O'Keeffe was present when, at the head of a party of undergraduates, Daly forced his way through the stage-door of the Smock Alley Theatre, assaulted the doorkeepers, and rushed into the green room, causing the actress Jane Pope to be "greatly terrified".
[10] Other sources report a London meeting with the celebrated Irish actor Charles Macklin who encouraged Daly to seek his fortune on the stage, following which he made an anonymous debut in the role of Othello at Covent Garden in March 1779.
His performance on that occasion is said to have been poorly received, but in the following month his benefit night was successful, and shortly afterwards he returned to Ireland in the company of Thomas and Ann Crawford who had also been playing at Covent Garden.
[16] The couple made their first stage appearance together in November 1779 as Beverly and Belinda in the Crow Street production of Arthur Murphy's All in the Wrong, and in the following February they played in George Farquhar's The Inconstant.
[20] In order to escape this double burden, Ryder elected to give up the Smock Alley tenancy when his landlord offered to release him from liability for rent arrears of £3,615 if he surrendered the premises.
Peter Le Fanu, a fashionable Dublin clergyman) followed by Richard Cumberland's comedy The West Indian and Isaac Bickerstaffe's farce The Sultan, Daly and his wife playing in the first two of these.
[23] In the following month the couple featured in the first Irish production of Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem, which had been the major success of that year's London theatre season and was staged by Daly "with magnificence not at all inferior to Covent Garden.
[27] Early members of his company included the actress Sarah Hitchcock and her husband Robert (the later historian of Irish theatre) who became prompter and afterward deputy manager at Smock Alley.
[30] However, Kemble's "wonderful strength" in the title-role of Robert Jephson's The Count of Narbonne won much acclaim; in this he was supported by Daly in the character of Theodore, while "Miss Francis" (who was to become the celebrated Mrs Jordan) played the part of Adelaide.
[36] In 1783 he began to intersperse the usual dramatic fare at Smock Alley with major operatic productions, Giusto Fernando Tenducci arranging and performing in Thomas Arne's Artaxerxes and William Bates's Pharnaces.
[37] In January 1784, Tenducci and Elizabeth Billington sang the title-roles in Christoph Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice[38] and, during their joint season, they received "uncommon bursts of applause from the most brilliant and crowded audiences that ever honoured a theatre".
The musicians included Billington's husband on double-bass and were led by her brother, the violinist Charles Weichsel,[39] and the scenery, "in a new style", was the work of the landscape painter Thomas Walmsley whose employment at the theatre "did infinite credit to Mr Daly's judgment".
[48] The appeal and vitality of the offerings at Smock Alley resulted in rapid decline of audience numbers at Crow Street and in 1782, unable to pay his actors, Thomas Ryder withdrew from theatrical management and joined Daly's company of players.
[59] At the end of 1787 Daly closed Smock Alley Theatre (which he sold in 1789) and relocated his Dublin operations to the Crow Street playhouse, on the refit of which between fifty and sixty men were employed daily and on which he spent upwards of £12,000.
[60] A new roof, at greater height, was constructed; this allowed a revised layout inspired by the arrangements at Covent Garden and Drury Lane and had the effect of giving a light and airy quality to the whole house, throughout which the "utmost luxuriancy of taste" was displayed.
The claim was referred to arbitration, resulting in an agreement whereby Daly would pay Owenson £300 annually for ten years conditional upon no paid actor or actress performing at the City Theatre.
[70] He also took to insulting members of Daly's company in print, declaring they were drawn from among "the cast-offs of Sadler's Wells, the refuse of Covent Garden and the outcasts of Drury Lane", and denouncing Andrew Cherry as "the lowest buffo of the stage".
[75] This triggered debate in the Irish House of Commons concerning the legality of requiring bail in defamation cases, an issue that was referred to a Grand Committee of the Courts of Justice where the Attorney-General frustrated its determination.
[79] Disturbances at the Theatre Royal did not cease with the outcome of the Magee case and when, in the autumn of 1791, Daly and his brother Cuthbert, a barrister, came to blows with an audience member, they were themselves convicted of aiding riot and assault.
[81] By 1792 Mrs Billington was the principal diva at Covent Garden and rumoured to have slept with a succession of Dukes and the Prince of Wales,[82] and the publication created a minor sensation, selling out almost immediately.
[94] In January 1793 Saunders's News-Letter was at last able to "congratulate the lovers of the drama, on the return of their two greatest favourites, Mr and Mrs Daly, to that station in the theatric world, which they supported with such superior ability".
[102] In the same year Frederick Jones applied to the Lord Lieutenant, Earl Camden, for a full patent for staging theatrical entertainment; the application was accompanied by a memorial, signed by many of Dublin's fashionable figures, criticising both Daly's playbills and premises.
[103] Daly declared he would prefer to retire on fair remuneration rather than engage in what he believed would be ruinous competition and, with effect from 12 August 1797, he transferred his theatrical undertaking and the Crow Street premises to Jones in exchange for an annuity of £800 for his own life and thereafter of £400 for the joint lives of some of his children.
[108] For "reasons of economy" Daly removed to the Isle of Man, where he built "an elegant mansion" and found himself a neighbour of Thomas "Jerusalem" Whaley, an Irish MP and notorious gambler.
However, fairly soon after his retirement and in an otherwise sympathetic account of his career, the Thespian Dictionary or Dramatic Biography of the Present Age declared that his acting in tragedy was "contemptible" and in light comedy only "tolerable".
[113] Nevertheless, contemporary reservations about his ability in melodrama are evident from Sir Martin Archer Shee's remark after seeing his performance in Frederick Reynolds' dramatisation of The Sorrows of Young Werther: "Daly, though many degrees removed from excellence is, in my opinion, passable and much better than you would expect" (italics added).
[note 19] However, his conduct on such occasions was not uniform: in 1794 he declined to pursue George Frederick Cooke for breach of his articles (Charles Mathews observing "he would not distress him for the world")[125] and, when in 1788 Mary Wells appealed for release from her contract on account of domestic difficulties, Daly responded by tearing up the document in her presence.
Their grievances sometimes grew from not being cast in the parts to which they aspired and, in Daly's defence, the Thespian Dictionary posited that occasional slander was the penalty every manager paid for "resisting the whims and caprices of his company".
[141] Some of the allegations seem based on slight or ambiguous foundation,[note 28] but their cumulative effect provides support for the application to Daly by Oxberry's Dramatic Biography of the general assertion that "Managers are, in their theatres, little better than Turks in their seraglios; at least as far as the indigence or immorality of their female performers will allow them to be so".
[144] In his suit against Magee, Daly took particular exception to the suggestion that he was a gambler, protesting this to be "false, scandalous and malicious",[145] though there was later attributed to him "an extraordinary propensity for making wagers in reference to incidental matters, however unimportant".