Mary O’Malley obituary

The playwright Mary O’Malley, who has died of cancer aged 79, was internationally renowned for her ebullient satirical play of life in a convent school, Once a Catholic, which opened at the Royal Court in 1977 and won four major awards, including the first Susan Smith Blackburn prize for female playwrights on either side of the Atlantic.

O’Malley described her very funny, evocative, nostalgic study, rooted in the Catholic liturgy and teaching practices of pre-ecumenical and Pope John XXIII times, as an epitaph for the 1950s. A noonday summons of bells for the Angelus in a convent school in Willesden, north London, interrupts a biology class (facts of life are off limits at prayer time) while Mother Peter waxes lyrical about the apparition of Our Lady of Fátima in 1917 as anti-communist propaganda.

Lady of Fátima regulation black knickers – let alone the school trip to the Portuguese holy shrine – are beyond the pocket of the parents of the central girl, Mary Mooney (all the girls in the class are called Mary: Marys Kelly and Keogh, Looney and Mooney, O’Malley, O’Rourke, O’Shea), who is embarrassed in the confessional and beset by guilt at her male music teacher’s tale of sexual sorrow, and then by a close encounter with her best friend’s preening, smoochy teddy-boy boyfriend.

At the Royal Court, the play’s lighthearted blasphemy never strayed into the louche, dark anti-Catholic sensuality of the prison plays of Genet and Arrabal. It was more like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie filtered through Dave Allen – and O’Malley’s own breezy rebelliousness. No accident, perhaps, that Jane Carr, who had made such an impression in Ronald Neame’s 1969 movie of the Muriel Spark novel as Mary McGregor, an unwitting victim of Miss Brodie’s fanatical absolutism, was so brilliantly and fetchingly gauche as Mary Mooney.

Mike Ockrent’s production of the play was a triumph, moving from the Court to Wyndham’s theatre in the West End, where it ran for more than two years. O’Malley’s name was made, as was Carr’s. Carr joined the Royal Shakespeare Company where, among a string of important roles, she appeared in O’Malley’s Look Out … Here Comes Trouble (1978), directed by John Caird at the Donmar Warehouse, an ensemble piece for 14 actors set in a psychiatric hospital (O’Malley researched it at the Maudsley hospital in south London), for which Maxine Audley, as a clairvoyant, won a critics’ award.

Although she attended a convent school in Harlesden, north London, O’Malley denied Once a Catholic was necessarily autobiographical, though it was, she admitted, an exercise in flushing Catholicism out of her system, an impossible task, as her title implies.

She was born in Bushey, Hertfordshire, of Irish and Lithuanian ancestry, the daughter of Patrick O’Malley, who worked for Kodak film, and his wife, Elizabeth (nee Klimatis). Mary and her two younger brothers wrote and performed plays at home for the fun of it. She decided to be a writer at the age of 15, studied drama at the City Lit institute in central London, and was encouraged by another writer, Paul Thompson, whom she met at improvisation classes, to “have a go”. This led her to a writers’ workshop at the Royal Court with Howard Brenton and a play “about a bloke living in style on social security”, Superscum, at the new lunchtime theatre, the Soho Poly, near Broadcasting House, in 1972.

She was, and remained, embarrassed at hearing actors speak her words. This felt, she said, “like walking down the Uxbridge Road in your underwear”. Short London plays at the Open Space and the Soho Poly again – A ‘Nevolent Society (1974), about three Jewish brothers living in Stoke Newington, and Oh If Ever a Man Suffered (1975), about Catholic family incest in Cricklewood – mixed personal observation with Joe Ortonesque fantastical black comedy, and were followed by two commissions for BBC television’s Second City Firsts series in Pebble Mill, Birmingham, produced by Tara Prem, before O’Malley fully found her voice in Once a Catholic.

In the same year, 1977, BBC’s Play for Today screened Oy Vay Maria, charting the liaison of a north London Jewish boy – O’Malley had married David Kleinman in the early 1960s; the marriage soon failed – and an Irish Catholic girl, with raucous gags at the expense of both parties. The play, directed by Richard Loncraine, attracted an audience of 12 million viewers, twice the average figure for that slot.

It was later televised in Israel and performed in 1981 on the stage of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. In 1996, the stage version was directed by Warren Hooper at the Oldham Coliseum, with Jonathan Tafler playing the role of Cousin Lionel that had been taken by his father, Sydney Tafler, in the BBC original.

O’Malley’s fourth and final major play was Talk of the Devil (1986) which, in mining the tale of a good Catholic girl in west London trying to escape both a domineering mother and her religion, probably exhausted the stock of her material. The girl, Geraldine, was beset on either side by the devil in black leather evening dress and Our Lady in a halo of Christmas lights, two figures of the medieval morality play or the modern pantomime.

The premiere at the Bristol Old Vic, directed by Paul Unwin, featured Pauline Yates and John Ronane as the quarrelsome parents, and Kevin Lloyd as the devil, while Bill Alexander’s production in the same year at the Watford Palace starred Annette Crosbie and TP McKenna, with Ian Dury as the devil. Critics suggested that the play’s 28-year time span diffused its dramatic energy, and it never reached the West End.

O’Malley was intensely private and found writing a struggle. Her preferred modus operandi was to lie on the floor, writing in longhand while puffing on Silk Cut cigarettes. The pleasure came when she transferred her notes and rough draft to the typewriter. She became reclusive, although her output was partly affected by a bad car accident that resulted in an ununited fracture in her forearm, which made the physical process of writing almost impossible.

She is survived by two sons, Paul and Adam, four grandchildren, and two brothers, Kevin and Tony.

• Mary Josephine O’Malley, playwright, born 19 March 1941; died 19 September 2020