If You Want To Know Who We Are The Rathmines Rathgar Musical Society 19132013

The R&R has been part of Dublin's cultural landscape for 100 years. Founded in 1913 - the year of the Great Lockout - it was socially as far removed from those turbulent events as possible. Its origin lay in the genteel middle-class and mainly Protestant township of Rathmines. Indeed one of its early leading figures was none other than William Martin Murphy, the unyielding leader of the Dublin employers and implacable enemy of James Larkin. From its earliest days, the R&R has been indelibly linked to the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, although - as Myles Dungan points out in this crisply written history - their repertoire has embraced many other composers including such luminaries of the American musical as Rogers and Hammerstein and Jerome Kern.