him over a year to clear his name in court; by then, both his marriage and the theatre’s finances were on the rocks. (He later went on to a successful career as a director in the Abbey.)

But for Anna Manahan, as she told me in an interview on the 50th anniversary of the controversy two years ago, ‘The Rose Tattoo’ “sent my career rocketing”.

Anna Manahan played the lead role of Serafina, a young widow paralysed by her idealised memory of her husband. Manahan had lost her own husband, Colm O’Kelly, two years previously, when he died of a sudden illness while on a theatrical tour in Cairo. This tragedy may have lain behind the power of her performance.

“I suppose the deep sorrow I felt came out through the play,” she said. “I felt a depth of emotion I had never felt before and I knew how to harness it.”

After Simpson’s arrest, the play continued for the remainder of the week, becoming a cause celebre. The night of Simpson’s initial hearing, a crowd of supporters gathered outside the theatre, amongst them Brendan Behan. As Manahan recalled,

“That night, my last speech was completely drowned out by Brendan in the lane, singing ‘The Auld Triangle’. He had a case of Guinness and was handing them out and saying, ‘Drink up men and women, and keep the bottles to throw at the police’.”

The cast had no idea whether the authorities would make further arrests. “I brought a nightdress and a toothbrush with me to the theatre each night, in case I would end up in Mountjoy,” said Manahan. But she recalled the experience fondly, and was grateful for the exposure.

“It catapulted me into a leading position in the theatre, which I’ve never lost,” she said.

Anna Manahan, the Tony-award winning Irish actress, died on March 8, aged 84. I interviewed her by phone in 2007 for an article in Village on the curious case of the ‘Rose Tattoo’, titled, ‘The pornographer who invented Wanderley Wagon‘. The above was written for the Irish Independent.