Editorial: Blánaid MacCann, a costumier who raised the profile of Waterford theatre

The death last week of widely respected costumier Blánaid MacCann has been met with great shock and sadness across a community that stretches far beyond the Déise.

Blánaid’s magic touch was there in countless theatrical shows in Waterford and across the country. Poignantly, only last March Blánaid was honoured with the Waterford News & Star Green Room Lifetime Achievement Award for her immense contribution to the arts and culture in Waterford.

Blánaid, as the award recognised, dedicated her life to the arts through her costume business, NOMAC Productions, which she founded alongside the late Cathy Nolan.

For approximately 45 years, they were responsible for creating many of the magnificent costumes and designs that brought productions to life on Waterford stages.

Blánaid played an instrumental role in the hugely successful Tops of the Town productions, supplying banks and finance groups with their costumes.

In recent years, she was known for creating the spectacular costumes for Waterford Panto Society’s productions – in fact her work was visible right back to when the Panto Society started over 40 years ago.

She delighted in taking her seat in the audience and watching on as her work played its own crucial, showstopping role.

When she was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award, arts correspondent Pat McEvoy said in tribute to her: “To move from just being involved in costumes to the vision that you had, not only to become a business but to be part of the apparatus of all of the theatres and shows.” Blánaid said, in accepting the award, “over the years, people began to recognise us in Waterford”. 

There is no doubt that, through her work and building a talented team around her, Blánaid played an instrumental part in building that recognition of Waterford theatre.

It was a great tragedy that her life’s work, in terms of the magnificent physical costumes, was destroyed in the fire that tore through the Tycor Business Centre last May, where her business had been based in recent years.

However, the imprint that Blánaid leaves, her legacy, will be carried forward by all those who wore her costumes, who stepped into character all the more powerfully as a result, and those who delighted in that magnificent moment, when the curtain rises and the spectacle of the show comes alive through the intricacy of a thread and a needle.