The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 9781408175279, 9781408175286, 9781408165980, 9781408165997

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THE IRISH DRAMATIC REVIVAL 1899–1939

Anthony Roche is a Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests are in the areas of nineteenth to twenty-first century Irish drama and theatre. Recent publications include Contemporary Irish Drama (2nd edition, 2009); Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics (2011); and Synge and the Making of Modern Irish Drama (2013).

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Also available in the Critical Companions series from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama: THE PLAYS OF SAMUEL BECKETT by Katherine Weiss THE THEATRE OF JEZ BUTTERWORTH by David Ian Rabey THE THEATRE OF CARYL CHURCHILL by R. Darren Gobert THE THEATRE OF MARTIN CRIMP: SECOND EDITION by Aleks Sierz THE THEATRE OF BRIAN FRIEL: TRADITION AND MODERNITY by Christopher Murray THE THEATRE OF DAVID GREIG by Clare Wallace THE THEATRE AND FILMS OF MARTIN MCDONAGH by Patrick Lonergan THE THEATRE OF SEAN O’CASEY by James Moran THE THEATRE OF HAROLD PINTER by Mark Taylor-Batty THE THEATRE OF TIMBERLAKE WERTENBAKER by Sophie Bush THE THEATRE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS by Brenda Murphy MODERN ASIAN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 1900–2000 by Kevin J. Wetmore, Siyuan Liu and Erin B. Mee

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THE IRISH DRAMATIC REVIVAL 1899–1939

Anthony Roche Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan and Erin Hurley

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Anthony Roche and contributors, 2015 Anthony Roche has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-4081-7527-9 PB: 978-1-4081-7528-6 ePDF: 978-1-4081-6599-7 ePub: 978-1-4081-6600-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roche, Anthony. The Irish dramatic revival 1899–1939 / Anthony Roche. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4081-7528-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4081-7527-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. English drama—Irish authors--History and criticism. 2. English drama—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Theater—Ireland— History—20th century. I. Roche, Anthony. II. Title. PR8789.R63 2015 822’.91099417--dc23 2014036732 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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For my teachers Brendan Kennelly Vivian H.S. Mercier Donald R. Pearce Masters, all

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1

The Late Nineteenth Century Douglas Hyde The nineteenth century and Dion Boucicault Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw Henrik Ibsen The Irish Literary Theatre

7 7 9 12 18 22

2

Yeats as Founder and Playwright ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’: Yeats and the theatre Cathleen ni Houlihan On Baile’s Strand Deirdre At the Hawk’s Well The Dreaming of the Bones

29 29 33 36 40 44 50

3

The Impact of J.M. Synge The making of a playwright Riders to the Sea The Shadow of the Glen The Well of the Saints The Playboy of the Western World Conclusion

53 53 55 59 63 67 75

4

Shaw and the Revival: The Absent Presence The anti-Shaw prejudice Shaw’s direct encounter with the Irish Dramatic Revival John Bull’s Other Island and the Abbey Theatre The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet: An Abbey play? O’Flaherty, V.C. and the Irish in World War I

79 80 81 82 89 93 vii

Contents

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Lady Gregory: Irish Woman Playwright The emergence of a writer Spreading the News The Gaol Gate The Rising of the Moon The Workhouse Ward Grania

99 99 100 104 108 111 114

6

The Arrival of Sean O’Casey Contemporary urban working-class drama The Shadow of a Gunman Juno and the Paycock The Plough and the Stars The Silver Tassie

119 119 123 127 133 138

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The Revival from O’Casey to the Death of Yeats (1928–39) Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ and the arrival of the Gate Theatre The second Lady of the Abbey: Teresa Deevy Yeats’s Endgame

145

Critical Perspectives Performance and Spectacle in (and out) of Modern Irish Theatre by Paige Reynolds The Years of Synge: the cultural debates by P.J. Mathews Interview: Ghosts and the Uncanny in Irish Drama by Conor McPherson

161

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145 150 155

161 172 182

Conclusion: The Legacy

195

Chronology Notes Select Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

205 209 239 251 253

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my editors, Patrick Lonergan of NUI Galway and Mark Dudgeon at Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, for commissioning this work and for their helpful responses to early chapters. I am fortunate in my colleagues in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin and would particularly like to thank Frank McGuinness and Emilie Pine with whom I co-teach for their generosity of spirit in the closing stages. I would like to thank the following most particularly: Brian Arkins; Charles Barr; Terence Brown; Richard Allen Cave; Christopher Collins; David Clare; Joe Dowling; Christopher and Anne Fitz-Simon; James W. Flannery; Anne Fogarty; Peter Gahan; Alan Gilsenan; Nicholas Grene; Jane Grogan; John P. Harrington; Joseph M. Hassett; Kellie Hughes; Eamonn Jordan; Margaret Kelleher; Brad Kent; Declan Kiberd; Cathy Leeney; Ben Levitas; Patrick Lonergan; Fiach Mac Conghail; the late Gus Martin; Frank McGuinness; Patrick Mason; P.J. Mathews; Christopher Morash; Paul Murphy; Christopher Murray; Philip O’Leary; Emilie Pine; Richard Pine; Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel; Peter Raby; James Ryan; Melissa Sihra; Ian R. Walsh; Stephen Watt; Katharine Worth. My students in the Second Year Drama class on the Early Irish Theatre Movement at University College Dublin contributed to these pages in the questions they raised and the dialogue they enabled. My longest-standing debts are recorded in my dedication: to Brendan Kennelly, from whom I learned so much about drama in general and J.M. Synge in particular, as an undergraduate in the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin; to Donald Pearce in the Department of English at University of California at Santa Barbara, who instilled in me a lifelong love of Yeats during my postgraduate years; and to Vivian Mercier, with whom I studied all of these playwrights in seminars at the University of California at Santa Barbara and who supervised my PhD on Synge. My greatest debt is to my family, my wife Katy Hayes and sons Merlin and Louis, who created the loving and supportive context which did more than anything to see the book forward. The following institutions and individuals have kindly given permission to quote from copyright materials: the Society of Authors on behalf of the ix

Acknowledgements

Bernard Shaw Estate; Michael Johnston on behalf of Denis Johnston; Jacqui Deevy on behalf of Teresa Deevy. The quotations from the following plays by Sean O’Casey – The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars and the Silver Tassie – are copyright the Estate of Sean O’Casey and are quoted by kind permission of the Estate of Sean O’Casey, care of Macnaughton Lord Representation of 44, South Molton Street, London, W1K 5RT.

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INTRODUCTION

Theatre is never the creation of one person. As the Irish playwright John Millington Synge, who features so prominently in these pages, reminds us in the Preface to his 1907 masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World: ‘All art is a collaboration.’1 This is particularly true of the drama, which requires a concentrated gathering together of a range of artists in order for a theatrical event to take place: playwrights, directors, producers, actors, lighting and scenic designers, etc. In the speech he gave when awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, as Chapter 2 explores in detail, W.B. Yeats concentrated not on the poetry which was to see him designated as the pre-eminent English language poet of the twentieth century, but his dramatic experiments, which many Yeats admirers have neither seen nor read. More precisely, Yeats said on the occasion that being a lyric poet would not have brought him to the attention of the Nobel Committee as much as being the ‘representative’ of ‘the Irish Dramatic Movement’ did (this was the title of his speech).2 Towards the end of his life, Yeats described the Irish National Theatre as ‘the creation of seven people’.3 Three of these were playwrights: Yeats, Synge and Augusta, Lady Gregory. With Playboy, Synge wrote the movement’s most controversial play, and the most influential on everything that followed. Gregory co-founded the Irish Dramatic Movement with Yeats, defended the theatre when Dublin Castle sought to prevent the production of a Shaw play and wrote her own distinctive drama after initially collaborating with Yeats. The other four of Yeats’s founding parents were actors. Sara Allgood acted with the company over several decades and secured a worldwide reputation as the fiercely maternal Juno in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock in 1924. Her sister Molly Allgood acted under the stage name ‘Maire O’Neill’ to prevent confusion with her older sister; she was also the fiancée of J.M. Synge, though he died at thirty-six before they could marry. The remaining two of the seven were brothers, Frank and Willie Fay. The Fays created some of the most memorable characterisations in these plays (Frank as Yeats’s warrior-hero Cuchulain, Willie as Synge’s ‘playboy’, Christy Mahon). But the brothers also did much to create the distinctive theatrical character of that revolutionary movement, Frank by concentrating on speech, Willie by directing. Yeats could no doubt have mentioned more who contributed to the

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939

creation of the movement: for example, playwrights Edward Martyn and George Moore, who were both instrumental in its formation.4 Over the years, there were secessions and splits as various groups of actors left after rows that were variously inspired. The first was when the actors who prided themselves equally on their nationalist and amateur status resented the directors’ decision to make the theatre professional. The greatest divisions were political: from the off, the Irish National Theatre proclaimed not just that it was avant-garde in relation to the more commercial fare widely on offer in Dublin’s theatres but that the work it presented had a national status, that its plays were an image of the country as a whole. This claim was made from the start and was contested from the start. The most creative response occurred when a playwright reacted against what he or she had just seen on the stage and wrote a play to counter it by representing his or her own vision and version of Ireland. When audiences dissented vigorously from what they saw on the stage, riots ensued, in which the most frequently shouted riposte was: ‘That’s not Ireland.’5 On those two most notable occasions, the opening night of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and the first week of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1926, Yeats took to the stage to confront the crowds, on the second declaring: ‘You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an everrecurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius? Once more you have rocked the cradle of genius. The news of this will go from country to country.’6 Conscious that his words might not be heard over the din, Yeats had deposited a copy of his speech in the offices of The Irish Times, where it was printed the following morning.7 From there, as he correctly prophesied, it went global. The Irish Dramatic Movement was from the beginning a newsworthy phenomenon, generating column inches in the Irish newspapers way beyond what the meagre audiences the plays themselves frequently attracted would suggest; and with their carefully orchestrated tours abroad, first to England, increasingly to the United States, the world’s first national theatre was never a purely Irish phenomenon. However many theatre makers helped in its creation, the story of the Irish Dramatic Revival is the story of one theatre: the Abbey. This was preceded by the three-year experiment of the Irish Literary Theatre from 1899 to 1902 in which Yeats, Gregory and the others mounted an annual season of Irish plays to see whether there was an audience for them, both in the theatre and on the stage. But from December 1904 on, with the opening of a purposebuilt theatre in the centre of Dublin, the names of the Abbey Theatre and of the Irish Dramatic Revival became synonymous. There are many other 2

Introduction

Irish theatres that existed but are not represented in these pages: a workingclass theatre outlined by Ben Levitas of which Sean O’Casey is described not as the first example (as his appearance in this book might suggest) but rather ‘a late flowering’;8 an Ulster theatre movement, based in Belfast, which runs in parallel to the Dublin one.9 The briefest glance at the plays produced, even within the Irish Dramatic Revival and especially in its first decade, immediately suggests that there was a greater contribution by female theatre makers, and by Irish women playwrights in particular, than has been recognised until recently.10 This study does at least manage that emphasis, by touching briefly on the early contribution of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) to the Movement and in particular by paying attention to the plays of Lady Gregory throughout and to Teresa Deevy in the 1930s. In 1928 the Gate Theatre in Dublin arrived, offering more European fare to audiences than the Irish drama at the Abbey. But even then its most famous play in its first decade, Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, was (as its title indicates) first written for, submitted to and rejected by, the Abbey Theatre. Although the Gate went on to prosper (because it offered a genuine theatrical alternative), none of the earlier breakaway movements from the Abbey Theatre succeeded in supplanting it or long survived on its own. The story of the Irish Dramatic Revival, in terms of Irish playwrights, is the story of the writing and the staging of the plays of W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey. I have sought to broaden this scope in my study by including a chapter on George Bernard Shaw, whose work is more often mentioned in passing. But while Shaw wrote for the Royal Court Theatre in London and worked towards the creation of a National Theatre in England (which only saw fruition in 1964), he contributed in important ways to the development of the Abbey, from the contribution of John Bull’s Other Island to the opening of an Irish national theatre in 1904 to his support for O’Casey when the Abbey turned down the latter’s experimental play The Silver Tassie in 1928. The chapter on Shaw stands in for the larger argument that the theatres of these two neighbouring islands cannot be considered in complete isolation from each other. If this book offers close and contextualised readings of the plays of Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Gregory and O’Casey, the spine which runs through it is provided by W.B. Yeats. His plays have their own (second) chapter and are prominent in the first one. But even as other figures succeed and move into the spotlight, Yeats remains a presence in every subsequent chapter. He does so because of one incontestable and central fact. W.B. Yeats self-consciously 3

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939

and determinedly set the agenda for the Irish Dramatic Revival, from its earliest mission statement in 1897 to his renewed presence in the Abbey through the decade of the 1930s. (Hence the dates for this volume: it begins with the controversial staging of his first play, The Countess Cathleen, in 1899 and concludes with Yeats’s death at Rocquebrune in France in January 1939.) The plays written for an Irish national theatre would be ‘sincere’ and ‘written with a high ambition’;11 they would be aesthetic in aim and would eschew an overt politics;12 they would show an image of the nation to itself. The question of how much the Abbey Theatre had to avoid politics in order to keep in with Annie Horniman, the Englishwoman who bankrolled the building of the theatre and was involved up to 1910, and with the anti-Republican Free State government of the 1920s, who gave them the world’s first theatre subsidy and appointed a government representative to the Board, has been debated and argued.13 But Yeats’s opposition to overt propaganda was evident from his earliest years and whenever their freedom was challenged, whether by Dublin Castle, Miss Horniman or the Irish governments of the 1920s and 1930s, Yeats and Gregory were insistent that if forced to choose between financial support or freedom they would opt to retain their freedom. The agendas Yeats set for the Irish dramatist in general and for Gregory, Synge, Shaw and O’Casey in particular were challenged and rewritten by each of those playwrights in turn. Having helped Yeats to develop a speakable dialogue in his early plays, Lady Gregory insisted on writing her own. When Yeats wished to restrict her to being a writer of comedy (as she so expertly demonstrated with Spreading the News on the Abbey’s opening night), to balance the tragedies in which he was engaged, she challenged that restriction by writing plays in a wide variety of genres, including tragedy. When Synge’s first play, When the Moon Has Set, was turned down by Yeats and Gregory in 1901, he turned to writing a peasant drama which he thought more likely to be accepted but very much on his own terms. He once memorably distinguished between Yeats and himself by saying that the former situated himself in ‘a land of the fancy’ but was always ‘leaning out to reality’, while Synge himself was ‘the man of real life’ who ‘with the wildness of [his] fancy [was] always passing out of what is simple and plain’.14 This complementary relationship enabled Yeats and Synge to work closely together in the Abbey’s important years. But a profound disagreement arose between them over the key issue of what kind of plays Ireland’s National Theatre should be presenting. In December 1906, Yeats advanced the suggestion that the Abbey ‘should perform selections from foreign masterpieces’ in order to ‘widen its capacities of performance, appeal to different temperaments, and multiply 4

Introduction

its chances of creating writers’.15 Synge disagreed vehemently, seeing the distinction of the Irish dramatic movement as residing in the ‘creation of a new dramatic Literature where the interest is in the novelty and power of the new work’ rather than in a ‘more and more perfect interpretation of works that are already received as classics’.16 In his Nobel Prize speech in 1923, Yeats said that his mind had been definitively changed on this subject by his fellow playwright and director’s argument. When Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island was rejected as one of the plays which would open the Abbey Theatre, the dramatist opined that ‘Mr. Yeats got rather more than he bargained for’ with a play that challenged the romantic abstractions of Cathleen ni Houlihan with an ‘uncompromising presentiment of the real old Ireland’.17 O’Casey was welcomed at the Abbey when his plays sold out the theatre. But when he sought to go beyond the apparent social realism of his first three Dublin plays into the overt expressionism of The Silver Tassie, his play was rejected. (Both the Shaw and the O’Casey plays were subsequently staged there by Yeats.) What they challenged most was Yeats’s selfish desire to keep all theatrical experimentation to himself. All of the Abbey playwrights to be considered in this book spoke in favour of experiment in the theatre and made a point of never repeating themselves. As Lady Gregory wrote: ‘One has to go on with experiment or interest in creation fades, at least so it is with me.’18 The plays in this study will be analysed with that interest in experiment foremost in mind. They are all involved in the conscious creation of a theatrical language written in English but based on the various idioms and constructions of Irish speech. The plays pose a constant challenge to notions of identity, whether of politics or gender. And throughout they display the self-conscious meta-theatricality of a drama which was being fashioned from no available tradition (there were no plays in Irish-language literature for them to revive) and which had also to create an audience for what it was about to deliver. Little wonder that sparks should frequently fly. But as Synge wrote to Molly Allgood after the fracas at the opening night of The Playboy of the Western World, in which she had played Pegeen Mike: ‘It is better any day to have the row we had last night, than to have your play fizzling out in half-hearted applause. We’re an event in the history of the Irish stage.’19 In Chapter  8, two leading experts on Irish theatre and an acclaimed contemporary Irish dramatist offer a new series of perspectives on the Revival. Paige Reynolds places the scripted plays of the Abbey Theatre in a broader spectrum of large-scale public events, underscoring how central performance was to the forging of a new national identity. P.J. Mathews 5

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939

invokes the broader perspective of the ‘self-help’ movements that characterised the Revival and examines the political debates the plays generated over key issues involved in the creation of a national theatre. Conor McPherson considers how plays of the Revival by Yeats, Synge and O’Casey might look in the light of contemporary dramatic concerns, particularly his own acclaimed plays like The Weir and Shining City. All three testify to the enduring importance and relevance of the Irish Dramatic Revival and the extraordinary body of work it produced.

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CHAPTER 1 THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Douglas Hyde The term ‘The Irish Dramatic Revival’ was designed to echo related cultural developments in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Foremost among these was the revival of the Irish language as the primary aim of a nationalist movement dedicated to pursuing an agenda summed up in the title of a seminal lecture, Douglas Hyde’s ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ (1892). Among his many cultural and political activities,1 Hyde wrote oneact plays in the Irish language, some on his own, some in collaboration with Lady Gregory. In 1901 Hyde’s Irish language play, Casadh an tSúgáin/The Twisting of the Rope, was staged by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory as an early contribution to their nascent theatre movement. But almost every play which followed, especially once the Abbey Theatre opened in 1904, was to be in English; and the Abbey Theatre’s claim to be a national theatre was often challenged on the language front. W.B. Yeats was the leading light in what became known as the Irish Literary Revival. His forceful personality and early eminence as a poet enabled him to draw together a politically and aesthetically disparate group of writers and intellectuals into a self-conscious literary movement. Its poets faced up to the dilemma of whether their work would be in Irish or in English by drawing on the important scholarly work done during the nineteenth century with the publication of properly annotated editions of Irish language texts and the provision of English translations. Chief among these scholar-translators was Douglas Hyde in such works as Love-Songs of Connacht (1893). The revolution of Hyde’s translations was to provide an English version much more closely and directly modelled on the Irish original than the usual translations, which emulated an eighteenth-century English poetic style. The first quatrain of ‘An Tuirse agus an Brón So’/‘The Weariness and Grief ’ gives the flavour: ‘This weariness and grief/Are going greatly, greatly, round my heart,/And the full of my two shoes of it,/And the tears dropping down with me.’2 Declan Kiberd has provided a full account of how key speeches from J.M. Synge’s 1907 drama, The Playboy of the Western

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939

World, are drawn directly from Hyde’s Hiberno-English translations.3 Lady Gregory also owed Hyde a debt when she fashioned what became known as ‘Kiltartanese’, an English closely modelled on the language spoken by native Irish speakers in her locality, close to her Coole estate in the west of Ireland. Synge and Gregory both knew Irish (as, later, did Sean O’Casey) and were able to draw on it to fashion an English dramatic speech that was closely based on Irish syntax and drew much of its idiom from that language. Yeats knew no Irish and when he wrote plays for the early Irish theatre frequently did so in collaboration with Lady Gregory, whose experience of dialect, as he acknowledged, helped him to ‘get down out of the high window of dramatic verse’ when it came to writing plays.4 But Douglas Hyde was also a scholar of Irish literature and in his pioneering study, A Literary History of Ireland (1899), he observes that ‘great producers of literature as the Irish always were . . . they never developed a drama’.5 A partial exception he cites are the dialogues between St Patrick, the man who converted Ireland to Christianity, and Ossian (or Oisín), the aged remnant of pagan Irish civilisation. (I will argue in Chapter  3 that Synge drew on these dialogues in The Well of the Saints.) Hyde’s fidelity to Irish sources may help to explain why he never became the great Irish playwright the Revival was looking for, since he lacked the dramatic experience and technique to develop his plays beyond the briefest of sketches. But his remarks point to a stubborn fact that will bedevil the history of the Irish Dramatic Revival throughout: there was no native Irish drama to develop. The models would have to be sought elsewhere, with the Norwegian Ibsen as the most fruitful resource, and this would lay the writers’ dramatic products open to the repeated charge of not being Irish. A no less important argument would be to suggest that the development of a native Irish theatre movement was not entirely dependent on nor to be found entirely within the metropolitan proscenium theatres of Ireland’s major cities (Dublin, Cork, Belfast), but rather in a primarily oral literature, mostly in the Irish language, found on the west coast. Synge’s prose work, The Aran Islands (1907), has widely been regarded as showing how he found the language for his plays and many of their themes and stories by going to the islands. What Synge encountered there which he and his drama most needed were the storytellers who knew this folk literature and delivered it in a protodramatic context. The old storyteller Pat Dirane is the source of the story of the unfaithful wife, which has many variants in folklore sources, on which Synge modelled his play, The Shadow of the Glen (1903): it recounts the narrative of an older husband who feigns death in order to catch out his 8

The Late Nineteenth Century

adulterous young wife and her lover. About the folk narrative of the unfaithful wife on which he drew, Synge says ‘he [Pat Dirane] told [it to] me’.6 Many of the stories he heard on the islands were delivered to him personally. But he also records the more social occasions when the storytellers of the Aran Islands delivered their stories to an impromptu audience that gathered in one of the cottages to hear them, on evenings that were a mixture of music and storytelling. Even when Pat is telling his story directly to Synge, his presence in the cottage is noted and soon draws an audience: ‘some young men [had] come down to listen to the story’.7 The last page of The Aran Islands records Synge’s own contribution to such a gathering: ‘After that I had to get out my fiddle and play some tunes for them while they finished their whisky.’8 The story of the unfaithful wife runs to approximately two pages in Synge’s prose volume, pithy, pointed and with a strong finish. And while Synge is going to develop it when he writes his own version, the brevity of his play shows how closely he has kept to its storytelling origins. Lady Gregory, before she had even met W.B. Yeats, responded to his cultural summons by going out into her Kiltartan neighbourhood and gathering folklore from native informants. These stories, and that dialogue between the tenants and the lady of the manor, form the basis of the plays she was to write for the Abbey Theatre, both on her own and in collaboration with Yeats. All three playwrights favoured the one-act form, Yeats above all. While this emphasis distinguished the Abbey Theatre as an avant-garde and artistic enterprise from the commercial Dublin theatres which offered full-length plays, the prominence of the oneact play in the early Abbey repertoire also marked the National Theatre of Ireland as one which drew directly for its drama on native culture and on the centrality of the storyteller and his or her closeness to their audience.

The nineteenth century and Dion Boucicault As Nicholas Grene has pointed out, every new ‘dramatic movement claims that they can deliver the true Ireland which has previously been misrepresented, travestied, rendered in sentimental cliché or political caricature’.9 This was certainly the case when Yeats and Gregory in 1897 wrote and two years later circulated their manifesto for an Irish Literary Theatre. Their statement explicitly addressed itself to the form of Irish theatre their new movement was designed to supplant: ‘We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment, as it has been represented.’10 This was readily recognised as an allusion to and an attack upon the Irish plays of Dion 9

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939

Boucicault, whose political melodramas enjoyed a great popularity in larger commercial theatres such as the Queen’s. In mid nineteenth century, a Dublin playwright with the unlikely name of Dionysus Lardner Boucicault produced his first play. London Assurance (1841) was a remarkably assured London debut for this twenty-one year old Dublin emigré. The play shows verbal wit, a reinvigorated set of comic stereotypes in figures like Lady Gay Spanker, acute social observation and great energy. But most of Boucicault’s prolific writing for the London stage over the next decade or so subsided into hackwork. Translations from French plays or stage versions of novels like Dumas Père’s The Corsican Brothers proved more financially rewarding and were quicker to produce than original plays. With Boucicault’s sudden and unexpected move to the US in 1853, when he eloped with the actor-manager Edmund Kean’s actress protégée, his career took a different direction. The move to the US appears to have encouraged Boucicault to undertake a series of plays that were explicitly Irish in setting and characters, and increasingly nationalistic – the plays for which he is now primarily known. The first of these, The Colleen Bawn (from the Irish, the beautiful fair young woman) (1860) was hugely successful and brought Boucicault back in triumph to the London stage. The play was based on Gerald Griffin’s novel, The Collegians, and a famous murder trial where a young aristocrat had his boatman do away with the teenage peasant lover of whom he had grown tired. Boucicault’s most significant addition to the story is the first of his Stage Irishmen, Myles-na-Coppaleen (from the Irish, Myles of the little horses), a role he wrote for himself and which came to dominate subsequent productions. Myles is addicted as any Stage Irishman to the drink (he runs an illicit still in the mountains and usually appears with a keg on his shoulder) but in this he is usually joined by the other native Irish characters, including the local priest, Father Tom. He is characteristically pugnacious but the violence he metes out is usually in the cause of honour. Earlier plays by Irish playwrights occasionally featured a Stage Irishman in a minor role. But since these plays were set in English society, the Stage Irishman rarely appeared to advantage and was usually the object of ridicule, most often on the score of his brogue, ‘so deviant and ludic in relation to the norms of English pronunciation’.11 Relocating a Stage Irishman to the geographical space and sociopolitical context of Ireland lessens his oddity and eccentricity, enhancing both his dramatic visibility and his complexity. In particular, it makes clear that the Stage Irishman is involved in a selfconscious performance, in part for his own enjoyment, in part to deceive 10

The Late Nineteenth Century

others in that he is wearing a protective mask. This is the case with Boucicault’s distinctive treatment of the Stage Irishman. As Andrew Parkin has argued: ‘What had once been a foolish, drunken butt of English wits, he transformed into a clever, courageous and resourceful descendant of the tricky slave.’12 His Stage Irishman characters stand outside the strict social hierarchy of Bouicault’s plays, with their idealised aristocracy and peasant characters and the despised middle class of grasping agents and magistrates. Myles lives in the wild, comes and goes like a free agent and at the close is not part of the formal marriage celebrations between the major characters. He is excluded from the social world that Boucicault represents while remaining central to the dramatic activity. In this, he prefigures the tramp figures in the plays of Hyde, Synge, Yeats and Gregory. Boucicault’s masterpiece was 1874’s The Shaughraun (from the Irish, vagrant or wanderer), with the Stage Irishman promoted to the title character. The play complicates the class structures of the earlier Irish plays and their romances by introducing the relationship between the two neighbouring islands and their national identities (as Shaw was to do in 1904 with his Abbey play, John Bull’s Other Island). In the opening scene, Captain Molineux, a young English officer, arrives with ‘a detachment of our regiment at Ballyragget’13 to apprehend a Fenian rebel who is rumoured to be returning to Ireland from Australia. He encounters the beautiful young Irishwoman Claire Ffolliot and is immediately enraptured. In detailing the political imperatives that find him in Ballyragget, Molineux tries to make light of his mission and hence of his involvement. Naturally, the returning, outlawed Fenian rebel turns out to be Claire’s brother, and Molineux is confronted throughout with a conflict of motives, between duty and desire. The political villain in The Shaughraun, as always in Boucicault’s melodrama, is neither the English officer nor the returned Fenian outlaw, who even his opponent can recognise is ‘a gentleman’, but rather the local police agent and the squireen, the resolutely lower middle class and upwardly mobile characters. Conn the Shaughraun is somewhat less of a free agent than Myles na Coppaleen in The Colleen Bawn; he knows his social place and remains unswervingly loyal to his ‘master’, Claire’s exiled brother. The political resolution to the play fuses with and is absorbed by the romantic: Robert Ffolliott is pardoned by Queen Victoria (no less) and is free to marry his beloved; simultaneously, Claire’s way is cleared to accept Molineux’s proposal. Boucicault’s melodramas in the late nineteenth century went from being hugely popular to falling increasingly out of favour. This happened not only because the plays of Henrik Ibsen and those of Yeats and Gregory’s Irish 11

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Literary Theatre arrived to transform theatrical modes of expression, but because Ireland’s increasing struggle for political independence from England made the utopian metaphor and the political allegory of a marriage between the two countries increasingly untenable.14 Boucicault and his Stage Irishmen did not prove as easy to supplant as Yeats and Gregory might have supposed. Synge felt that the wholesale dismissal of Boucicault for the ‘absurdity of his plots and pathos’ had blinded ‘people of taste’ to ‘what good acting comedy some of his work contains’.15 His play The Shadow of the Glen (1903) draws on this humour in an explicit acknowledgement of Boucicault. In the story of the unfaithful wife Synge heard on the Aran Islands, the dead husband discloses no motive for suddenly sitting up and revealing himself to the narrator when the wife and her lover are absent. Synge filled the psychological gap in the narrative by supplying a motive: Dan Burke is about to sneeze and wants a drink of whiskey. ‘Give me that whiskey. Would you have herself come back before I taste a drop at all?’16 In Boucicault’s play, Conn the Shaughraun fakes his own death and attends his own wake, in the course of which he surreptitiously helps himself to the illicit whiskey/poteen from under the table. Sean O’Casey acted in the plays of Boucicault as a teenager and the influence can clearly be seen in the Stage Irish double act of Captain Boyle and Joxer Daly in his 1924 play, Juno and the Paycock. But O’Casey does not indulge his Stage Irishmen as Boucicault, since his play provides an acute representation of the poverty and oppressive social conditions which may influence their drunken and irresponsible behaviour. Boucicault had his part to play and his contribution to make to the Irish Dramatic Revival, whatever Yeats and Gregory may have intended.

Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw Before the advent of the Irish Dramatic Revival, there was a tradition of well-known playwrights from Ireland in the English language. But they were almost exclusively associated with the other island, its theatres and society. As more than one critic has observed, there would hardly have been any English drama of note between the Renaissance period and the advent of the twentieth century were it not for the contribution of Irish playwrights. The roll call, even at its most restricted, is an illustrious one: George Farquhar at the close of the seventeenth century, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the eighteenth. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the London stage was dominated by the plays of two Irishmen, 12

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Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, what Wilde himself in a letter to Shaw dubbed ‘the great Celtic school’ of dramatists.17 Shaw was once asked what difference his being born and raised in Ireland made to him and he replied: ‘To the extent of making me a foreigner in every other country. But the position of a foreigner with complete command of the same language has great advantages. I can take an objective view of England, which no Englishman can.’18 By being placed at one remove from English society, the Anglo-Irish playwright can view that society whole, as Shaw suggests. As individuals who escape their own class system in Ireland, they are essentially déclassé in England and can address all levels of English society from a disinterested position. At the same time, as immigrants from another country, they depend more than any native does on a continuing goodwill and never occupy a position of stability or security. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the two greatest exemplars of the Anglo-Irish tradition emerged in the formidable persons of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. Both were from Dublin Protestant backgrounds; but their social circumstances were different. Wilde had brilliant and socially illustrious parents, the renowned surgeon Sir William Wilde and the nationalist poet, ‘Speranza’ (Jane Francesca Elgee). Both Sir William and Lady Wilde separately published important collections of Irish folklore; in doing so, they rescued from oblivion oral narratives from the Irish countryside by native storytellers, many of whom perished in the Famine; the influence of these folk and fairy tales has been widely detected in Wilde’s prose stories for children.19 Wilde was raised in the fashionable address of 1, Merrion Square, and attended Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied Greek under Professor J.P. Mahaffey (they visited Greece together in 1877, when Wilde was twenty-three). Shaw grew up not very far away, in Dublin’s Synge street, but significantly further down the social register. As he later acidly remarked about Wilde: ‘[he was] a snob to the marrow of his being, having been brought up in Merrion Square Dublin’.20 Shaw’s father, George Carr Shaw, was a partner in a corn-merchant business and a dissolute. His mother Bessie was the artistic one, interested in music which she studied and performed with their lodger, George Vandaleur Lee, a ‘philosopher of voice’ and a clear model for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion (1914). Shaw detested his biological father and idealised the other ‘George’, later casting doubt on his own paternity. As biographer Michael Holroyd has noted, the issue of fatherhood is often a vexed one in Shaw’s plays: ‘The themes of consanguinity and illegitimacy recur obsessively . . ., but it is the emotional independence of the woman that is stressed.’21 13

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Both Wilde and Bernard Shaw moved definitively from Ireland to England when both of them were at or near the age of twenty. Wilde had completed three years at Trinity College when he won a scholarship to Magdalene College, Oxford; he was sent on his way with Mahaffy declaring: ‘You’re not quite clever enough for us here [at Trinity]. Oscar. Better run up to Oxford.’22 Having won the prestigious Newdigate Prize there for the poem ‘Ravenna’, Wilde graduated with a First in Greats in 1878, transferred to London the following year and in 1880 moved to Tite Street and published his first play, Vera; or the Nihilists. Yeats visited Oscar and his Dublin-born wife Constance in Tite Street in 1887–8, giving a memorable description of the all-white house that the couple had designed, but also noting: ‘it was perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few years before had gone too completely’.23 Shaw was two years younger than Wilde. In 1876, at the age of nineteen, he moved to London, happy to leave behind a Dublin he described as a place ‘of failure, of poverty, of obscurity’.24 London, for a young man with literary ambitions like Shaw, was for him ‘the literary centre for the English language, and for such artistic culture as the realm of the English language (in which I proposed to be king) could afford. There was no Gaelic League in those days nor any sense that Ireland had in herself the seed of culture’.25 In moving to England, both Wilde and Shaw left fathers behind in Dublin who were to die a few years after their departure. Though Wilde got on better than Shaw with his father, he cannot have been too pleased by the revelation in the reading of the will in 1876 that Sir William had already spent most of his considerable money. And though both young Dubliners may have presented their going to reside in England as an act of self-assertion and refashioning, a declaration of independence, Shaw’s mother travelled to London shortly before her son and Wilde’s mother arrived shortly after hers. One of the first signs of Shaw’s social progress there was an invitation to attend Lady Wilde’s weekly salons. Both mothers lived considerably longer than the fathers: Lady Wilde to see her brilliant son’s success and ruin, Bessie Shaw until 1914, well into ‘Sonny’s’ magnificent career. But neither writing career started well for Wilde or Shaw. In the 1880s, Wilde wrote serious plays in various theatrical modes – Vera; or the Nihilists, The Duchess of Padua – which came to a climax with a symbolist drama (in French) on the Biblical Salomé. In 1891 The Duchess of Padua was staged in New York, but to no great success. In 1892, his Salomé was in rehearsal in London (in Lord Alfred Douglas’s translation), with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, when it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain. Oscar Wilde’s route 14

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to theatrical success in London was to be the same one as that which had worked for Farquhar, Goldsmith and Sheridan, when at the start of the 1890s Wilde decided to turn to the writing of comedies about English society. In 1892 he wrote Salomé, and Lady Windermere’s Fan, the first of his society comedies, was staged to great success at St James’s Theatre in February of that year. After the banning of Salomé that June, Wilde wrote A Woman of No Importance two months later. When he received the card from the Marquess of Queensbery, Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, accusing him of being a ‘sodmomite’ and taking him to law, initiating his imprisonment and social disgrace, two of Wilde’s comedies – An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest – were playing to packed houses in London theatres. Shaw began his London writing career in 1879 with Immaturity, the first of a succession of novels, most of which remained unpublished (or at least were not published until after he gained fame as a playwright). He increasingly made a reputation as a formidable and witty critic, of music, of art and of theatre. Shaw’s trenchant critiques of the moribund state of the London theatre of the late nineteenth century increasingly suggested that the best response was for him to write his own plays. His first play, Widowers’ Houses, was notoriously delayed seven years in its composition. A collaboration with Ibsen’s English translator, William Archer, in 1885, it was laid aside after two acts had been completed and was finished by Shaw on his own in 1892, stimulated by the staging of Ibsen by J.T. Grein’s Independent Theatre. Ironically, Archer was not impressed by the end result, claiming Shaw had scarcely bothered with the plot he had supplied and had filled the play, not with people, but with puppets – a charge, as Michael Holroyd points out, ‘that was forever to linger round Shaw’s plays’.26 It was Oscar Wilde who not only responded positively to Widowers’ Houses when he saw it in December 1892 but pointed to what he regarded as its greatest achievement: ‘I admire the horrible flesh and blood of your creatures.’27 In the same letter, Wilde consciously paired himself with Shaw and dubbed them ‘the great Celtic School’ of dramatists. He then listed their plays as a series (almost a joint composition) in the following way: Lady Windermere’s Fan as Op. 1; Widowers’ Houses as Op. 2; A Woman of No Importance, which he had just finished writing, as Op. 3; and Shaw’s next play as Op. 4. Inflected by their joint socialism, the two ‘Celtic Dramatists’ undertook a nuanced critique of England in their plays. Frequently, these feature an outsider figure who is seeking to break into or re-establish themselves in English society. In Lady Windermere’s Fan and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written by Shaw in 1893) that outsider is a 15

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woman – specifically, an older, attractive woman with a past, now returned to England (temporarily, as it turns out) from twenty years of living on the Continent. In each case, the woman turns out to be the (unacknowledged and unknown) mother of the heroine, Lady Windermere and Vivie Warren respectively, whom they have had outside wedlock. Vivie cannot stomach the harsh economic fact that her rearing and college career have been funded by her mother’s profession as madam of a succession of brothels. Mother and daughter can at least agree, however, that each loves to work and be financially independent. Vivie’s order for her mother to leave is greeted with something new to Mrs Warren: a mother’s tears. Wilde’s Mrs Erlynne makes her own decision to return to the Continent, with Lady Windermere remaining ignorant of their true relation. But she does so because, like Mrs. Warren, she too has acquired and been troubled by maternal feelings for the first time: ‘Only once in my life have I known a mother’s feelings. That was last night . . . They made me suffer – they made me suffer too much. For twenty years . . . I have lived childless – I want to live childless still.’28 The experience of witnessing Mrs Erlynne perform a good deed on her behalf (even if she remains largely ignorant of its true motives) finally renders Lady Windermere less of a Puritan and more conscious that ‘there is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand’.29 One isn’t sure that Vivie Warren doesn’t keep her Puritanism still as she shows her mother the door, leading Mrs Warren to retort: ‘I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I was a leper.’30 The contrast between the final scene of the two plays is revealing of the great differences in character between Wilde and Shaw, one acknowledging the precipice, the other asserting emotional independence. In their dramas, Wilde and Shaw deploy many of the conventions of nineteenth-century drama, playing with and inverting them. This same principle is brought to a fine art in Wilde and his dandies’ use of the epigram, where our conscious and logical sense of where the line is headed is inverted to tonic effect: hair turns gold, and not grey, from grief; young people and the lower orders need to set a good example for the old and the aristocratic; and so forth. In his 1895 review of An Ideal Husband, Shaw described Wilde as ‘our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre’.31 And yet the play in which Wilde most thoroughly did this, his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, was criticised by Shaw as producing in him no more than ‘miserable mechanical laughter’;32 Shaw went on to write 16

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several plays as conscious ‘replies’ to Wilde’s play.33 The Importance of Being Earnest dispenses almost entirely with plot and proceeds by way of a series of comic, almost absurdist variations on serious themes. A central concern throughout Wilde’s work is the question of personal identity. As Jack Worthing asks Lady Bracknell at a key point: ‘I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?’ Jack owns a double, split self, projected in geographic terms: ‘my name is Ernest in town, and Jack in the country’.34 In order to escape from the Victorian burden of being a responsible moral guardian, Jack has devised a rakish, improvident younger brother called Ernest. But this fiction takes on a kind of truth when his young friend Algernon assumes the role to woo Jack’s even younger ward, Cecily. In order to get rid of his annoying younger brother, Jack wears black and performs an elaborate ritual of mourning for a man who never existed; and whom the other characters insist is alive and well and in the next room. He proves no less secure when it comes to his own identity for, severely interrogated by Lady Bracknell when he wishes to propose to her niece, he is forced to confess that he has ‘lost’ his parents and was not born but ‘found’, in a hand-bag in the cloakroom at Victoria Station – in transit, as it were. The protean, unstable identities of the central character in Anglo-Irish drama have never been pushed further. Another important feature of Wilde and Shaw’s plays are their feisty, independent young heroines and their verbally intimidating matriarchs. As Declan Kiberd has put it, the men in The Importance of Being Earnest loll around on sofas eating cucumber sandwiches while the women study German philosophy.35 If Jack exerts a fair degree of creativity in devising the character of Ernest and Algernon in filling out the role and playing it, nevertheless it is the women who are the serious writers. Miss Prism makes her living as a governess but in her spare time has written a three-volume novel. Cecily writes down Algernon’s wittier sallies in her diary which, as it is ‘simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, [is] consequently meant for publication’.36 The two women, Cecily and Gwendolen, take the upper hand in determining the course of the men’s courtship when they insist their ideal is to marry a man called Ernest. In so doing, they are following the lead of the play’s singular authority figure, Lady Bracknell, who sets the terms to which the characters (especially the males) must submit and does so unfettered by the elderly Lord Bracknell, who remains offstage and endlessly enfeebled. The positive outcome of the play is not the restoration of any kind of social order or norm, but is only achieved through the utterly arbitrary coincidence that Jack happens to have been 17

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named and christened Ernest. His true identity is established through a paper trail which culminates in a search through ‘the Army Lists of the past forty years’37 – a piece of paper, a legal fiction. The ambiguous status of the ‘lie’ in the play, on which so many comic variations are wrung, is going to resound throughout the drama of the Revival. As D.E.S. Maxwell was the first to point out: ‘The Playboy of the Western World and The Importance of Being Earnest are equally artificial, and in comparable ways.’38 Playwright Thomas Kilroy develops this comparison by linking Wilde and Synge’s plays through ‘a characteristic distancing effect, . . . a strategic standing apart from his material (the objectivity that Shaw talks about) on the part of the playwright, [which] helps to account for the highly developed sense of form in the plays themselves, their stage artifice’.39 Wilde may have set his plays in and derived his characters from England, but they have proved a rich resource to more explicitly Irish playwrights in the century and more since. Yeats drew directly on Wilde for his play, A Full Moon in March (1935), as he himself was the first to point out: ‘The dance with the severed head suggests the central idea of Wilde’s Salomé . . . I found that I had gone close to Salomé’s dance in [his] play.’40 Oscar Wilde died in 1900 as the Irish Dramatic Revival came into existence. The feeling that, since his career and writings were so strongly set in England, he would not have contributed to the native movement had he lived is challenged by the case of Bernard Shaw. This last of the Anglo-Irish playwrights lived well into the twentieth century and continued a career in English theatre. But Shaw still and simultaneously contributed in important ways to the Irish dramatic revival, as Chapter 4 will examine.

Henrik Ibsen In the late nineteenth century a theatrical revolution was wrought by the plays of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). In a long life, Ibsen wrote many plays in varied styles but the heightened realism of the plays he wrote about bourgeois interiors in Norway from 1867 to 1890 had a transformative impact on the theatre of the succeeding century. The door slam which accompanied Nora Helmer’s transgressive exit from her home at the close of A Doll’s House, published in 1879 and staged across the next decade, resounded throughout Europe. Ireland was no more immune to Ibsen’s influence and impact than anywhere else. As Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus walks through Dublin in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he feels ‘the 18

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spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind’.41 The figure who most promoted Ibsen in an English context was an Irishman, George Bernard Shaw. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) he praised the playwright for stripping away the ideals with which people blind themselves to their reality and ‘looking the spectres in the face’.42 Shaw admired (and learned from) Ibsen’s dismantling of nineteenth-century melodramatic conventions towards more expressive ends, as when the threatening blackmailer Krogstad in A Doll’s House is shown to be much more of a mirror image of the entrapped Nora than he first appears. What Shaw most admired in Ibsen’s play was the open-ended denouement, when the plot had run its course and the couple sat down to have their first real conversation, as individuals and equals. Although he interpreted him very much in his own characteristic way, Shaw was to develop his response to and critique of Ibsen not in more prose criticism but in the plays he wrote for the London stage, from Widowers’ Houses on. The case with Ibsen was rather different in Ireland. Because they were writing an avowedly nationalist drama (and doing so in the English rather than the Irish language), Irish playwrights had to stress the authenticity of the origins of their work, its freedom from ‘pernicious’ foreign influence. When Arthur Griffith denounced Synge’s Shadow of the Glen as deriving from the decadent theatre of the Left Bank in Paris, Yeats pressed the reticent Synge to declare that his one-act play was based on a story he had first heard on the Aran Islands.43 With not only the nationalist press but the playwrights themselves keen to downplay any foreign influence, the question of the impact of Continental drama in general and Ibsen in particular on the Irish Theatre Movement is a complex one. Rather than the outright hostility with which they are often charged, Yeats and Synge were both ambivalent about the Norwegian playwright. There is Yeats’s strongly stated reaction when he saw A Doll’s House, ‘the first Ibsen play to be staged in England’, on the London stage in 1891 and wrote: ‘I hated the play [and] resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.’44 Yet Yeats also admits to being ‘divided in mind’ in his reaction to Ibsen, and is forced to declare that ‘neither I nor my generation could escape him because, though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies’.45 The Ibsen Yeats preferred was the author of ambitious, poetic, epic dramas like Peer Gynt and Brand and, in another mood than the above, he could declare the later, more realistic plays to be ‘less imaginative though profoundly interesting’.46 The earlier, poetic Ibsen, with his overt deployment of folklore, could be pressed into service by Yeats 19

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to claim a precedent in Ibsen’s career and practice for what he and the other playwrights were about to undertake. As Irina Ruppo Malone states, Yeats argued that ‘Irish literary nationalism could benefit from studying foreign writers who, like Ibsen, had participated in [national] movements analogous to the Irish Revival.’47 Yeats writes in his autobiography how he ‘bought [Ibsen’s] collected works in Mr. [William] Archer’s translation out of my thirty shillings a week and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland and Sligo’.48 This suggests an ‘Irish-ing’ of Ibsen and lays the foundation for the argument that both Yeats and Synge may more truly be said to have absorbed rather than rejected Ibsen. Further, almost every Irish writer at the turn of the last century was remaking Ibsen in their own image – and their own ideals for a national theatre. This process can be seen in the first staging of a Yeats play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, in London in 1892. He was commissioned to write it by Florence Farr, who won her reputation (as Yeats rather disdainfully notes) by becoming ‘prominent as an Ibsen actress and had almost a success in Rosmersholm, where there is symbolism and a stale odour of spilt poetry’.49 Yeats much preferred Farr’s performance in John Todhunter’s poetic drama A Sicilian Idyll in 1890, marvelling that ‘when [she] was upon the stage, no one else could hold an eye or an ear. [Her] speech was music’.50 In 1892, Florence Farr commissioned both Yeats and Shaw (with whom she was in the middle of an affair) to write plays for a theatre project funded by a friend of hers. This philanthropic benefactor was none other than Annie Horniman, who was subsequently to fund the building of the Abbey Theatre. Farr was to appear in the play Shaw wrote for her, Arms and the Man, which provided him with his first stage success. She asked Yeats to write The Land of Heart’s Desire specifically to provide a part, not for herself, but for her ten-year-old niece, hence the emphasis in Yeats’s play on the fairy child. He was glad of the opportunity to have a play written and staged and did so, as he writes, with his plans for an Irish theatre in mind. It ‘pleased a sufficient minority for Florence Farr to keep it upon the stage with Arms and the Man, and I was in the theatre almost every night for some weeks’. This was to be Yeats’s first sustained experience of the theatre and of staging his drama. The Land of Heart’s Desire has an Irish setting, Sligo, where Yeats had spent much of his own childhood, and draws on the folklore of the area. The child played by Florence Farr’s niece arrives in the Bruin household to take the dissatisfied young bride, Mary Bruin, ‘away’ to a place ‘Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,/Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue’.51 Yeats reveals where his true interest lay when he writes: ‘I wrote The Land of Heart’s Desire, in 20

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some discomfort when the child was the theme, for I knew nothing of children, but with an abundant mind when Mary Bruin was, for I knew an Irish woman whose unrest troubled me.’52 Embedded deep within this poetic fairy drama, this ‘Celtic Twilight’ artefact, are profound traces of Ibsen that contribute to the uncanny effect. Michael McAteer cites A Doll’s House as ‘the obvious precedent’ for a play which foregrounds ‘the theme of the young woman who rebels against the restrictions imposed on her through marriage’.53 But Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is even more pertinent. Mary Bruin is like Hedda a dissatisfied newlywed chafing against the constraints placed on her (whereas Ibsen’s Nora has been married for years and has borne children), and further both plays end with the death of the young heroine. Yeats’s Mary Bruin dies with some suggestion that she may have passed over into an alternative realm of real possibility. No such alternative is allowed for in the stifling domestic interior of a late Ibsen play like Hedda Gabler, once the Norwegian playwright had firmly shut the door on the earlier folkloric vistas of Peer Gynt and Brand. Synge’s alleged ‘hatred’ of Ibsen is derived from the attack on the language of the Norwegian’s plays contained in the Preface to The Playboy of the Western World: ‘Ibsen and Zola [deal] with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words.’54 Synge follows this a few lines later with the counter-assertion: ‘In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.’55 In this preface, written a mere two weeks after the play’s riotous premiere, Synge is keen to answer the charge that it was un-Irish by stressing the authenticity of his language, citing various living Irish sources for his dramatic speech. But the influence of Ibsen on Synge went deeper than this avowed dismissal would suggest. In 1893–4 Synge moved from Ireland to Germany, ostensibly to study music; but an introduction to live theatre and to the drama of Ibsen (he read four of the plays in German translation) saw him declare for literature and ultimately a life in the theatre.56 Early and late the figure of Ibsen haunts Synge’s drama, not least because he performs what Synge regards as the most valuable artistic imperative: he ‘deal[s] with the reality of life’.57 This was an aim Synge himself sought to emulate when he turned to writing plays for an Irish theatre. It is no accident that the heroine of his controversial debut play, The Shadow of the Glen, was named Nora, nor that she walked out of an unhappy marriage at the end. As playwright Frank McGuinness has observed in relation to Synge and Ibsen: ‘Love, money, fear, a wedding and a funeral – these obsessions link The Playboy of the Western World and the opening acts of Peer Gynt.’58 Synge may have exaggerated the linguistic differences between Ibsen and himself to obscure the obvious 21

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parallel. For all of their peasant trappings, Synge’s households – like Ibsen’s – are quintessentially bourgeois. His scenarios of strong but trapped individuals wishing to assert their independence in an oppressive environment are transposed from the middle-class homes of Norway to the cottages of Wicklow and the west of Ireland. Synge’s plays, like Ibsen’s, introduce an outsider figure (usually male) who comes into the bourgeois household and offers the trapped insider (usually female) some kind of alternative to that environment. These plays by Yeats and Synge are more than a literal translation of Ibsen; they inform and have been translated into the deep structure of the drama of the Irish Revival.

The Irish Literary Theatre The idea for an Irish theatre had arisen in conversation between Yeats and Lady Gregory in the west of Ireland in 1897.59 An important third figure at the time was Edward Martyn, like Gregory a Big House owner and landlord in the west, but with the distinction of being a Catholic. Martyn was also a playwright and had already written two plays. Yeats lamented the fact that neither he nor Martyn could interest the London stage in their plays and expressed a wish that they be played in Ireland. Gregory seized on this to promote the creation of an Irish national theatre between them. In future years she was to hold Yeats steady to his Abbey attachment when frustration at the staging of his own plays led him once more to think of London. Yeats, Gregory and Martyn wrote a letter to the Irish papers, which all three signed, announcing the formation of the Irish Literary Theatre, a three-year experiment designed to determine whether there was an audience in Dublin for Irish plays. This manifesto, quoted earlier on misrepresentation and buffoonery, made clear that the plays they presented would be of a very different stripe from the fare on offer in the commercial theatres and ‘whatever be their degree of excellence, [would] be written with a high ambition’.60 The first programme, announced for May of 1899, was to feature a play by Yeats, The Countess Cathleen, and a play by Martyn, The Heather Field. Martyn put up £300 for the productions, Gregory worked her social connections to secure support and Yeats provided artistic leadership. An important fourth was added when Martyn’s cousin arrived in the form of the novelist George Moore, another landlord of Catholic stock from the west of Ireland now resident in London. The Heather Field was a work written deliberately in homage to, and imitation of, Ibsen. It tells of an idealistic landlord in the west of Ireland who 22

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seeks to reclaim the wildness of the heather field by draining it and turning it into ‘a whole vast tract of fertile pasture’;61 in this, he is opposed by his materialistic wife, who would prefer to see the money invested towards improving both the house and their social position. Threatened with madness, Carden Tyrrell strives to recover until the last line announcement that ‘the wild heath has broken out again in the heather field’,62 at which point he capitulates. The play has strong echoes of Ghosts; but Martyn has not absorbed the Ibsen influence as the greater playwrights were to do and it now reads more like pastiche. A fascinating account of the play and its inauguration of the Irish Literary Theatre in May 1899 appeared in ‘Le Mouvement Intellectual Irlandais’ in L’Européen; its author was not French but Irish, one J.M. Synge, who had yet to write his first play. Synge wrote of the Irish production and contrasted it with one in London subsequently. He noted that the Irish audience sympathised with the ‘attractive personality’ of ‘the dreamer who consoles himself with grand hopes’; the London audience with a few exceptions found the materialistic wife’s point of view entirely reasonable while the husband was viewed as a ‘dangerous impractical person’.63 The Heather Field proved a great success for the Irish Literary Theatre; as Yeats noted, it ‘was a much greater success than The Countess Cathleen, being in the manner of Ibsen, the manner of the moment. The construction seemed masterly. I tried to believe that a great new dramatist had appeared’.64 Also in attendance was James Joyce, still an undergraduate at the Catholic University, who learned Norwegian the same year in order to read the works of Ibsen. Twenty years later, he proposed and oversaw a production of The Heather Field in Zurich as part of the programme for the English Players that he was helping to organise. In his note for the play, Joyce presented Edward Martyn as follows: ‘As a dramatist he follows the school of Ibsen and therefore occupies a unique position in Ireland, as the dramatists writing for the National Theatre have chiefly devoted their energies to peasant drama.’65 When Joyce detected what he interpreted as a movement away from the contemporary social realism of Ibsen to peasant plays in the third and final programme of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901, he excoriated this development in ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ with a pointed allusion to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: ‘the Irish Literary Theatre by its surrender to the trolls has cut itself adrift from the line of advancement’.66 Joyce has left an invaluable representation of the 1899 opening of the Irish Literary Theatre in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Curiously, the narrative focus is entirely on The Countess Cathleen rather than The Heather Field. Yeats’s play may have been less of a success than Martyn’s but 23

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it was the one that caused the controversy. The Countess Cathleen’s depiction of Irish peasants during a time of famine who sell their souls to the devil and are redeemed by the woman of the Big House was bad enough. But even worse from an orthodox Catholic point of view (and hence upsetting to the Irish Literrary Theatre’s main financial backer, Edward Martyn) was the ending, in which an angel appears on stage to reverse the Countess’s damnation with the theologically heterodox view that ‘The Light of Lights/ Looks always on the motive, not the deed.’67 Public controversy was stirred, rowdy scenes in the theatre ensued and the police were called. In Section V of Joyce’s novel, Stephen Dedalus remembers: the hall on the night of the opening of the national theatre. He was alone at the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of Dublin in the stalls and at the tawdry scenecloths and human dolls framed by the garish lamps of the stage. A burly policeman sweated behind him and seemed at every moment about to act. The catcalls and hisses and mocking cries ran in rude gusts round the hall from his scattered fellow students: – A libel on Ireland! – Made in Germany! – Blasphemy! – We never sold our faith! – No Irish woman ever did it!68 If Stephen Dedalus (and by extension James Joyce) is here standing ‘alone’ both from his fellow University College Dublin students in their opposition to the play and from the ‘tawdry’ production and the ‘cultured’ Dublin audience, this aloofness and disdain should not be seen as extending to Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen. The stream of consciousness prose of Joyce’s novel argues otherwise. Running through Stephen’s mind throughout this section, where he is about to go into exile, and saturating Joyce’s own prose with the ‘soft liquid joy’ of its words, are these lines by the Countess Cathleen from the play, directed to her family nurse and lover-poet: Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel, I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes Upon the nest under the eave before He wanders the loud waters.69 24

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It is these ‘verses crooned in the ear of his memory’, which Joyce was later to set to music, which bring the first night scene to Stephen Dedalus’s mind and testify to the greater emotional impact of Yeats’s play than of Martyn’s upon Joyce, whatever his proclaimed literary/political allegiances to Ibsen. The second season of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1900 had its own drama, mainly offstage. Edward Martyn delivered a play, Maeve, which they regarded as unstageable and which Yeats and George Moore promptly set about rewriting. A more important discovery occurred when Yeats finally saw Maeve staged and witnessed at first hand how an audience could play an active role in a drama’s construction and its ultimate meaning: Edward Martyn had shaped Peg Inerny, a principal character in Maeve, under the influence of stories gathered by Lady Gregory and myself. She is one of those women who in sleep pass into another state, are ‘away’ as the people say . . . We had thought the play dim and metaphysical, but it did not seem so in performance. Maeve, Lady Gregory wrote, ‘which we did not think a nationalist play at all, has turned out to be one, the audience understanding and applauding the allegory. There is such applause at “I am only an old woman, but I tell you that Erin will never be subdued”, Lady — reported to [Dublin] Castle that they had better boycott it, which they have done.’70 This dramaturgic lesson was not lost on Yeats and Gregory, who the following year would collaborate on the most significant play of the movement so far, Cathleen ni Houlihan. Their play was to foreground a poor old woman whose statements are clearly intended to be interpreted by the Irish audience in terms of a political allegory, as the next chapter on Yeats’s plays will examine. The third and final season of the Irish Literary Theatre in October 1901 presented two plays, a troubled collaboration between Yeats and Moore on Diarmuid and Grania and Douglas Hyde’s one-act play in Irish referenced at the start of this chapter, Casadh an tSúgáin/The Twisting of the Rope. In another article by Synge, ‘The Dramatic Movement in Ireland’, written in English not in French, unpublished and dating from 1907, he took stock of the three-year experiment and concluded that Hyde’s little play was in some ways the most important of all those produced by the Irish Literary Theatre, as it alone has had an influence on the plays that have been written since, and have made up the present movement. The other plays had many good qualities but none of them 25

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had the germ of a new dramatic form or seemed to have found any new store of the materials of drama . . . Dr. Hyde’s play, slight as it was, gave a new direction and impulse to Irish drama, a direction towards which, it should be added, the thoughts of Mr. W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and others were already tending. The result has been a series of little plays with Irish peasant life which are unlike, it is believed, anything that has preceded them.71 Casadh an tSúgháin is set in a farmer’s house on the eve of a wedding where a dance is taking place. Festivities are disrupted by the arrival of an outsider, a stranger from another province, Hanrahan, ‘a wandering poet’.72 The mother of Una, the bride-to-be, is distrustful of the newcomer, for all his braggadocio and charm, remembering an earlier encounter with her husband: ‘[M]aking songs he used to be and drinking whiskey and setting quarrels afoot among the neighbours with his share of talk.’73 The bride-tobe, to the consternation of her fiancé, is attracted to the stranger with his poetry talk and romantic stories of his lonely wanderings. The other characters band together and, physically unable to compete with Hanrahan, trick him into leaving the house by twisting a length of hay and moving backwards out the door, which they promptly slam and lock. Una is the only one to lament his departure, urging them to ‘let him back; that is Tumaus Hanrahan – he is a poet – he is a bard – he is a wonderful man’.74 This scenario closely resembles that of Synge’s Playboy, though the latter is much more developed. What Synge identified here as ‘the germ of a new dramatic form’ and which Nicholas Grene was to define as the ‘stranger in the house’ motif75 is to be found, as Synge and Grene both note, in many of the plays of the Irish theatre movement: it can be detected as early as The Land of Heart’s Desire and is to recur in 1902’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, where the fairy child and the Poor Old Woman respectively are the disruptive ‘strangers’ in the peasant cottage. Grene relates the ‘stranger in the house’ motif in these plays of the Irish Dramatic Revival directly to Ibsen.76 As Yeats wrote of Hyde: ‘Had he shared our modern preoccupation with the mystery of life, learnt our modern construction, he might have grown into another and happier Synge. But emotion and imagery came as they would; somebody else had to put them together.’77 Somebody else also had to supply Hyde with the scenarios of all his plays, as Yeats and Gregory did with Casadh an tSúgáin. While the three-year experiment of the Irish Literary Theatre clearly demonstrated a demand for plays on Irish subjects, in Yeats’s and Gregory’s view neither Edward Martyn nor Douglas Hyde turned out to be the ‘great 26

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new dramatist’ they had hoped for and were still seeking. Yeats had received invaluable experience in seeing first-hand the staging of his plays across three years; as he wrote of The Countess Cathleen: ‘The play itself was ill-constructed, the dialogue turning aside at the lure of word or metaphor, very different, I hope, from the play as it is to-day after many alterations, every alteration tested by performance.’78 Another playwright would emerge when Yeats sought the collaboration of Lady Gregory. Initially happy to give him sole credit on the plays which they co-wrote, Gregory soon produced her own and would see herself credited as sole author for one of the plays which opened the Abbey Theatre in December 1904, Spreading the News. When it came to the emergence of an unquestionably great Irish playwright, J.M. Synge was waiting in the wings, as his presence at and comments on two of the three Literary Theatre performances have demonstrated. Within a year of seeing Casadh an tSúgáin, Synge would write his two breakthrough plays, Riders to the Sea and Shadow of the Glen. By 1901, the end of the threeyear experiment of the Irish Literary Theatre and the opening of a new century, Irish playwrights could write plays on native subjects and look to have those plays produced in their own country.

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CHAPTER 2 YEATS AS FOUNDER AND PLAYWRIGHT

‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’: Yeats and the theatre More than one commentator has remarked on the strange fact that when W.B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, he chose as the theme of his lecture to the Royal Academy of Sweden not the poetry for which he was acclaimed and which would lead ultimately to his reputation as the greatest English language poet of the twentieth century, but his drama, which a good many Yeats admirers have neither read nor seen. In his twovolume biography of Yeats, when it comes to the work rather than the life, Roy Foster pays close attention to and offers scrupulous readings of the major poems in the Yeats canon; but the plays receive short shrift. In his account of Yeats’s time in Sweden to receive the prize, his biographer notes that in his Nobel speech Yeats ‘identified himself as “but a writer of plays”, mentioning his “gift of lyric writing” almost as an afterthought’.1 Foster finds this ‘hardly convincing’, going so far two pages later to describe it as ‘laughable’.2 He locates the rationale for what he views as this perverse choice of subject in terms of the theatrical nature of the occasion: the writer W.B. Yeats coming on stage before an audience in Stockholm, not to face the obloquy and opposition of an Abbey Theatre audience during the opening week of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, but to be awarded the highest international honour a writer can receive and a substantial sum of money. As Foster puts it, the occasion determines the topic which in turn ‘creates the persona which [Yeats] wishes to inhabit for this consummately selfconscious performance’.3 Michael McAteer extends and develops this point about the selfconsciously theatrical nature of the Nobel Prize ceremony (which included a performance by the Swedish Royal Theatre of Cathleen ni Houlihan) by arguing that ‘the figure of Yeats the dramatist was more readily identifiable as European than that of Yeats the lyric poet’.4 McAteer is here adding his own emphasis to what Yeats argues in his essay ‘The Bounty of Sweden’: ‘If I had been a lyric poet only, if I had not become through this Theatre the representative of a public movement, I doubt if the English committees

29

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would have placed my name upon that list from which the Swedish Academy selects its prize-winner.’5 McAteer’s 2010 study Yeats and European Drama follows in the distinguished footsteps of the two critical monographs from the 1970s which between them lay out a compelling argument for the validity and achievement of Yeats’s work in the theatre. Katharine Worth’s 1978 The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett convincingly demonstrates how Yeats’s drama breaks from the archaic, unstageable Romantic drama of the nineteenth century to anticipate ‘all that is most original in the European theatre’.6 The restless experimentation of Yeats’s dramatic work, the endless changes of theatrical style, are driven by a paradox: the poet’s belief in the centrality of language, that words alone are ‘certain good’, is challenged in the theatre (as Worth puts it) by Yeats’s conviction that ‘words were not enough for the theatrical task he had set himself ’. In order to approach the true nature of reality, the ‘deeps of mind’ as he was later to term it, ‘all the resources of the theatre – scene, colour, music, dance and movement – had to be brought into play’.7 McAteer adds an important political dimension to Worth’s pure aestheticism when he argues that the changes in theatrical style occur as Yeats’s plays respond to the turbulent political changes that occurred both in Ireland and globally across nearly fifty years: ‘the theatrical event was a structure through which Yeats represented the historical forces shaping the age’.8 If Worth and McAteer both position Yeats primarily in relation to the European influence of an Ibsen or Maeterlinck, James W. Flannery in W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice (1976), while paying due note to the Europeans, brings out Yeats not as the isolated writer but as theatrical collaborator with Irish theatre makers. Synge and Gregory both persuade him that the proper model for a national theatre is not a presentation of classic plays from the world repertoire but the ‘build[ing] of an Irish theatre from the ground up by giving plays to a company of Irish players’.9 Yeats had asked himself the same question as Foster: why, with his commitment to and reputation as a poet, had he insisted on being a dramatist? Immersing himself in theatrical experiment from 1899 to 1939 Yeats achieved nothing like the same acclaim or critical consensus as in his poetry. The answer is revealing: ‘I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a dramatist; I desire to show events and not merely tell of them; . . . and I seem to myself most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the one lofty occasion.’10 Yeats mentions on more than one occasion that Irish people ‘read little’11 but that they are acute listeners. The Irish Literary Theatre manifesto refers to an ‘imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion 30

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for oratory’.12 Yeats wanted to be heard by and to influence the Irish people and theatre offered him the ideal opportunity. In one of his greatest poems, ‘Adam’s Curse’, he memorably defines the business of the poet as being to ‘articulate sweet sounds together’13 and worked for many years to achieve that aim by chanting his poetry to Florence Farr’s accompaniment on the psaltery. But the theatre offered him the ideal opportunity to be heard by and to influence an Irish audience. For Yeats, there is no absolute distinction or separation between poetry and drama. Rather, they exist in a continuum from memorable words spoken or sung before an audience to the full articulation of a drama with music, design, choreography of movement and acting which yet keeps passionate speech at its centre. The title of Yeats’s Nobel lecture, ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’, identifies him even more as the founder of a movement rather than as an individual playwright. For as he stresses throughout his Nobel speech, he takes the Swedish stage flanked by two absent figures, a ‘young man’s ghost’ and ‘a living woman sinking into the infirmity of age’,14 and a great deal of his speech centres on the figures of John Synge and Augusta Gregory, as this book will. But he also finds room to mention others for, as he emphatically declares, ‘we wanted Irish plays and Irish players’ (560). They soon appeared in the form of two brothers, Frank and Willie Fay, and two sisters, Sarah and Molly Allgood. The Fays are identified in the Nobel speech as ‘our two best men actors’ (563) and embodied contrasting acting styles. Frank was drawn to poetic drama and insisted on coaching the players to speak it properly; he played Cuchulain in On Baile’s Strand, the first play Yeats wrote about the Ulster warrior. Willie Fay’s genius was for a more popular kind of comic acting; and it was he who played the Fool in the same play. Despite Yeats’s insistence that he only wrote tragedy, On Baile’s Strand exhibits a distinctive blend of tragedy and farcical comedy which may well have been suggested by the presence in the company of the two Fays and their contrasting styles of performance. Yeats was to speak late in life of how those two performances by the Fay brothers were among those ‘certain moments’ which had always ‘haunted’ him: ‘Frank Fay’s entrance in the last act of [Synge’s] The Well of the Saints; William Fay at the end of [his own] On Baile’s Strand.’15 But the brothers were more than actors of genius. They also contributed to the setting up of plays by Yeats, Synge, Gregory and others at the Abbey Theatre, Frank by coaching the players in the speaking of verse, Willie by directing. In ‘An Introduction for my Plays’ Yeats attributed the making of an Irish national theatre not primarily to himself, Synge and Gregory but described it as ‘the creation of seven people’.16 He went on to explicitly identify not just 31

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William and Frank Fay but two sisters, the players Sara Allgood and her sister Maire O’Neill (the stage name of Molly Allgood, taken to differentiate her from her sister). In the Nobel speech, Yeats singles out the Allgoods from all those amateur Irish actors who came to them, describing the sisters as ‘players of genius . . . : one all simplicity, her mind shaped by folk-song and folk-story [Sara]; the other sophisticated, lyrical and subtle [Molly]’ (563–4). Sara Allgood was to forge a particularly close relationship with Lady Gregory, in whose Spreading the News she scored an opening night triumph and displayed a gift for comedy as Mrs Fallon, the wife who stoutly defends her set-upon melancholy husband, Bartley. And there is no doubt that one of Gregory’s most powerful plays, The Gaol Gate (1906), was written for the Allgood sisters playing a mother (the matronly Sara) and daughter (Molly) coming to the prison to learn the tragic fate of their son/husband. Molly was later to become Synge’s fiancée and it was for her he wrote the major women’s parts in his last two plays, Pegeen Mike and Deirdre of the Sorrows. Molly left the Abbey shortly after Synge’s death; but Sara was to have a second coming in the plays of Sean O’Casey, in particular as the formidable Irish mother in Juno and the Paycock. James Flannery, who has written the best account of the Fays, describes the impact these four players in particular made in bringing ‘the kinetic impact of the live actor’s voice and body once again to bear in the theatre’ and so ‘to create a base for a national theatre’.17 Joseph O’Connor’s 2010 novel, Ghost Light, is centred on the relationship between Synge and Molly Allgood. What O’Connor suggests is that this relationship only became possible in the space of the Abbey Theatre, that zone of play where the rigidities enforced by Irish society became more flexible and enabled a freer intercourse between people of differing classes. That freedom was relative. Yeats grew increasingly irked at the time by the democratic vote of all the members as to what play was staged, however benign he may have grown later in life about the theatre as the ‘creation of seven people’. As he succinctly describes it in ‘The Irish Dramatic Theatre Movement’: ‘Our theatrical organization was preposterous, players and authors all sitting together and settling by vote what play should be performed and who should play it. It took a series of disturbances, weeks of argument during which no performance could be given, before Lady Gregory and John Synge and I were put in control’ (564). The use of the passive construction ‘were put’ is rather disingenuous, given Yeats’s active efforts to wrest that control for the three playwrights. The playwright Padraic Colum (who was on the original reading committee) describes how Yeats was ‘determined to create the directorate’ and so establish his ‘hegemony’; 32

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but even he concedes that Yeats was the one who gave these disparate personalities a ‘focus’ and held them to a common purpose.18

Cathleen ni Houlihan Frank and Willie Fay had assembled their company of amateur actors by 1901 but their nationalist aims, to stage Irish plays, were frustrated by the lack of same. As the playwright James Cousins reported, the Fays wanted to perform such plays ‘but apart from Boucicault and other stage-Irishmen types we cannot find any’.19 Cousins pointed them to a printing of the first act of a play on the legendary Deirdre by the poet-painter-mystic George Russell (known as AE), and brought them to meet the author, who was not only persuaded to write a second act but to design the costumes and (with Willie Fay) to paint the scenery. But even at two acts, AE’s Deirdre was still not long enough to fill an evening and the company requested a play from Yeats, which he supplied with the recently completed Cathleen ni Houlihan. The two plays went on at St Teresa’s Hall in Clarendon Street in April 1902 and attracted large, enthusiastic audiences. By the end of the year, the group founded the Irish National Theatre Society with Yeats as its president. That name was to persist, since it directly acknowledged their aim to be a national theatre for Ireland, even though it was more habitually referred to by the less cumbersome shorthand of the Abbey. AE was never to write another play, despite a reasonable success for Deirdre; his true interests lay in poetry and painting. The staging of Cathleen ni Houlihan, on the other hand, began for Yeats the history of collaboration with theatre makers that was to persist throughout the rest of his life. As so often in theatre, the nature of that collaboration was not an easy one, especially when it came to the matter of credit. For what has become increasingly apparent in recent years is that Yeats was not sole author of the one play of his which has, in his own words, ‘been constantly revived, and has, I imagine, been played more often than any other’.20 James Pethica has definitively established that Lady Gregory did not just ‘translate’ a play solely written by Yeats in his high poetic and overtly symbolic style into the dialect of her native Kiltartan area. Rather, all of the play up to the entrance of Cathleen into the peasant cottage almost half way through was, in Gregory’s words, ‘ “mine alone” ’ and all that followed was co-written ‘ “with W.B.Y” ’.21 To say that Gregory wrote all of the peasant dialect sections of the play with Yeats assuming sole responsibility for the gnomic and suggestive utterances 33

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of the old woman is tempting but ultimately too crude a distinction. As Pethica points out, the ‘profoundly divergent styles’ of the two playwrights are ‘successfully integrated’ in the play, never more so than in its ‘fusion of realistic and supernatural or symbolic elements’.22 Cathleen ni Houlihan, then, represents the first staging of a play by Lady Gregory, albeit in collaboration. The fact of their co-authorship has recently been made explicit in both of their collected plays. What precluded acknowledgement of this for many years was Yeats’s persistent and peculiarly emphatic insistence on sole ownership/authorship of the play. In the Nobel speech, he refers to the performance at the Royal Theatre of ‘my Cathleen ni Houlihan’ (emphasis mine) (556) and in one of his very last poems, ‘The Man and the Echo’, poses a question which manages to mix both self-praise and self-blame: ‘Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?’23 Lady Gregory, given her admiration for Yeats and the fact that the play was the one whose title could quieten the Playboy rioters (‘the author of Cathleen ni Houlihan addresses you’24), was initially happy to go along and acquiesce in the suppression of her major contribution to its authorship. But as time went by she grew increasingly irked by this and made more vocal claims about her authorship. When Gregory stepped into the role at short notice in 1919, was her one and only theatrical performance; self-deprecatingly, she said that all the part needed was a ‘ “hag and a voice” ’.25 Yeats’s response to Gregory’s moving in and taking over the part of Cathleen, the one section of the play indisputably his, was distinctly chilly. As an old woman, a ‘hag’, playing the role, Lady Gregory might have seemed like ideal casting as the iconic Poor Old Woman. But at the end of the play Cathleen ni Houlihan changes into ‘a young girl’.26 This bodily transformation occurs offstage and is reported by the twelve-year-old son of the household, Patrick. The part of Cathleen was played at its premiere in April 1902 by another iconic Irishwoman who was not a professional actor, Maud Gonne. Yeats had pleaded with Gonne to play the part of the Countess Cathleen in 1899, a role she had inspired; but she had just as persistently refused. On this occasion, she agreed and made her one and only stage appearance to stunning effect, as actor Máire Nic Shiúbhlaigh recounts: ‘How many who were there that night will forget the Kathleen ni Houlihan of Maud Gonne, her rich golden hair, willow-like figure, pale sensitive face and burning eyes.’27 Yeats’s own comments confirm how much of the uncanny effect of Gonne in the part derived from the younger woman looking through the made-up mask of old age: ‘The most beautiful woman of her time, when she played my Cathleen, “made up” centuries old.’28 34

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Maud Gonne was singularly apt casting as Cathleen, given how much she had contributed to the creation of the part. The play is set in 1798, with the landing of the French at Killala and the start of the ill-fated insurrection. Gonne had drawn Yeats into, in his biographer’s words, ‘the business of commemorating [the centenary of] 1798 and inaugurating a new age of revolution’;29 this was arguably the high point of Yeats’s direct involvement in nationalist politics, though the ‘lure’ (his phrase) remained Gonne. There is a direct line of continuity between her involvement in Cathleen ni Houlihan and the theatrical nature of Maud Gonne’s appearance on political platforms, preaching violent revolution and embodying the role of Mother Ireland. Maire nic Shiubhlaigh’s description captures this performative double focus: ‘Watching her, one could readily understand the reputation she enjoyed as the most beautiful woman in Ireland, the inspiration of the whole revolutionary movement . . . She was the very personification of the figure she portrayed on the stage.’30 Gonne not only appeared in the play but helped to produce it under the auspices of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), a women’s group which performed plays in Irish and English, musical and dancing events (céilí), and tableaux vivantes on Irish themes, the latter under the direction of Willie Fay. In Chapter  8, Paige Reynolds quotes a remark by his brother Frank on ‘the variety of performances and spectacles that successfully fostered a shared feeling of national identity among the native Irish . . . : commemorations, parades, readings, and recitations, staged competitions of music and dance, and tableaux vivants’. If Lady Gregory’s contribution to the writing of the stage play has until recently been erased or suppressed, so too has this feminist involvement in the producing of Cathleen ni Houlihan.31 To what extent are these gender conflicts that surrounded the staging of Cathleen ni Houlihan to be found in the work itself? The play fits in to the ‘stranger in the house’ motif discussed in the last chapter. The Poor Old Woman is identified on more than one occasion as a member of the fairy forces, designed to disrupt and disturb the Gillane household on the eve of a wedding: ‘Is she right, do you think? Or is she a woman from beyond the world?’ (225) But whereas the fairy was a child in Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire, here it is a full-grown woman with a cultural memory stretching back centuries. And the roistering male figure of Casadh an tSúgáin is replaced by a woman who takes the sexual initiative and boasts of her many ‘lovers’. She puts the ‘come hither’ on Michael Gillane, the young man of the household about to be married, but assures him in a line simultaneously prudish and sexually provocative: ‘With all the lovers that brought me their love I never 35

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set out the bed for any’ (226). It becomes clear by the end of the play that Michael has transferred allegiances from his fiancée Delia Cahel to an espousal of Cathleen’s cause, the romantic version of nationalism. The dramatic advance of Cathleen ni Houlihan in Yeats’s development is evident in the relationship to the audience. If his two earlier plays were ‘tapestry’ which remained intact but dramatically inert within their frame and asked to be admired for their artistry, the new play set up a complex dynamic between the people on stage and those in the audience. Maud Gonne was a figure who usually addressed an audience from a political platform; and the feature of her casting as Cathleen meant that her appeal was as much directed outwards into the auditorium as it was to the listeners in the Gillane household. This complex interaction worked to break down the strict separation between stage and audience and to make for an allencompassing drama, a greater fluidity in the relationship. The audience of Cathleen ni Houlihan has the advantage of the Gillanes because they are more ready and able to interpret the political allegory, to read the strange woman’s gnomic utterances in nationalist terms. But this was to rob the drama of a necessary uncertainty and to overprivilege the figure of Cathleen. The truer interpretation may well have been the onstage one, as to whether this was a flesh-and-blood old woman subject to delusions. In future, in such dramas as The Playboy of the Western World, the offstage audience would share the same uncertainty of response as those onstage: was Christy Mahon a father-slaying hero or a craven imposter? And this uncertainty of response would help to spark unease and even riots. Synge’s Maurya in Riders to the Sea is a real poor old woman who has lost her actual sons. But it is impossible entirely to extirpate the symbolic resonance of such a figure. The act of placing a woman on an Irish stage would always suggest a symbolic and political resonance, that she was representing Ireland and that her actions should at least in part be interpreted in that light. Similarly, if you place an Irishman on stage, he will always to some degree be a Stage Irishman. The dramatists soon learned that their work would benefit from these representational issues being confronted.

On Baile’s Strand Written and staged for the opening night of the Abbey Theatre, On Baile’s Strand marks a further development in Yeats’s dramaturgy. It is the first of the five plays he was to write in a dramatic cycle about the Ulster warrior 36

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Cuchulain. Since it ends with the drowning of his lead character the subsequent plays Yeats wrote have to seek out earlier episodes from the narratives Lady Gregory had gathered and translated as Cuchulain of Muirhemne (ensuring she still had some role in the creation of the heroic plays). In the high-flown exchanges between Cuchulain the warrior and Conchubar the high king, with the latter enjoining the former to take an oath of political allegiance, the medium is not dialect but Shakespearean blank verse. This, and other related features of On Baile’s Strand such as its deployment of a plot and subplot, raises the role that Shakespeare was to play in the Irish Dramatic Revival. In May 1901, five months before the final season of the Irish Literary Theatre, Yeats visited Stratford-upon-Avon to view a season of Shakespeare’s history plays. He had in mind the Irish national theatre that was then forming, a concern which surfaces in ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, the essay he wrote about the visit. It is the direct theatrical experience which moves him most: I have seen this week King John, Richard II, the second part of Henry IV, Henry V, the second part of Henry VI, and Richard III played in their right order . . . ; and partly because of a spirit in the place, and partly because of the way play supports play, the theatre has moved me as it has never done before.32 In this theatrical encounter is the germ and suggestion for Yeats to write his own cycle of plays, a process begun with On Baile’s Strand. It may seem that, in choosing the ‘ancient idealism’ of Irish myth, Yeats is deliberately avoiding and sidestepping the dividedness of Irish history. But contemporary Irish politics is going to have its influence on the struggles represented in the Cuchulain cycle, however remote they might at first seem. As Michael McAteer points out, the radically divergent theatrical styles deployed throughout the five Cuchulain plays derive in part from ‘the necessity of attending to distinctive historical circumstances in which the various plays of the cycle were written and performed’.33 The shape, the theatrical form of a Yeats play, is going to be considerably different from that of a Shakespeare play. In place of a five-act structure, Yeats aims for the compression of a oneact, wishing to turn back the clock on the multifariousness of the Renaissance in favour of the rigorous simplicity of medieval drama. The Shakespeare play at Stratford-on-Avon in 1901 which most draws Yeats’s interest is Richard II and in particular the contrast, or as he describes 37

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it the ‘antithesis’, between two human types: ‘Richard II, “sentimental”, “weak”, “selfish”, “insincere”, and Henry V, “Shakespeare’s only hero” ’.34 Yeats is careful here to place the terms describing Richard in quotation marks, because he wishes to promote the ‘failure’ of the former as more admirable than the ‘success’ of the latter. In so doing, he is constructing a political allegory, with the sensitive failure of Ireland overcome by the Machiavellian force of England: ‘he made his king fail because he [Richard II] had certain qualities that are uncommon in all ages’.35 Yeats battens on his father’s friend, Edward Dowden, Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin, a Unionist in politics and author of a book on Shakespeare: ‘He lived in Ireland, where everything has failed, and he meditated frequently upon the perfection of character which had, he thought, made England successful.’36 That antithesis between ‘failure’ and ‘success’ is played out dramatically in On Baile’s Strand. As Declan Kiberd puts it, Yeats ‘reimagined the contest between Richard and Bolingbroke as the clash between Cuchulain and Conchubar, “a wise man who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from his place” ’.37 He pits King Conchubar, who wishes to secure a settled society for his children, against the radically anarchic individualism of the warrior, who proclaims: ‘I’ll not be bound./I’ll dance or hunt, or quarrel or make love,/Wherever and whenever I’ve a mind to.’38 Cuchulain is eventually persuaded to curb his excesses and take an oath of loyalty to the king. This process may be seen as inevitable but the consequences for Cuchulain are tragic. No sooner has he sworn allegiance than he is forced to take arms against a young warrior from Scotland and slay him. Equally inevitably, the young man turns out to be his son. On Baile’s Strand is not just the straightforward tragedy this might suggest. Rather, its strikingly modernist style is an audacious combination of tragedy and farce. When the play opens we are confronted not with the heroic images of the two Ulster warriors but with the grotesque and comic Fool and Blind Man, who may be said to shadow the two protagonists. In this development, Yeats was drawing on his interpretation of what the subplot contributes to a Shakespearean play. In his 1903 essay on the subject, ‘Emotion of Multitude’, he writes that ‘the Shakespearian drama gets the emotion of multitude out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as the shadow upon the wall copies one’s body in the firelight’.39 Yeats wonderfully exemplifies his meaning with reference to King Lear where ‘Lear’s shadow is in Gloucester, who also has ungrateful children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond shadow, till it has pictured the world.’40 If there is then a mirroring effect between the two plots 38

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which is potentially endless, there is also a mirroring effect throughout society: the main plot extends beyond the royal family at the centre of traditional society ‘and work[s] itself out in more ordinary men and women’.41 At the beginning of an Irish national theatre, Yeats’s desire under this Shakespearean influence to have a play containing both a plot and a subplot also doubles the usual length for his one-act plays. What is so notable and distinctive about Yeats’s handling of the subplot is how it refuses to stay within bounds, even from the very beginning. The Fool and the Blind Man enter the ‘great hall at Dundealgan’ (459) because it is empty and because they wish to forage for food while the nobles are away. Although two separate people, their physical disabilities require a high degree of bodily interdependence: the Fool leads the Blind Man on stage while relying on him for direction since ‘[t]here’s nobody with two eyes in his head that is as clever as you are’ (459). As in Shakespeare, the subplot among the more ordinary men and women is in prose, not blank verse, and although Yeats eschews dialect, the bantering exchanges between his two comic types reveal the benefits of his dramatic experiment with Lady Gregory. The Blind Man gropes his way to the throne, takes his seat and proceeds to play the role of King Conchubar: ‘He will sit up in this chair and he’ll say: “Take the oath, Cuchulain, I bid you take the oath” ’ (463–5). This move automatically positions the Fool in the place of Cuchulain and his reply manages to verbally fuse both roles: ‘I will not. I’ll take no oath. I want my dinner’ (465). This metadramatic development also clearly references the tavern scene in Henry IV Part One (a history play which Yeats had not seen at Stratford) when Prince Hal and Falstaff take it in turn to perform the confrontation scene between an irate King and his wayward son. The difference here is that the Fool and the Blind Man have usurped both roles simultaneously and in the absence of any of the royal characters. As the play unfolds, this mirroring of the two pairs is developed, with Conchubar at one stage chiding Cuchulain for thinking ‘that a fancy lighter than the air,/A whim of the moment, has more matter in it’ (507) than the oath. When Cuchulain goes out to kill the young Scottish warrior, the rest of the court follows and the stage is once more unoccupied and free for the Fool and Blind Man to return. What this indicates is not just a mirroring but a reversal. Effectively it frames the Cuchulain-Conchubar exchange, the overtly mythic and tragic conflict in Shakespearean blank verse, as a playwithin-the-play outflanked by the farcical drama of the Fool and the Blind Man. The latter at least in part sets the terms through which the ‘serious’ drama will be interpreted, with a strain of farce coloring what follows on 39

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stage between the heroic personae. The subplot occupies almost half the entire play as well as providing the interpretative frame. As Michael McAteer puts it when referring to ‘the tension between tragedy and farce’ in the Cuchulain cycle, there is a deliberate interrogation of King Conchubar’s political ‘power through the medium of farce’.42 But this idea of the farcical subplot undercutting and placing in question the tragic concerns of the main plot, still suggests that these two dramatic worlds do so through juxtaposition while remaining in their own separate spaces. What the play demonstrates instead is how all such distinctions break down when both plot and subplot are forced to occupy the same stage space. Chris Morash and Shaun Richards note when discussing On Baile’s Strand that what ‘distinguishes Yeats’s drama is its constant experimentation with the space staged and the space evoked as he sought to transcend realism’.43 Here, the tragic is forced to enter the play on farcical grounds when Cuchulain reenters holding his unsheathed sword and, taking some of the Fool’s chicken feathers, begins to wipe the blood off it. The Fool inadvertently reveals that the young man Cuchulain has just slain is his own son. When the griefstricken champion runs out, the two comic characters are once more left in sole possession of the stage and remain so to the very end. It may well be that, as McAteer argues, the Abbey’s resources were not up to staging the climactic sword fight between Cuchulain and his son; and so it had to be moved off stage.44 But at the play’s climax the onstage space is taken up with the Fool’s delicate miming of Cuchlulain’s sword fight with the waves in a way which is dramatically more progressive, more the surrealism of Jarry’s Ubu Roi than the sturm and drang of Wagner’s Ring Cycle:45 ‘O! he is fighting the waves! . . . There, he has struck at a big one! He has struck the crown off it’ (524). It is a strikingly modernist ending, with no return of the established order (however decimated), as at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but with the minor characters (the lords of misrule) continuing to dominate.

Deirdre Writing a stage version of the Deirdre legend became something of a rite of passage for Irish male playwrights. And yet none of these mythic plays entirely fitted in to the theatre for which they were written. AE had begun the process in 1902 by completing his version for the Fay brothers and so helping to usher the Irish Dramatic Revival into existence. But it was to be 40

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his only play; the production of it did not persuade AE to continue to write for the stage but to return to poetry and painting. Synge was to follow The Playboy of the Western World with a three-act version of Deirdre of the Sorrows, but though he laboured on it from September 1907 for eighteen months, it remained unfinished at the time of his death on 24 March 1909. The version of Synge’s play that was eventually staged at the Abbey in January 1910 was a posthumous collaboration between Yeats, Gregory, the dead playwright and his fiancée, Molly Allgood, for whom he had written the part. Yeats’s version is the most theatrically accomplished of the three. It was staged at the Abbey in November 1906 but its staging brought out tensions surrounding how Yeats felt his drama did, or rather did not, fit into the developing Abbey style, tensions that were in the end to drive him away from the theatre he had co-founded. These difficulties can best be approached through gender issues in the play. In On Baile’s Strand, the dramatis personae are almost exclusively male, for all that they are divided between the tragic and the farcical. Deirdre, by its very title, places a woman at the centre of the drama. Synge was to write a three-act play which covers the three phases of the Deirdre narrative – a first act where the beautiful young woman meets and elopes with the young warrior Naoise, fleeing the jealous attentions of the aged High King Conchubar; a period of exile in Alba (Scotland); and a third act where the two lovers are wooed back to undergo separation and death. Yeats characteristically opts for dramatic compression. His version comes in on the final act as Deirdre and Naoise arrive back in Ireland to what they increasingly realise is their extinction. Conchubar succinctly phrases the drama’s kernel: ‘One woman and two men; that is the quarrel/That knows no mending.’46 To focus that perennial drama, Yeats has eliminated Naoise’s two brothers, who are present in Synge’s version and in the Irish prose legend, ‘Deirdre and the Sons of Usna’. The play must find room for Fergus, the displaced king who lures them back and whose trust in Conchubar is sorely misplaced. But Yeats has balanced the elimination of the two sons of Usna with three women, no part of the original legend but a significant addition to and development of his dramaturgy. They are first onstage before a nervous Fergus arrives to see that everything is in order. Within the naturalistic frame of the drama, they identify themselves as ‘wanderers’ (345) of the roads, Yeats’s own version of the tramp characters Synge was developing, here significantly recast as women. They do not, however, arrive as fully fledged dramatic characters, ‘strangers in the house’ to disrupt the environment they enter, as in earlier Revival plays. Rather, they are characterised in the dramatis personae as 41

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‘musicians’ who enter bearing stringed instruments. During the course of Deirdre, they will sing lyrics that engage from a different, more abstract perspective with the key themes of the play: love and death. In this, they anticipate Yeats’s move towards a form of the Japanese Noh drama and away from the representational, however heightened and symbolic. But they are also a form of the Greek chorus, who do not directly interact with the drama but provide a perspective which recalls what has been and prophesies what will come. The First Musician identifies their primary dramatic function as storytellers in her very first line – ‘I have a story right, my wanderers’ (345). In so doing, she indicates that Yeats’s movement away from a representational norm is also a more direct engagement with the act and process of storytelling which this study argues is at the heart of Irish drama. They tell the story of Deirdre which, although not yet completed, is already becoming a myth: the growing beauty of Deirdre, the love of Naoise, the jealousy of Conchubar. This deployment of the musicians as storytellers allows Yeats to keep open the various narrative possibilities which the different Gaelic versions had entertained: for example, the question of who had taken the sexual lead in the courtship between the two lovers: ‘Naoise, the son of Usna, climbed up there,/And having wooed, or, as some say, been wooed,/Carried her off.’ (346). And as the story’s denouement unfolds, it plays with the question of whether Deirdre will live with Conchubar beyond the death of her lover, as the most radical Gaelic version described, before opting for the two lovers to die in quick succession. The musician/storytellers who set the scene do not give way entirely when Deirdre, Naoise and Conchubar arrive but rather remain on stage to engage in and contribute to the construction of the story they will ultimately transmit. Deirdre arrives to find herself, a solitary woman in the play’s scenario, surrounded by warrior men who spend a great deal of time conversing in homosocial terms about a warrior’s honour. Even Naoise is moved to say: ‘I have [Conchubar’s] word and I must take that word,/Or prove myself unworthy of my nurture/Under a great man’s roof ’ (355). The most frequent image with which she is associated is a bird trapped in a cage, with only limited and highly compromised options for survival. But Deirdre is not alone on that stage. Three other women are also present and when the men are absent can make common cause along gender lines. As they repeatedly reassure her, in their presence Deirdre can ‘speak freely’ (359), something which is not possible within the partriarchal discourse constructed by the men. They tell her of the marriage bed that has been prepared for her by Conchubar and, when she learns of this, there is a crucial exchange of 42

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objects: the musicians supply the knife with which she will kill herself and she entrusts them with her bracelet as a token to ensure they do not betray her legacy: ‘All through your wanderings, the doors of kings/Shall be thrown wider open, the poor man’s hearth/Heaped with new turf, because you are wearing this [Gives Musician a bracelet.]/To show that you have Deirdre’s story right’ (377). The casting of the part of Deirdre caused deep divisions within the Abbey. Yeats was happy enough with the male actors taking the other leading roles – Frank Fay was to play Naoise – but, for all of his praise of the two sisters as ‘players of genius’ decades later, he objected strongly to Fay’s proposed casting of Sarah Allgood as Deirdre. As Michael McAteer puts it, ‘Yeats rejected this [proposed casting], however, distinguishing Deirdre from the “peasant work” of Gregory and Synge.’47 He was happy enough to have the Allgood sisters play two of the three Musicians. But for the part of Deirdre, claiming that ‘it is almost impossible for us to find a passionate woman actress in Ireland’,48 he wanted to import an actor from England, Florence Darragh (who ironically was Irish) who had impressed him as Wilde’s Salomé. His insistence on this casting, and the two-tiered hierarchy it introduced to the Abbey, had much to do with the departure of the Fay brothers from the company in January 1908. In the event, Darragh was a disaster, even in Yeats’s eyes, her florid acting style standing out awkwardly on the Abbey stage. It was only when Mrs Patrick Campbell played the part the following year that Yeats was satisfied. He described her acting in a letter to his father as ‘a kind of magnificent hysteria’49 and dedicated the published version of the play to her for the ‘generosity of her genius [in playing] my Deirdre in Dublin and London with the Abbey Company, as well as with her own people’ (344). Synge wrote his version of Deirdre in part at least to impress Yeats by showing him that ‘a passionate woman actress from Ireland’ like Molly Allgood could perform the role. Even when viewing Molly’s performance the year after Synge’s death, and even after all of their collaboration in constructing the play, Yeats remained equivocal. After the opening night, he remarked that ‘Miss O’Neill [Molly Allgood] had personal charm, pathos, distinction even, fancy, beauty, but never passion’;50 by the following night, he felt she ‘had so much improved her performance that I begin to think she may have some real tragic power’.51 But he never entirely removed the question mark hovering over these responses to Molly Allgood’s performance as Deirdre. The vexed issue of who was to play the title role has a direct bearing on Yeats’s play itself, because in Michael McAteer’s words ‘Deirdre becomes her 43

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own performance, ultimate synthesis of the performative elements unifying the play.’52 The three women musicians apply their ‘raddle’ (354) as make-up to Deirdre in order to instil a confidence she may not feel, to supply the missing colour in her cheeks. The net effect of wearing the make-up and beautiful jewellery to meet the High King is to induce a profound self-division, so that ‘[m]yself wars on myself ’ (354). Nor is she content to be a beautiful object, the one which Conchubar covets throughout, but to speak out against what is being done to her in whatever way she can. She consciously deploys what she knows will be regarded as traditional feminine wiles in order to provoke Naoise to jealous retaliation against the High King. After he has had Naoise killed, Conchubar is surprised by Deirdre’s calm, having expected her to behave like a bad actress: ‘I thought that you would curse me and cry out,/And fall upon the ground and tear your hair’ (383). Instead, she channels Lady Macbeth and assails his masculinity when he is slow to let her view the corpse, lest she take her own life: ‘He has refused. There is no sap in him; . . . /He has refused me the first thing I have asked –/Me, me, his wife’ (386). Finally, she threatens him with the one weapon she possesses, her body, and asks that she be strip searched. In the face of all this, Conchubar concedes and Deirdre makes her final exit. Yeats’s Deirdre also makes several verbally explicit references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Fergus in his role as councillor to the High King is as fussy as Polonius; Conchubar has Claudius’s sexual arrogance. But where is Hamlet to be found? Only two dimensionally in Naoise. The tragic centre of the play is not a man but a woman, more in the vein of Greek than Shakespearean tragedy, a woman who is described throughout as ‘a queen’ even though she is never married to the High King. Deirdre and Cathleen ni Houlihan, who has ‘the walk of a queen’, are aristocrats of the spirit , their kingdom that of the wild places and among the disenfranchised of the roads rather than in any gilded palace or bourgois order.

At the Hawk’s Well As James Flannery has pointed out, from 1906 until 1929, ‘no new plays were written by Yeats specifically for the Abbey Theatre Company’.53 The exception, as he notes, is The Green Helmet of 1908. Ostensibly another play in the Cuchulain cycle initiated with On Baile’s Strand, the play neither works well as a contributory part of the cycle nor as a stand-alone piece. The tone is satirical, the style a discordant jumble of theatrical modes Yeats was interested in, and the piece itself (as Michael McAteer rightly describes it) 44

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‘crowded and noisy [as] charioteers, stable boys and scullions jostle and roar, drowning out Cuchulain’s shouting at one point’.54 Most commentators have read this as a metatheatrical commentary on the riots over Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World the previous year. Although Yeats won the battle in addressing the turbulent crowds in the theatre and winning an audience both for Synge’s play and its issues, in the longer term it convinced him that the future of his drama did not lie in the theatre he had helped to co-found. In 1919, Yeats wrote what he termed ‘An Open Letter’ to Lady Gregory in which he reviewed the first fifteen years of the Abbey Theatre. He believed these had been both a success and a failure. What they had succeeded in creating is what he terms ‘A People’s Theatre’ which he defines as the building up of a repertoire in which the majority of the members of an audience can expect to see a dramatic representation of the lives they lead, the people they know and the language they speak. He describes such a drama as ‘the making articulate of all the dumb classes each with its own knowledge of the world, its own dignity, but all objective’.55 But as he goes on to remark ruefully: ‘we did not set out to create this sort of theatre and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat’.56 In the opposite camp of ‘Subjective’ dramatists who write from their ‘own thought and passion, observing little and using little, if at all, the conversation of [their] time’,57 he placed Synge, Gregory and himself. In relation to Gregory, Yeats insists that she finds a welcome in the Abbey Theatre to the extent that she is a writer of comedy. (Gregory will dispute this categorisation, as we will see in Chapter 5.) And Synge they have at least hated. When you and Synge find such an uneasy footing, what shall I do there [i.e. in the Abbey Theatre] who have never observed anything, or listened with an attentive ear, but value all I have seen or heard because of the emotions they call up or because of something they remind me of that exists, as I believe, beyond the world?58 These comments of 1919 are being shaped by the discovery Yeats has made in the decade since the death of Synge, his refashioning of the Japanese Noh theatre into a dramaturgically apposite set of theatrical conventions for conveying his own distinctive vision. After the death of Synge, Yeats continued to work in the Abbey on increasingly innovative ways of staging the plays he had written. Particularly 45

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noteworthy is his collaboration with designer-artist Gordon Craig which led to his endowing the Fool and the Blind Man in On Baile’s Strand with masks and replacing conventional scenery with a series of monochromatic movable screens. But neither innovation sat well on the Abbey stage or with the players, and by 1912 Yeats had had enough. His remove from the Abbey at that point also coincided with a more widespread removal from Ireland. He decided to rent a cottage in England and share its space with the young American poet, Ezra Pound. Yeats would still assiduously read scripts submitted to the Abbey Theatre; but the running of the Theatre effectively passed to the young Cork playwright Lennox Robinson and Lady Gregory, with Yeats assuming a more executive position. While in Stone Cottage, Yeats started a prose autobiography. But his more frequent daily activity was to write a series of essays and elaborate notes to Lady Gregory’s last and most substantial collection of folklore, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. While Yeats was working at this, Pound was working in tandem on another writerly obligation to a widow: putting in order the materials the late American scholar Ernest Fenollosa had gathered across a lifetime on the Japanese Noh theatre. Yeats came to a rapid knowledge of Noh drama and, shaping it to his own ends, plunged back into playwriting with greater zeal than ever. As Roy Foster records: ‘He began writing At the Hawk’s Well in January 1916; by 4 February he had hit upon the right form for it; by 16 February he was planning its production.’59 With the introduction of the Noh, Yeats severed his always tenuous links with naturalism; the form is avowedly artificial, overtly theatrical. Masks are worn, costumes are stylised, language is formal and poetic. Ironically, for the poet who held from the outset of his writing career that ‘words alone are certain good’,60 these plays come to climax in a dance and so, as Pound oberves, can seem unfinished until they are staged. They also draw on a range of arts, ‘verse, ritual, music and dance’, all of which work together to ‘help in keeping the door . . . against a pushing world’,61 as Yeats writes in ‘Certain Noble Plays of Japan’. In discussing the wearing of masks on the Noh stage, Pound notes that, though very different to what we are accustomed to on western stages, ‘it is a theatre of which both Mr. Yeats and Mr. Craig may approve’.62 This comment indicates the extent to which the discovery of the Noh enabled Yeats to carry through on a reformation of the conventional western stage he had long contemplated. For example, in relation to scenery, it favoured extreme minimalism. Yeats’s plays for dancers do and did not require any elaborate scenery or lighting. Much has been made of the fact that the premiere was staged by a fashionable aristocrat, Lady Cunard, in 46

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April 1916; but less of the fact that it could be staged in the natural light and setting of a drawing-room (or that the premiere was designed to raise funds for charity). The setting is provided by the three musicians who are a central feature of each of the plays. They can be seen to develop from the three-woman chorus in Deirdre; but where the latter intervened to supply the tragic heroine with the fatal dagger, the three women in the dance plays take no part in the action. In At the Hawk’s Well the First Musician comes to the front, holding a cloth which the other two unfold to reveal ‘on the black cloth . . . a gold pattern suggesting a hawk’,63 one of the central images of the play. While at one level the Noh may have seemed to be pandering to the ornamental and a laying-on of effects, the reverse was more the case, since it enabled Yeats to aim for a greater simplicity and intimacy in his staging. As Roy Foster writes: ‘WBY was determined on austerity: written in a kind of free verse, the play was cut down, draft after draft, to remove descriptive passages and focus on a single metaphor, as deliberate as the echoing rhythm of line in Chinese and Japanese painting.’64 The opening lines of the First Musician attest to this leaner, more stripped and austere verbal style: ‘I call to the eye of the mind/A well long choked up and dry/And boughs long stripped by the wind’ (399). The musicians remain present throughout ‘and accompany movement with drum and gong, or deepen the emotion of the word with zither or flute’.65 In effect, they are the play’s storytellers and as such are a reminder that, however far Yeats may have wandered from the idea of an Irish theatre, it was never entirely absent from his mind. Even as he rehearsed the play in London with the dancer Michio Ito and the designer Edmund Dulac, he writes that: it pleases me to think that I am working for my own country. Perhaps some day a play in the form I am adapting for European purposes may excite once more, whether in Gaelic or in English, under the slope of Slieve-na-mon or Croagh Patrick, ancient memories; for this form has no need of scenery that runs away with money nor of a theatrebuilding.66 Fired by this idea, Yeats contacted Lady Gregory during the London rehearsals to ‘suggest that they adapt a room in the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute for plays of this kind, with masks and no scenery’. As Foster rightly observes, the ‘Noh enterprise had restored his old faith in an experimental Irish travelling theatre’.67 47

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The other link with Ireland and with Lady Gregory was supplied by his work on her collection of folklore, the source of their original collaboration. Yeats’s interest in that material was reinvigorated by his contact with the Noh, as he began to discern parallels and affinities between the two cultures. As he noted of the central situation of most of the Japanese Noh plays on which Pound was working, they hinged around ‘the meeting with god, goddess or ghost at some holy place or much-legended tomb; and god, goddess or ghost reminds me at times of our own Irish legends or beliefs’.68 Much of the folklore which Yeats and Lady Gregory gathered, and which Synge encountered on the Aran Islands, had to do with meetings between the living and the dead, a topic broached with contemporary Irish playwright Conor McPherson in this book’s final chapter. These encounters with the Otherworld informed the early Irish Revival form of the ‘stranger in the house’ plays; but those were always dramatised from the perspective of the ‘here’ rather than the ‘there’, with the supernatural visitant smuggled (as it were) into the predominantly realistic scenario. Yeats said that he went ‘to Asia for a stage convention’:69 the Noh provided a set of stage conventions for supernatural encounters, for meetings between the living and the dead that no naturalistic stage could approach. Each of the plays for dancers features characters from both worlds, human and superhuman. In the case of At the Hawk’s Well the former are the Old Man who has been waiting fifty years for the dry well to bubble up with the waters of immortality and the Young Man (later revealed as Cuchulain) who joins him for the same purpose. But there is a third character, the Guardian of the Well, symbolically linked to the hawk which has pursued the young warrior as he climbed the mountain. This figure identifies even further with the bird of prey (and identifies as female) when she casts off the cloak which has covered her and begins to dance: ‘The Guardian of the Well has begun to dance, moving like a hawk.’ (409) This is the only choreographic direction Yeats’s text supplies, beyond the fact that her ‘dance goes on for some time’. So impressed was he by Ito’s dancing he cut some of its lines to extend its length. Ito’s biographer gives this account: ‘it was in fact a modified Noh dance – tense, continuous movement with subtle variations on its monotony . . . – but its increase in tempo was more rapid than genuine Noh and the arm movement was broad and smoothly dramatic, . . . giving a feeling of a great bird’s gliding and wheeling’.70 Yeats followed the Noh in bringing the drama to its climax with a dance. But he introduced a counter-measure of anticlimax which was antithetical to the Noh. The Guardian of the Well’s dance distracts Cuchulain from hearing the waters of the well return; instead, the Young Man drops his 48

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spear ‘as if in a dream’ (410) and follows the dancer offstage. The Old Man, meanwhile, has fallen asleep; so it is left to the First Musician to announce that ‘I have heard water plash’ (410). The Young Man returns and the Old Man awakes to find that the stones are wet and that miracle has occurred in their absence. While Yeats was working on his theatrical revolution in England, simultaneously back in Ireland some of his fellow poets and playwrights were working on a political revolution. (The Abbey had presented Thomas McDonagh’s When the Dawn is Come in October 1908.) The simultaneity is uncanny, and has led Seamus Heaney to remark in regard to At the Hawk’s Well that ‘we might find an allegory of Yeats’s inner conflict at that moment of political crisis . . . It would not be hard to imagine a reading of the poem “Easter 1916” in terms of At the Hawk’s Well – Cuchulain’s heart “Enchanted to a stone,” the Old Man murmuring “England may keep faith” . ’71 The speech which most anticipates and makes the connection with the ‘terrible beauty’72 of the Easter Rising is made by the Old Man: The Woman of the Sidhe herself, . . . She is always flitting upon this mountain-side, To allure or to destroy. When she has shown Herself to the fierce women of the hills Under that shape they offer sacrifice And arm for battle. There falls a curse On all who have gazed in her unmoistened eyes; . . . It may be that she will kill your children, That you will find them, their throats torn or bloody, Or you will be so maddened that you kill them With your own hand. (407–8) This last line supplies a gloss on the tragic action which will befall the older Cuchulain in On Baile’s Strand. The passage as a whole now introduces a crucial ambivalence to the 1902 representation of Cathleen ni Houlihan, and not just because Gregory and Gonne are absent as collaborators. The service of Mother Ireland is seen as a form of bloody sacrifice leading to the horrific deaths of a younger generation. This, at least, is the Old Man’s view. For the youthful Cuchulain, the call to arms is an exaltation of the heroic life, which he rushes to embrace: ‘He comes! Cuchulain, son of Sualtim, comes!’ (412). A third perspective is provided by the chorus of musicians on both the Old and the Young Man: ‘Who but an idiot would praise/Dry stones in a well?’ (413). 49

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The Dreaming of the Bones In the same month as At the Hawk’s Well was first performed, news reached Yeats in England of the Easter Rising on 24 April 1916. It was not a development he had anticipated nor a direction he had wished for; but as the event gained its tragic momentum with the execution of the rebel leaders, including an Abbey playwright (Thomas McDonagh) and an Abbey actor (Sean Connolly), he came to realise that all had ‘changed, changed utterly’, as his poem ‘Easter 1916’ memorably phrased it.73 The events of the Easter Rising came to dominate Yeats’s thoughts. His awareness that he had missed out on the cultural and political ferment of which he had once been part would move him back to Ireland in the 1920s, with a tower in the west of Ireland where he brought his new wife and later their daughter and son, and a residence in Merrion Square where he could attend to his duties as a senator in the new Irish Free State and as a director of the Irish National Theatre. In the meantime, in 1917, he wrote another play modelled on the Japanese Noh, this time with the Easter Rising explicitly rather than implicitly as its theme. As he wrote to Lady Gregory on 12 August from his residence with Maud and Iseult Gonne in France: ‘I have finished my play. I think of calling it The Dreaming of the Bones. I have greatly improved it since you saw it – improving and adding to the lyrics and strengthening the atmosphere. Here they [presumably, Gonne mère et fille] say it is my best play. It has evidently some popular quality.’74 The time of the play is given as ‘1916’75 and the play itself precisely situates its time scheme in relation to the Easter Rising. Asked if he has ‘fought in Dublin’, the unnamed Young Man at the centre of the play replies: ‘I was in the Post Office, and if taken/I shall be put against a wall and shot’ (764). The young rebel has come to County Clare and, in the Syngean guise of an Aran Islander, is waiting to be taken to the islands and given sanctuary. The Dreaming of the Bones is the first Yeats play since Cathleen ni Houlihan to be given a precise place and a politically loaded date: 1798 and 1916. It is also written between Gregory and Gonne, its composition begun during a lengthy return to Coole Park, its revision and completion undertaken in the French home of Maud Gonne, in political exile since her separation from Major John McBride, one of the executed leaders; with his death, the widowed Gonne was free to return to Ireland. (Yeats reports that ‘Maud Gonne is no longer bitter’.)76 In the next two months, Yeats would in turn propose to and be rejected by Maud (once more free to marry) and her daughter, Iseult. Finally, he would propose to and be accepted by Georgina Hyde-Lees. Reflecting the tumult of its composition, The Dreaming of the 50

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Bones is sexually as well as politically charged. Its explicit politics reflect on another important woman in Yeats’s life and writing, Annie Horniman. It was she who had provided financial backing for the theatre movement, making possible the building of the Abbey Theatre. The wealthy Englishwoman’s philanthropy was inspired by her admiration for Yeats rather than any commitment to Ireland and she made it a condition of her support that the Abbey should avoid any overt engagement in politics.77 To a large degree this suited Yeats’s pursuit of a ‘high art’ aesthetic in the theatre; and he always consistently denounced the ‘distortions’ of propaganda. The Abbey’s relationship with Miss Horniman was always prickly; and ended in 1910, the final straw being the theatre’s failure to close for the death of King Edward VII. It is ironic, therefore, that in moving away from the Abbey (not long after Horniman withdrew as patron) Yeats should find through his experiment with the Noh a means of coming more closely to grips with Irish political history. The Dreaming of the Bones hinges, as do all of the dance plays, on an encounter between the living and the dead. In the original Noh play on which it is closely based, Nishikigi, the travelling priest encounters the ghosts of a young man and woman who, because their love remained unconsummated while alive, are condemned to endlessly repeat their frustrated wooing while dead, she by weaving a cloth, he by leaving an ever accumulating pile of love tokens at her door. The pity evoked in the listener by the story brings their love to a fruition symbolised by a change of costume and the climactic dance. Yeats complicates the love story by adding a political and historical dimension. These are not just any adulterous lovers but the ghosts of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla, who brought the Normans into Ireland. These lovers, the ‘callersin of the alien from overseas,/ . . . are alone,/ Being accursed’ (769–70). Since the lovers resolutely refuse the first person and tell the young rebel the story of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla as a third-person narrative, it only slowly emerges that they are ghosts and these ghosts in particular. The form in which the lovers tell that story, both verbal and physical, draws directly on Yeats’s occult experiments, which he had renewed during his time in England at Stone Cottage (and through which he first met his wife-to-be). As he writes in a note on The Dreaming of the Bones: ‘The conception of the play is derived from the world-wide belief that the dead dream back, for a certain time, through the more personal thoughts and deeds of life.’78 In his prose philosophy A Vision, Yeats describes the process whereby the spirit of someone who has just died ‘in the Dreaming Back . . . is compelled to live over and over again the events that had most moved it; 51

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there can be nothing new; but the old events stand forth in a light which is dim or bright according to the intensity of the passion that accompanied them’.79 The dramatic scenario of the ‘dreaming back’ envisages people who are forced to relive the details of their life, bathed in the retrospective light of everything that has occurred since and with the moral burden of much greater knowledge than the ignorance they could claim at the time. That consciousness of guilt is enacted in the endlessly repeated dance in which the dead lovers strive to kiss: ‘but when he has bent his head/Close to her head, or hand would slip in hand,/The memory of their crime flows up between/And drives them apart’ (772). The ghost of the young man lays out the occult and political grounds of their otherwordly plight; the young woman speaks more directly in terms of empathy.80 Moved by their plight, the young rebel inquires what crime the dead lovers have committed and from the brief reply can immediately identify them as Diarmuid and Dervorgilla. The latter indicates the crucial mediating role the rebel could play ‘if somebody of their race at last would say,/“I have forgiven them”’ (773). That forgiveness, in distinct contrast with the harmonious conclusion of the Noh original Nishikigi, is immediately withheld by the IRA rebel, not just for the contemporary historical moment in which he has participated, but on into the future: ‘O, never, never,/Shall Diarmuid and Dervogilla be forgiven’ (773). The prayer offered is an unforgiving one and, as Michael McAteer has rightly recognised, refuses redemption: ‘The four Plays for Dancers emerged at a time of deep political turmoil in Ireland when historical forces appeared to be reaching a critical point. Yeats articulated this through the stress generated in . . . plays that worked within ritual drama while refusing its redeeming purpose.’81 Yeats reworked the meeting between the living and the dead in Noh drama into a confrontation between past and present. More precisely, it enabled him to draw two periods of Irish history into the same dramatic frame, one confronting the other in a dialogue which the Young Man may think he has definitively terminated but which will continue to resound for Irish audiences. The Dreaming of the Bones did not receive its first staging until December 1931 but the place was significant: the Abbey Theatre. For in the last decade of his life Yeats was to return to the theatre he had co-founded for the staging of his plays. Chapter 7 will discuss the final decade of Yeats’s life (and of this study) as he brings his experiments once more before a Dublin audience in a series of plays of an unparalleled variety and range of dramatic styles.

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CHAPTER 3 THE IMPACT OF J.M. SYNGE

The making of a playwright The meeting between W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge in Paris in December 1896 has become legendary and is seen as ‘one of the key moments in the history of Irish drama’.1 Yeats was thirty-one, an established poet and the founder of a burgeoning Irish literary revival; Synge was twenty-four and wished to become a writer but, as Yeats put it in his famous account of their meeting, had ‘nothing to show but one or two poems and impressionistic essays’.2 On this or another occasion (even that is not certain), Yeats claims to have given Synge some crucial advice on his artistic development and direction: ‘Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine . . . Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.’3 It might be truer to say that the life on Aran had found expression, in the rich oral literature in the Irish language which Synge encountered there, but not in English and not in print. Synge went to the Aran Islands annually from 1898 to 1902, staying principally on the middle island, Inishmaan, and for a number of weeks on each occasion. It was there he not only worked on his spoken Irish but encountered the dialect, an English closely modelled on the syntax and turns of phrase of Irish, which was to form the language of his plays. The storytellers he sought out on the islands relayed the folk narratives which supplied the dramatic kernel of three of his subsequent plays. But while no amount of demythologising can ever completely do away with Yeats’s advice and its outcome, the process was a good deal more complex and drawn out than his account suggests. Synge had gone to Trinity College, Dublin, from 1889 to 1892 where his degree included Irish and Hebrew, the subjects traditionally taken by Protestants preparing for the ministry, who would frequently end up proselytising in foreign parts or to Irish-speaking natives. By this point, Synge’s Christian beliefs had lapsed; but he may well have wanted the cover of this degree to keep his family happy. An uncle, the Reverend Alexander Synge, had preceded him on the Aran Islands fifty years before, as a

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missionary; but when his nephew went there on the first of his annual visits in 1898, it was to be converted rather than to convert. Synge had begun to study music at Dublin’s Royal Irish Academy and in 1894 went to Germany to further his studies of violin and piano. There, he underwent the first of his ‘conversion’ experiences when he suddenly made the profound decision to give up the study of music for that of literature.4 The usual reason given is that he suffered from nerves as a performer and realised he would never be a musician of the first rank. But Synge continued to play and brought his violin with him to the Aran Islands where his playing lessened the communication gap he experienced with the islanders. His notes reveal how often he used musical terms in the construction of his plays. But that year in Germany also provided his introduction to drama, since none of his family ever attended the theatre, even when his own plays came to be produced at the Abbey in the following decade. There, Synge read the plays of Ibsen (in German) and attended productions of works by Goethe and Schiller: an invaluable introduction to the idea of a national theatre.5 He also drafted a play (set back in Ireland) of which only an outline remains. Yeats’s advice suggests that there is an either/or distinction between the study of European drama and the writing of an Irish literature. But what if Synge went to the Aran Islands with a copy of Racine’s plays in his back pocket, as the contemporary Irish playwright Frank McGuinness has suggested?6 He had pursued a course of self-directed studies during his years in Paris, primarily at the Sorbonne, notably with the great Celtic scholar Professor Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville on ‘the civilisation of Ireland compared with that of Homer’. Synge displayed throughout his studies a strong preference for comparative literature and began to develop a series of cultural parallels between Irish and other societies which would equip him to lay out the template for a national theatre, securely Irish in its sources yet nourished by an awareness of parallels with world literature. When Yeats gave Synge the famous advice, no Irish national theatre was yet in place. The meeting between Yeats and Lady Gregory at which the first plans for the Irish Literary Theatre were discussed did not take place for another twenty months. The writing that Yeats thought would emerge from Synge’s annual sojourns on Aran was to form a prose account of life on the islands, as indeed it proved with The Aran Islands.7 Synge showed the first three quarters of his prose book to Yeats and Gregory at Coole Park in September 1901 just before his third visit to the islands, to a chorus of approval. But during these same years a no less crucial annual event to 54

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complement and interact with his visits to the Aran Islands was the annual performances in Dublin by the Irish Literary Theatre, the first signs of an incipient national theatre to which he might contribute and in which he might play a part. Synge showed a keen interest in the venture, attending both performances in 1899 and writing about them for a French publication. He was scathing about the hypocrisy of the ‘scandalised drunkards who . . . delivered moral observations in the direction of Mr. Yeats and his colleagues’8 at the stormy premiere of The Countess Cathleen. This is eerily prophetic of the row over his own Playboy of the Western World eight years later and his reaction to it. On the visit to Coole at which Synge drew such praise for the manuscript of The Aran Islands, he also submitted a two-act play for Yeats and Gregory’s approval, When the Moon has Set, which was summarily rejected. The play was the only one of Synge’s dramatic works to draw on his own background as a member of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy; but the language spoken by the young scion of the Big House (clearly modelled on Synge himself) is strained and artificial, like the prose essays he had shown Yeats in Paris. The famous Synge dialect is spoken by the servants and is much richer and more speakable than anything else in the play: ‘we were thinking it’s destroyed you’d be driving alone in the night and the great rain, and you not used to anything but the big towns of the world’.9 Synge went straight from this rejection of his first play to the Aran Islands and from there to Dublin to attend the third (and final) offering of the Irish Literary Theatre. At those performances, he was particularly taken with Douglas Hyde’s one-act play in Irish, Casadh an tSúgáin/The Twisting of the Rope, which he later wrote was the only one of the plays presented by the Irish Literary Theatre that ‘had the germ of a new dramatic form or seemed to have found any new store of the materials of drama’.10 This dramatic trope, the ‘stranger in the house’,11 which shows the peasant cottage disrupted by the arrival of an outsider, was to be developed by Synge in several of his plays. In the following summer, Synge was to write Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen, the plays that were to make his reputation. As Yeats shrewdly noted in relation to When the Moon has Set, ‘it was after its rejection by us [that] he took to peasant work’.12

Riders to the Sea ‘No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.’ 55

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It is widely accepted that Synge drew directly on the life he had experienced during his five annual sojourns on the Aran Islands in his one-act play Riders to the Sea, written in the summer of 1902. It was first staged on 25 February 1904 by the Irish National Theatre Society at the Molesworth Hall, Clarendon Street, in Dublin, with the author himself directing. What was stressed in the accounts of this first staging of the play was the authenticity of the production when it came to the clothing of the characters. Synge brought in a pair of the pampooties (a flat sandal tied with laces of rawhide) he had worn on the islands to show how they were made; Lady Gregory sent up a spinning wheel from Galway and Synge instructed the players in the delivery of his long, syntactically demanding lines and in the peculiar chant of the caoineadh or lament (‘keen’ in Hiberno-English). But the absence of those items from purchase in the streets of Dublin, and of the lament from the lived experience of the Irish actors playing the parts, showed the extent to which ‘authenticity’ and ‘reality’ were not the same thing but marked rather by distance. Indeed, the transplantation of these items from the everyday lives of the islanders to the milieu and context of an urban locale rendered them ‘exotic’ features – self-consciously theatrical props – of a consciously adopted style, one which marked its difference from the majority of the players and the audience involved in its production and reception. That exoticism became all the more marked when Riders to the Sea was part of a programme of Irish plays presented by the company at the Royalty Theatre in London the following month. This one example serves to show how the single-minded claim of ‘authenticity’ or ‘realism’ cannot long be sustained, especially in the medium of theatre. If Synge reproduces in Riders to the Sea accurate details about fishing and spinning and the phrases he had heard spoken in both languages, he is up to more than just a faithful, documentary-style reproduction of an exotic social scene. For what concerned him was the mentalité of the people among whom he sojourned. As he later wrote in a letter defending The Playboy of the Western World: ‘The story – in its ESSENCE [underlined four times] – is probable, given the psychic state of the locality.’13 This interest led him to seek and record the mythology and folklore preserved on the Aran Islands, much as Yeats and Lady Gregory did in their programme of cultural nationalism. All three were concerned to argue that a sub-stratum of preChristian pagan beliefs underlay the Irish peasants’ Catholicism and claimed their more profound allegiances. Where Yeats valorised the past, Synge wanted to represent the complex psychic makeup of the islanders he encountered in the present. 56

The Impact of J.M. Synge

In his Preface to The Playboy, Synge wrote that ‘[o]n the stage one must have reality and one must have joy’.14 In a brief and rare theorising about the arts, he made a similar claim about great writers: For a long time I have felt that Poetry roughly is of two kinds, the poetry of real life . . . and the poetry of a land of the fancy . . . But what is highest in poetry is always reached where the dreamer is leaning out to reality, or where the man of real life is lifted out of it, and in all the poets the greatest have both these elements, that is they are supremely engrossed with life, and yet with the wildness of their fancy they are always passing out of what is simple and plain.15 I would recast those necessary two kinds of poetry as the real and the mythic and will proceed to study the presence of both in ‘the psychic state of the locality’ in Riders to the Sea. That dual presence or strain can first be seen in the play through the two very different methods used by the mother and two daughters to determine whether the missing son Michael has been drowned or not. Michael, rather like Beckett’s Godot, is the absent presence who is endlessly sought by the characters onstage, the one they seek to summon and to conjure up. They have been caught between the hope that the missing family member is still alive and the dread that he has perished. Two means of investigation are pursued at the same time, one consciously, the other inadvertently. Cathleen and Nora have been given the effects of a recently drowned man in Donegal, his features rendered unrecognisable by his immersion in the sea. They send their mother after the departing son, Bartley, with the good luck prayer and the fresh loaf of bread they have forgotten to supply. With Maurya gone, they are free to examine ‘a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking’16 and are still hard pressed to say whether they are their brother’s. The conclusive proof which clinches their forensic examination is suitably empirical; they count the number of stitches in the stocking: Nora It’s the second one of the third pair I knitted, and I put up three score stitches, and I dropped four of them. Cathleen (Counts the stitches.) It’s that number is in it. (Crying out.) (15–17) If the two daughters achieve the tragic recognition of their brother’s death by the most realistic means possible, by scrutinising the quantifiable physical remains, their mother comes to the same realisation through the 57

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very different process of a supernatural vision at the well. Maurya returns from the pursuit of Bartley and enters keening (lamenting) to report that she has not only encountered a living son but also her dead one, or rather that she has seen ‘the fearfullest thing’ (19): ‘I seen Michael himself.’ What she has witnessed at the well is the crossing over from one realm to another, as the still living but about to die son Bartley meets up with the mirror image of the son Michael whose death has just been confirmed by his visionary appearance ‘with fine clothes on him, and new shoes on his feet’ (19). Synge is dramatising the process of his characters ‘getting their death’,17 a process not of instantaneous transition from the realm of the living to that of the dead but one in which the entire community is involved. Fiona Macintosh has used this elaboration of the process of dying as one of the bases of her comparison of the plays of the Irish Dramatic Revival to those of classic Greek tragedy: ‘The dead person is thus not considered to be completely “dead” for a whole month after the moment of death, but continues to exist in a state of flux somewhere between the world of the living and the world of the dead.’18 For all of its gestures towards realism, what Synge is fashioning in Riders to the Sea is a drama of ritual which sustains a valid comparison with Greek tragedy. While the two young women may at one level be engaged in an investigation of scientific exactitude when they examine the drowned man’s clothes, at another the distinctive red dresses worn on Aran, their measured movements and the proximity of the spinning wheel cannot but evoke the Fates who hold the young man’s destiny in their hands. And the powerful choric effect that is developed as Maurya begins the keen, her two daughters take it up and it is amplified as other members of the island community enter the cottage gives a sense of mythic depth to the scene, moving it beyond a ‘personal complaint for the death of one’ person to reveal the ‘passionate rage’ of ‘beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas’.19 Above all, it is the play’s disruption of chronological time that moves Riders to the Sea beyond the realm of the everyday. The stage effect of timelessness and cyclic recurrence is most fully enacted in the scene where Maurya verbally recalls the day many years before when her son Patch was drowned: I was sitting here with Bartley, and he a baby, . . . and I seen two women, and three women, and four women coming in . . . I looked out then, and there were men coming after them, and they holding a thing in 58

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the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it – it was a dry day, Nora – and leaving a track to the door. (21) As Maurya points to the door for dramatic emphasis, it opens as if at her command and a growing number of old, keening women cross the threshold. The sequence of events Maurya describes as having taken place in the past now unfolds and is enacted in the dramatic present. This effect is heightened by the deliberate repetition of Nora looking out the window and verbally echoing her mother’s account of the dripping body in the red sail. Although she may seem the tragic victim passive in the hands of an impersonal fate, Maurya’s physical and verbal gestures in the final stages of Riders to the Sea give her the metadramatic role of a director or indeed a playwright determining the action which will unfold on the stage and bringing it into being. In the dramatic world of Riders to the Sea, the distinctions between past and present collapse in the perpetual present tense of the theatre. The final scenes establish a space where the measured, hieratic movements of ritual drama have taken over from the more mundane activities of island life and the forward propulsion of plot. Bartley’s drowned body is brought on stage and given an elaborate laying out by his mother. Maurya’s moving threnody on the death of all her men culminates in the play’s final line, void of Christian consolation, Classical in its stoicism: ‘No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied’ (27).

The Shadow of the Glen ‘He’s a queer look on him for a man that’s dead.’ The other play Synge wrote in the summer of 1902, The Shadow of the Glen, was based on a folk tale he had heard from the old storyteller Pat Dirane on Inishmaan. The story has a wide provenance in Irish folklore, where it is known as ‘The Man Who Pretended to be Dead’,20 a cultural fact with which Synge was able to rebut those nationalist critics who identified the foreign and dubious ‘Widow of Ephesus’ as his source. Briefly, the folktale tells of the narrator taking shelter from the rain in a cottage where the young wife is laying out the remains of her just deceased older husband. When she goes off to fetch her lover, the dead man rises up and discloses himself as still alive, informing the narrator that he is performing this trick to confirm his suspicions about his wife. The dead man lies down again, the young woman 59

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returns with her lover, they withdraw to the bedroom, the husband takes a stick and kills the lover in a welter of blood. He does not kill his unfaithful wife because, in the patriarchal scheme of things governing a traditional marriage, one does not destroy one’s own goods and chattels. The story, though Synge heard it on Aran, has a mainland setting and this enabled him to translate it from the general opening reference to the storyteller/narrator ‘travelling on foot from Galway to Dublin’21 into the very specific and detailed east coast setting of Wicklow. If the play gains in specificity and social realism from such a precise location, there still remains the more fundamental question of the translation of an oral prose narrative into drama. What is involved in Synge’s stage version of the folk tale is a fundamental realignment of sympathies, away from the point of view of the vengeful, misogynistic husband towards a more sympathetic and detailed portrayal of the wife. The two versions begin in virtually the same way, with Synge following the plot outline of the original while developing all of the characters. The greatest difference is in the ending, where the melodramatic violence is replaced by the more open-ended and Ibsenian departure of the wife (another Nora) from the household. Synge’s greatest addition to the story is the figure of the tramp, in place of the anonymous and passive narrator. In all of his plays, Synge was attracted to figures living on the margins of society – tramps, wanderers, vagrants, tinkers. His own life was not as secure as might have appeared, and certainly Yeats’s description of him in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ as ‘that rooted man’22 seems singularly inappropriate. Synge spent almost a decade on the Continent after his graduation from Trinity. For a number of years more he alternated between Ireland in the summers and Paris in the winters. Even after Synge gave up his Paris flat in 1903 and returned to Ireland, the sense of coming home is an odd one. For one thing, he continued to live at home with his widowed mother and failed in several attempts to set up an independent household, even when he became engaged to Molly Allgood and his plays began to have some success. The ‘home’ to which he returned was not the property in Wicklow which the Synge family had owned well into the nineteenth century. They were no longer landowners by the time Synge was born in 1871, and the financial situation was not helped when the playwright’s father died before his youngest son was one. What Mrs Synge and her family lived in was a series of rented properties in Counties Dublin and Wicklow. In the mass of correspondence which survives from Synge to his fiancée, the letters to Molly are almost always signed ‘Your Old Tramp’. His psychic 60

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projection and imaginative identification with the figure of the tramp is expressed in an essay entitled ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’, where he writes of how in ‘the middle classes, the gifted son of a family is always the poorest – usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation – . . . , the gifted son sinks . . . and is soon a tramp on the roadside’.23 In The Shadow of the Glen, the dramatic function of the Tramp in part resides in his subjecting everything he encounters to enquiry. Rather than neutrally entering the scene and mutely receiving the shelter and drink he has requested, as the narrator does in the original Aran folktale, Synge’s Tramp comments repeatedly on the oddity of what he sees: of the elaborate and visible preparations ‘as if for a wake’24 (a bottle of whiskey, glasses, a home-made cake, a tea-pot and cups are all specified) but it is a wake no one is attending; of the ‘queer look’ (33) on the face of a man who is reputedly dead. In making his pointed observations, the Tramp isolates and renders self-consciously strange the folkloric elements so seamlessly presented in the tale Synge originally heard. This activity facilitates the dramatic process by which his creator will manipulate them and send them in a different direction from the original. The Tramp’s most brazen efforts in this regard vis-à-vis Nora Burke occur when he comments on his own strangeness, and notes how she has not flinched from admitting a strange man into her house. The major addition that Synge makes to his source is to introduce a lengthy and revealing dialogue between Nora and the Tramp, in which she opens up to him about her married life and its shortcomings. Rather than being presented as a grotesque incident in its own right, the device of the dead man stretched out on the table is pressed into service as a psychological index of the relationship between the married couple. Under the Tramp’s gentle prompting, and in the later dialogue with her lover, Nora speaks of the life she has led with her husband across a span of years and reveals the lack of intimacy afflicting their union: ‘Maybe cold would be no sign of death with the like of him, for he was always cold, every day since I knew him, – and every night, stranger’ (35). From the beginning of the play, Nora breaks one of the most binding and enduring taboos in Irish society, the lack and avoidance of discussion of intimate relations between a married couple. She has had the spectacle of old age presented to her every day in her physical contact with her husband. The central question posed by the play is this: why should such an independent and fiery young woman have settled for a domineering old man as a husband? It is answered as another question, in which Nora Burke clarifies the stark choices facing women in Irish society at the turn of the 61

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century: ‘What way would I live and I an old woman if I didn’t marry a man with a bit of a farm?’ (49). If she takes comfort from the men passing on the roads, she recognises her own lost opportunities: to have two or three children like her friend Mary Brien, to have the right to wander where she pleases and to talk with whom she pleases. Synge’s play establishes Nora’s speech as the potential site and source of her greatest freedom, that zone of language in which she builds up an autonomy and self-deriving authority that is most at odds with her social situation. Characteristically, that talk is reduced and dismissed as ‘blathering’ (43) by her husband when he revives and chides the Tramp for encouraging and participating in it. The transformative element in resolving the unsatisfactory situation is the Tramp, who increasingly intervenes in the narrative and alters its direction. When Dan echoes the husband’s words in the original folk tale by asserting ‘I’ve a bad wife in the house’ (43) as he takes his stick from the cupboard, the Tramp does not acquiesce in this judgement with his silence but rather queries it: ‘Is it herself, master of the house, and she a grand woman to talk?’ Far from maintaining the alignment between the old man and the storyteller, The Shadow of the Glen has opened up a gap between them and developed a potentially disruptive alignment of the Tramp with the wife that the husband is quick to detect and warn against. The appearance of Dan Buke’s black stick suggests to an audience that the play is headed in the bloody direction of the original. But it is in the ending of The Shadow of the Glen that Synge makes his most significant revision, the greatest departure and difference from the traditional tale. With Michael refusing Nora, and her husband showing her the door, the Tramp makes his decisive move by stepping forward and suggesting she accompany him to a life on the roads. From this point on, Synge moves his play towards the more open modernist ending pioneered by Ibsen in A Doll’s House by having a woman called Nora walk out of a house whose values she and the play have called increasingly into question. But the dramatic denouement he fashions becomes characteristically more Syngean in the fact that it is a man and a woman who exit in the promise of a more equal relationship than any we have witnessed within, either between husband and wife or the two lovers. The woman leaving with the Tramp, Synge’s ending, prompted resignations and walkouts from the Irish National Theatre Society: of Maud Gonne, for one. In The United Irishman, Arthur Griffith denounced Synge’s Shadow of the Glen for the outrageous unreality of its denouement: ‘Men and women in Ireland marry lacking love, and live mostly in a dull level of amity. 62

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Sometimes they do not – sometimes the woman lives in bitterness – sometimes she dies of a broken heart – but she does not go away with the Tramp.’25 The suggestion of these alternative endings to Synge’s play can be linked to a pseudonymous playlet, ‘In a Real Wicklow Glen’, published in The United Irishman.26 The place of publication and the play’s ideological thrust have led to the suggestion that behind the ‘Conn’ to whom the play is attributed lies the same Arthur Griffith.27 But despite the claims of its title, ‘In a Real Wicklow Glen’ for the most part resembles nothing so much as a nationalistic nineteenth-century melodrama, particularly in the fate of the rejected lover Michael, who goes to the bad and takes to the drink. The pseudonym ‘Conn’ directly suggests the influence of the title character of Boucicault’s 1874 play, The Shaughraun, and a good deal of the characterisation and dialogue is in the same vein. ‘In a Real Wicklow Glen’ deploys a set of theatrical conventions which by 1904 were becoming outmoded and in the Irish context were being supplanted by the arrival of Synge and his revolutionary drama.

The Well of the Saints ‘The Lord protect us from the saints of God!’ The production of The Well of the Saints was beset by delays and difficulties. The opening of the Abbey Theatre was itself postponed from October 1904 until 27 December and even then the Synge was not part of the opening night’s programme. Three one-act plays – Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand, Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News and Yeats’s and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan – took the honours, though Shadow of the Glen was included the following evening.28 The Well of the Saints finally received its premiere on 4 February 1905. At the discussions of what plays should open the National Theatre the previous September, Frank Fay attacked The Well of the Saints directly, in the following terms: ‘He is dead against my play . . . He says my work is only addressed to blasé town-dwelling theatre-goers, that as long as we play that sort of work we are only doing what [André] Antoine does in Paris and doing it worse, that he wants a National Theatre that will draw the people etc. etc. etc.’29 And in the final rehearsals Willie Fay, who was directing as well as playing the lead part, approached the author and pointed out that every character ‘was bad-tempered right through the play, hence, as I pointed out to Synge, all this bad temper would inevitably infect the audience and make them 63

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bad-tempered too.’30 When Fay suggested that the characters be made more ‘lovable’ or ‘good-natured’, he found that the playwright was not for turning: ‘Synge would not budge. He said he wanted to write “like a monochrome painting, all in shades of the one colour.” ’31 When the play opened, it attracted little dissent but drew small crowds and lost money. But it had a powerful influence on many fellow playwrights, beginning with Yeats’s reaction on the opening night: ‘perhaps I was Synge’s convert. It was certainly a day of triumph when the first act of The Well of the Saints held its audience, though the two chief persons sat side by side under a stone cross from start to finish’.32 And it had a profound impact on Samuel Beckett who, when his official biographer asked him in his eighty-third year ‘who he himself felt had influenced his theatre most of all, Beckett suggested only the name of Synge’.33 The Well of the Saints is not set in the present, but ‘one or more centuries ago’34. Its abstract properties hew closer to the forms of the fable or parable, lifted free of its own times while free to comment on them. It has the wish-fulfilment quality of such fables, albeit in a harsh, ironic vein. The two main characters, Martin and Mary Doul, are blind (from ‘dall’, the Irish for blind). Old, weather-beaten and ragged, they sit by the side of the road, stripping rushes for lights but in the main swapping stories and jokes. Martin and Mary Doul are reasonably happy with their condition, particularly as they imagine themselves as young and beautiful rather than the opposite. But Martin still hankers for the physical sight he lost as a child and in the first act expresses the following wish: ‘I do be thinking in the long nights it’d be a grand thing if we could see ourselves for one hour, or a minute itself ’ (73). This wish is granted by a visiting Saint, who brings holy water – or perhaps one should more accurately say water with magical properties – from the Aran Islands to the east coast setting. But when the two old people see each other, their minds are not ‘troubled with joy’ (99), as the Saint naively thinks, but deeply disillusioned. This is how the first of the play’s three acts concludes. Synge broke new ground in this play, as he notes, by moving beyond the one-act structure which Yeats continued to favour. He had already experimented with two acts in the unproduced The Tinker’s Wedding, with mixed success. The Well of the Saints is a three-act play, both epic and highly compressed, artistically successful and dramaturgically innovative. Synge achieved this without succumbing to the available model of the well-made play and its conventional developments of an increasing complication of plot across three or four acts. Instead, he built on and followed through on the implications of the distinctive one-act form that Irish theatre had 64

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developed. In a sense, The Well of the Saints comprises three plays-withinthe-play. Act One most resembles a folk tale or one of Lady Gregory’s comedies, with the ironic reversal of expectation when the cured blind couple are horrified rather than exalted by what they see. But the tragic implications of what could have been a farcical denouement are explored and lived through in the second act. Martin and Mary are now separated from one another, beset by loneliness and the freezing cold of mid-winter. The third act stages recovery and restoration, as the season turns from winter to spring. For the play’s three acts are staged respectively on three successive seasons, with the first act announcing in its opening lines: ‘Well, the sun’s coming warm this day if it’s late autumn itself ’ (71). Winter and spring dominate the imagery of the succeeding two acts. The missing season is summer; instead, in characteristic Synge fashion, there is decay, disillusionment, death and a resurrection. Finally, in terms of its structure, the brilliant modernist innovation of Synge’s third act is that structurally it largely repeats the first: once more the couple are blind, once more the Saint returns and offers to cure them. But the play repeats itself with a difference. This advancement by repetition and variation is one of the innovative features of The Well of the Saints that made it so appealing to Beckett. The Well of the Saints may draw symbolically on the Aran tale of the holy well. But for its dramatic structuring, Synge looked elsewhere – mentioning a ‘pre-Molière French farce’ he had read in his studies at the Sorbonne which was subsequently identified as Andrieu de la Vigne’s fifteenth-century Moralité de l’Aveugle et du Boiteux (Morality of the Blind Man and the Lame Man).35 In this one-act play, a blind man and a lame man join forces to compensate for each other’s physical shortcomings and are cured without their asking. The blind man rejoices at his cure but the lame man is mindful of his lost occupation and resolves to feign a handicap in order to continue begging. The play was also to influence Yeats’s 1925 The Cat and the Moon and all three plays, the Synge, the Yeats and Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, are centred on not one but two central characters, a dramatic double act bound by some combination of physical and psychological interdependence. Synge’s drawing on a French source, albeit medieval rather than modern, would appear to vindicate Frank Fay’s charge cited earlier. But Fay is overlooking a salient fact about the Irish Dramatic Revival. As the Introduction pointed out, there was very little to revive in the native tradition when it came to drama. Douglas Hyde made this point in his scholarly A Literary History of Ireland (1898), arguing that ‘the Irish never developed a drama’.36 The one exception Hyde noted were the dialogues between 65

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St Patrick, the bringer of the new dispensation of Christianity, and Ossian (more correctly, Oisín), the revenant and remnant of pagan Ireland. This is not Oisín the warrior-poet of the Fenians in his physical pride or the lover of the beautiful Niamh who spent three hundred years in Tír na nÓg/the Land of Youth, except perhaps in Martin’s own imaginings. This is the final version of Oisín after he returns from Tír na nÓg: a cantankerous, blind old man, trapped in an Ireland he no longer recognises and adhering to a system of pagan beliefs which St Patrick has banished. As Douglas Hyde writes, the nearest thing the native tradition offered as drama was in this colloquy of the ancients: ‘The conception of bringing the spirit of Paganism and of Christianity together in the persons of the last great poet and warrior of the one, and the first great saint of the other, was truly dramatic in its conception.’37 Synge pointed out to Max Meyerfeld, the German translator of The Well of the Saints, that he had placed lines from an old Irish poem called ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ in a speech by the Saint in Act One: ‘you’d do well . . . to be saying a prayer for your own sakes against false prophets and heathens, and the words of women and smiths’ (91). The Saint’s return in Act Three is marked by ‘the faint sound of a bell’ (133) and provokes from Mary Doul the most heartfelt prayer in the play: ‘The Lord protect us from the saints of God!’ As David Krause points out, one of ‘the countless ways in which the Fenian life is superior to the cleric’s austere Christianity’ is marked by Oisín’s contrasting ‘the melodious songs of the blackbirds and thrushes with the gloomy bells of St. Patrick’.38 Just before the Saint re-enters, the blind Martin and Mary have come together again and re-established their union by noting ‘the sound of one of them twittering yellow birds do be coming in the springtime from beyond the sea’ (131). Where Martin submitted meekly, even eagerly, the first time, he is now in a defiant mood, willing to challenge the authority of a Christian saint in order to defend his hallowed imaginative ground. Forced to kneel and be cured a second time, ‘Martin Doul with a sudden movement strikes the can from [the] Saint’s hand and sends it rocketing across [the] stage’ (147). What accounts for much of the play’s dramatic value is the way the opposition between the Christian and the pagan viewpoints is not immediately apparent, but evolves in the progress of the action. Synge, in fact, charts a course which has as its starting point the tenuous harmonising of his Aran Islands source, where a joy in the beauty of nature is not incompatible with reverence for a Christian God. But The Well of the Saints develops through the irony and humour characterising de la Vigne’s medieval farce into the fully-fledged and articulated opposition of pagan and saint. Douglas Hyde noted the degree to which in the dialogue between St Patrick 66

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and Oisín the ‘reciters of the present day’ bring out ‘considerable humour’ by reproducing ‘the censorious, self-satisfied tone of Patrick, and the querulous, vindictive whine of the half-starved old man’. He concludes with the observation that ‘under happier circumstances something great would have developed from it’.39 Six years after Hyde’s Literary History of Ireland was published, ‘something great’ and ‘truly dramatic in its conception’ emerged with the staging of Synge’s elaborately Ossianic The Well of the Saints at Ireland’s new National Theatre.

The Playboy of the Western World ‘That’s a grand story.’ ‘He tells it lovely.’ In a later, more demythologising account of his first meeting with Synge, which is rarely referred to, Yeats wrote that at that time he did not yet ‘divine [Synge’s] genius’ and goes so far as to concede that he would probably have given ‘the same advice to any young writer who knew Irish’.40 Yeats did not know any Irish, and had come up sharp against this limitation when he visited the Aran Islands in August 1895 a mere four months before the Paris meeting with Synge, seeking material for his aborted novel, The Speckled Bird. While there, he was told the same story which Synge heard on his very first visit to the islands. As the latter recounts it in The Aran Islands: The oldest [man] on the island . . . is fond of telling me anecdotes – not folk tales – of things that have happened here in his lifetime. He often tells me about a Connaught man who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he was in passion, and then fled to the island and threw himself on the mercy of . . . the natives.41 Yeats was able to make nothing of this oral narrative; Synge transformed it into a dramatic masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, the most controversial and ultimately the most influential play the movement produced. But part of its greatness resides in the extent to which its author goes beyond the process I have been tracing in the development of the previous three Synge plays, the transformation of storytelling into drama, to make that very subject the metadramatic object of enquiry in the play itself. What facilitated, even enabled, his doing so was a crucial artistic choice Synge made in the elaborate drafting of The Playboy: the decision not to 67

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represent directly the violent exchange between Christy and his father. In Synge’s draft outline of The Murderer (A Farce), as the play was originally titled, he gives the following description of Act One: ‘(a potato garden) Old O’Flaherty describes his son’s life and exasperates him so much that in the end he takes the loy [spade] and hits his father on the head with it then rushes across stage and out on left.’42 The second act has Christy telling his story and being acclaimed; the third brings the father back on to overthrow the son. No extant version of that contemplated first act survives. Synge clearly realised early on how much more dramatic mileage he would gain by having no externally verifiable version of the father-slaying but rather presenting an event that is only and always from the start an oral narrative, subject to and capable of endless retelling. It takes the Mayo villagers a long time to draw from Christopher Mahon, the young cowed stranger in their midst, what concerns him about whether the pub is likely to be visited by the police or not. It is only when threatened with violence by the beautiful young daughter of the house, Pegeen Mike, that Christy blurts out the specific nature of his crime: ‘Don’t strike me . . . I killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that.’43 When pressed for details, all he can manage is the following monosyllabic sentence: ‘I just riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull, and he went down at my feet like an empty sack, and never let a grunt or groan from him at all’ (73). This is virtually identical to Synge’s own outline of the abandoned first act, and is the narrative kernel of the drama Synge and Christopher Mahon would elaborate between them across the three acts of The Playboy of the Western World. The following morning, word about the man who killed his father has spread in the locality and drawn three young women to the O’Flaherty household. As Christy had begun to realise the night before, far from being reviled for his deed, he is regarded as a hero and now offered drink and food gratis on all sides. Here, the sexual charge which his reputation as a murderer ignites among the women is confirmed by the deliberate double entendre of the following: Susan And I brought you a little laying pullet . . . Feel the fat of that breast, Mister. Christy

It’s bursting, surely. (99)

Christy now presents a much more verbally and dramatically elaborate version of his father-slaying to the three women. This process was begun the night before in his dialogue with Pegeen Mike, where he consistently 68

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aggrandized his father, converting him from a real, biological parent into a mythic figure from Celtic mythology, ‘rising up in the red dawn, . . . as naked as an ash tree in the moon of May’ (83). The father’s prodigality is stressed, as he goes around peopling the earth with ‘sons and daughters walking all great states and territories of the world’ (85). This increasingly mythical account of Old Mahon may be said not only to animate Christy’s narrative but to ‘father’ it. At the conclusion of this account, in saying he ‘did up a Tuesday and halve his skull’ (85), Christy is shearing off his father’s prodigal energy and claiming a goodly portion of it for himself, to account at least in part for his transformation. The following morning, with Pegeen absent and the three young women present, he subjects his prose narrative to a greater degree not only of mythmaking but of overt theatricalisation. As well as adding colorful detail to the verbally unadorned one-sentence account of the night before, he now supplies dialogue between the two mighty protagonists and accompanies the account with appropriate physical gestures in a full-bodied mime. (A chicken-bone is pressed into service as a loy.) He does so to appreciative comments from his on-stage audience: Christy ‘God have mercy on your soul,’ says he, lifting a scythe; ‘or on your own,’ says I, raising the loy. Susan

That’s a grand story.

Honor He tells it lovely. (103) But Christy’s full-blown dramatic enactment draws a less appreciative audience when Pegeen Mike returns to the shebeen and is ‘aghast’ (105) at what she beholds. She scatters the women and threatens to send Christy on his way. And she is not readily won back when the abashed hero promises to tell her the acclaimed story again. Pegeen’s reply makes clear that its effect is being worn thin through repetition: ‘You’ve told me that story six times since the dawn of day’ (107). With the diminishing returns this confirms, Christy’s story urgently needs to have a new element injected if it is to retain and regain dramatic currency. This arrives in the unexpected form of The Playboy’s greatest dramatic surprise, the appearance of Old Mahon onstage halfway through Act Two. When confronted with this, Christy expects that all he has to do is to kill his father all over again, and he will be the more lionised. But this turns out to be far from the case. Indeed, it is the very opposite of what occurs in Act Three. The Mayo villagers are not enthralled but horrified when Christy attempts to slay his father in the flesh.

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In order to evaluate why this may be so, other related kinds of ‘story’ that emerge in the play’s first act need to be considered. Even before he first appears on stage, Christy Mahon has entered the Mayo shebeen in verbal form. Pegeen Mike’s craven fiancée, Shaun Keogh, has heard a voice coming out of the dark: ‘I’m after feeling a kind of fellow above in the furzy ditch, groaning wicked like a maddening dog, . . . and breaking his heart. It should have been a young man from his words speaking’(61). Christy first enters the play, therefore, as a verbal narrative and as human and dramatic potential, more dead than alive, scarcely articulate. When Michael James Flaherty and the others arrive subsequently, Pegeen’s father has not directly encountered the stranger, as Shaun Keogh had. Instead, even in this incredibly short space of time, word about the stranger has spread and circulated in the form of a verbally transmissible story. Michael James Flaherty reports: ‘I’ve heard tell there’s a queer fellow above going mad or getting his death, maybe, in the gripe of the ditch’ (65). When Shaun reports hearing a voice undergoing trauma, Pegeen chides him for his cowardice and lack of Christian charity in not offering the stranger aid in what is clearly intended to evoke the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. Shaun’s response to his chastisement is not personal mortification or shame but concern that she will tell this to the others, turn it into a story which may be passed on. Pegeen threatens him with the law – ‘[W]hat’ll you say then to the peelers, or the Justice of the Peace?’ (61) – but what Shaun appears to fear even more is the judgement of the local community in which he lives: ‘Don’t tell your father and the men is coming above, for if they heard that story they’d have great blabbing this night at the wake.’ One of the defining characteristics of the community Synge represents, the imaginative lifeblood that runs through it, are stories, events transformed immediately into verbal narratives for rapid oral transmission. If they concern members of the community, the stories are frequently to the detriment of their subjects and are designed to elicit derisive laughter rather than sympathy or compassion from their listeners. The most perishable, and hence, valued commodity in this corner of Mayo is a reputation. At the beginning of Act Two, before the three young women appear, Christy is shaving and in a celebrated scene looks at himself in the mirror to evaluate the degree and kind of his transformation: ‘Didn’t I know rightly I was handsome, though it was the divil’s own mirror we had beyond, would twist a squint across an angel’s brow, and I’ll be growing fine from this day’ (95). The scene has strong literary antecedents: in Hamlet’s advice to the players, when he tells them that the purpose of theatre is ‘to hold as ’twere the 70

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mirror up to nature’.44 This meaning is directly adverted to in Christopher Murray’s subtitle for his study of twentieth-century Irish drama: ‘mirror up to nation’.45 In the Irish context, Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses defines Irish art as ‘[t]he cracked looking-glass of a servant’.46 In post-colonial studies of Irish literature, Stephen’s remark has been aligned with Christy’s about the mirror, where the demeaning stereotypes of a colonial art are supplanted by confident self-representation. Again, a scholarly title makes the point: C.L. Innes’s The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature, a comparative study of Synge’s Playboy and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.47 In the most inventive production of Synge’s play I have seen, directed by Niall Henry at the Peacock in 2001, the part of Christy was played by Mikel Murfi, a gifted mime, who spent much of the first act in a foetal posture, signifying the extent to which Christy has not yet been born into a full sense of his own potential. In a dazzling metatheatrical touch, the young women did not actually appear at the opening of Act Two but were conjured up by Murfi/Christy in his play with the mirror. As Playboy develops, it stresses that Christy Mahon is not so much one character, but two contrasting types: the stuttering, squinting, clumsy son in subjection to his father; and the confident, eloquent, handsome man who makes good his verbal promise in Act Two by winning a succession of games, culminating in the mule race on the strand. The difference is stressed when Old Mahon appears and witnesses the winning Christy being hoisted high by the crowd. The Widow Quin has agreed with Christy to keep Old Mahon at bay and so is keen to stress the difference: ‘Was your son that hit you a lad of one year and a score maybe, a great hand at racing and lepping and licking the world?’ (139). The lead actor’s performing of the two Christies demands theatrical versatility and considerable histrionic power. Since the cowed young man who first enters the shebeen is not physically impressive, Willie Fay was perfect casting. He has been described by Declan Kiberd as ‘an actor who was the Woody Allen of the [Abbey] theatre, no more than five feet three inches in height’.48 And yet the actor playing Christy undergoes as much a physical as a psychological transformation, as he has to do if the triumphing at the sports is to be credible. The question posed from the mirror-scene on is: can Christy live up to and learn to fill the role that has been projected for him, or will it remain just that, a role which he never securely inhabits? But Pegeen Mike also undergoes a transformation. Although young and beautiful, she is known for a biting tongue and a shrewish persona. When Christy speaks of his delight in hearing ‘your voice talking sweetly for my own delight’, she is moved to reply: ‘And to think it’s me is talking sweetly, 71

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Christy Mahon, and I the fright of seven townlands for my biting tongue’ (151). Gail Finney has stressed the similarities between Christy and Pegeen: both lack mothers; both have dominant fathers; both are poised at various stages of rebellion.49 She also emphasises the extent to which the transformed Christy is Pegeen’s creation, a modern dramatic treatment of the Pygmalion myth seven years before Shaw’s: as penny pot-boy; as ladies’ man; as poet; as father-slayer. The unstable nature of Christy’s transformation and the rapidity with which Pegeen Mike turns on him when his father appears must both be considered in relation to the third key onstage factor in the play’s unusual development: the other members of the Mayo community – her father, her fiancée, the Widow Quin, the two barflies Jimmy and Philly, the offstage Father Reilly – not only in themselves but, in relation to the argument I have been developing about the self-consciously theatrical nature of Synge’s play, the community construed as audience. It has struck more than one critic that there is an extraordinary parallel between the two audiences of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. The onstage audience accepts the arrival of a stranger and the confession that he has murdered his father with apparent equanimity; likewise, the audience in the Abbey Theatre on 26 January 1907 accepted the first act so readily that Lady Gregory was able to send the first of two telegrams to an absent Yeats: ‘Play great success.’50 The Mayo community, it should be said, have little to fear from the physically unintimidating Christy Mahon and are happy to relieve their boredom temporarily by making play with the new arrival. Pegeen’s father is also anxious to get to Kate Cassidy’s wake and is happy to elect Christy Mahon to the role of his daughter’s protector. But there is also an innate and historical tendency in Ireland to side with a man on the run against those who operate what is explicitly described in the play as ‘English law’(105). That enjoyment and acceptance appear to persist well into Act Two. But the two audiences grow increasingly restive with the unexpected return of the father and the growing sense that the play is not headed for the likely resolution of the romantic comedy it in many ways resembles, crowned by the wedding of Christy and Pegeen. Until late in the third act, it still seems likely that parental opposition will be converted into support and the couple will wed. At the moment Michael James gives his consent, Old Mahon appears and pours scorn on the proposal. But over and above this obstacle is the negative impact his reappearance has on Pegeen and her feelings for Christy: ‘And it’s lies you told, letting on you had him slitted, and you nothing at all’ (161). Christy thinks that all he has to do is to slay his father again, 72

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thereby proving his heroism and all will be well. But Pegeen thinks otherwise. And her views cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of those on stage. For this is the point at which Pegeen’s own rebellion would appear to fail and she is once more absorbed back into the most negative aspects of the community from which she has sought to differentiate herself. To that group, a verbal narrative can be enjoyed for its own sake, especially one that plays up the more violent elements in the story. An actual incident in the hereand-now and their home ground which will bring the police down on their heads is another matter: ‘Would you go making murder in this place, and it piled with poteen for our drink to-night?’ (155). For Pegeen, who insists on the separation of words from deeds, ‘a strange man is a marvel with his mighty talk; but what’s a squabble in your back-yard and the blow of a loy, have taught me that there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed’ (169). But it is precisely in the liminal zone of the ‘great gap’ between word and deed, in that ambiguous in-between space, that the play and its characters are increasingly forced to operate. As Randolph Parker has argued: ‘[The play] leaves us in the inevitable gap between gallous stories and dirty deeds, a liminal zone in which the joy of language and the lure of fantasy are in a continually unresolved dialectic with the need to perceive life realistically.’51 The different routes the two characters take in the play’s closing section can be seen as determined by their differing responses to the violence and hostility of the play’s onstage audience. Christy stands up to and defies them, by making the claim that he has successfully performed and so can take possession of the role they have offered to him: ‘Shut your yelling, for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse maybe go mixing with the fools of earth’ (165). It is a declaration of theatrical independence, in line with the stance the Abbey adopted during the riots, not to succumb to public pressure and to keep the play on. Pegeen Mike readily identifies with the protests of the onstage audience and goes one further by burning Christy in the leg. Gail Finney surmises that the hypermasculinity of Pegeen’s act of violence was as much responsible as Christy’s notorious mention of ‘a drift of chosen females standing in their shifts’ for ‘the bewilderment of the play’s audiences and the opening night riots’.52 The volatility of the onstage Mayo audience appeared to have spread to the offstage audience. As the former grew increasingly violent and noisy, the playgoers enacted the same behaviour to protest this development as a gross 73

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slander on and a misrepresentation of Irish people. Synge had brought the two audiences into alignment from the beginning. His decision not to stage Christy’s father-slaying meant that the audience in the Abbey Theatre was in a no more privileged position than the shebeen dwellers onstage; they were as dependent on the elaborate question-and-answer session to which Christy is subjected to find out what crime he had committed. And they find out long before most of the other characters do that Old Mahon is still alive after what he contemptuously dismisses as ‘the tap of a loy’ (161). Hence the audience are even more prone to uncertainty as to how to regard and receive Christy’s new-found identity, given that its basis appears to have been destroyed. After the three women provide an appreciative audience for Christy’s performance of his primal deed in Act Two, the entire onstage ensemble of four people (the Widow Quin, Jimmy and Philly, and Old Mahon) are constructed as an audience through whom the offstage mule race on the strand in Act Three is represented. The audience in the Abbey confronts a mirror image of itself, watching an audience onstage contributing to the process by which Christy Mahon can now be acclaimed without irony as the playboy of the western world. When he determines to kill his father a second time, Christy ‘runs at Old Mahon with the loy, chases him out of the door, followed by Crowd and the Widow Quin’ (165). The second slaying of Old Mahon keeps faith with the original primal deed by being enacted offstage and not directly represented. It also preserves the ambiguity of whether Old Mahon has really been killed this time. The departure of the entire onstage cast leaves the audience in the auditorium confronting an empty stage, in an even more precise (because empty) mirror-image. Even though the returned Christy and the Mayo audience both attest that this time Old Mahon is now dead, he comes crawling back onstage ‘to be killed a third time’ (171), as his son puts it, in a scene which indicates the high degree of overt theatricality operating. With the degree of self-conscious mirroring between the two audiences, it should be no surprise that those present at the play broke into verbal ‘yelling’ and violence at almost precisely the same point as the onstage audience did. As Paige Reynolds has noted: ‘The real Abbey audiences reenacted the very dynamics Synge had scripted in Playboy.’53 The play concludes with the departure of Christy and his father, now reconciled. Christy recognises that his transformation is complete and irreversible, no longer dependent on the fickle judgement of the onstage audience: ‘you’ve turned me a likely gaffer in the end of all, the way I’ll go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning of the judgment day’ (173). With the disruptive stranger sent on his way, life 74

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in the shebeen returns to the situation that prevailed at the beginning: Pegeen serving at the bar and she and Shaun Keogh ready to be wed. But what the play’s famous closing lament – ‘Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World’ (173) – reveals is that another disruptive presence remains behind. In the course of the play, Pegeen has been moved by Christy’s example to defy her father, standing up to him and demanding that her own desires be ratified. Her entrapment by the social attitudes of the time proves in the end more powerful, influenced as she is by how she will be regarded in the community’s eyes for linking herself to an acclaimed hero who has done nothing. But those desires are not extinguished by the close of The Playboy of the Western World, despite appearances. They flare up in the final moments, in the wake of Christy’s departure, and suggest that he has left an ‘unmanageable revolutionary’ behind him.54

Conclusion On 24 March 1909 W.B. Yeats recorded in his journal: ‘Synge is dead. In the early morning he said to the nurse, “It is no use fighting death any longer”, and he turned over and died.’55 Synge had been ‘fighting death’ in the form of Hodgkin’s disease ever since the diagnosis of an inoperable tumour almost one year earlier. In September 1907 he had conceived the idea for a new three-act play entitled Deirdre of the Sorrows, covering the tragic narrative from Irish legend of Deirdre and the Sons of Usna. This was a first venture by him into the mythic territory already dramatised by Yeats and A.E. but one in which he would draw on his direct knowledge of the Irish language and its literature for greater accuracy in his treatment of the legend and write a more robust and earthy idiom than the two poets had. The beginning of one of Deirdre’s last speeches is characteristic of his play’s distinctive language: ‘I have put away sorrow like a shoe that is worn out and muddy.’56 Synge articulated the main challenge of the new work in one of his letters to Molly Allgood, who was to play the title role: ‘it wants a good deal of strengthening, of “making personal” still before it will satisfy me’.57 It is in certain respects the most autobiographical and personal of Synge’s plays, mirroring his difference in age and class from his fianceé in the relationship between the young Deirdre and the older, jealous figure of King Conchubar. In January 1908 he outlined his intentions for his new play in a letter to New York lawyer John Quinn: 75

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I am trying a three-Act prose Deirdre – to change my hand. I am not sure yet whether I shall be able to make a satisfactory play out of it – these saga people when one comes to deal with them seem very remote . . . In any case, I find it ‘an interesting experiment,’ full of new difficulties, and I shall be the better, I think, for the change.58 In the event, Synge struggled to make a satisfactory play of Deirdre of the Sorrows as his illness worsened throughout his last year of life; but the play, though substantially complete, remained unfinished at the time of his death. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Molly Allgood collaborated to produce the version that was staged at the Abbey in 1910, with Allgood winning widespread praise (not least from Yeats) for her performance as Deirdre. But Deirdre of the Sorrows has rarely received a production in the years since. Those ‘saga people’ that were so much in vogue in the early years of the Revival now seem ‘very remote’ to contemporary audiences also. And Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding did not receive a staging at the Abbey Theatre until 1971, sixty-two years after his death. This chapter has concentrated on the four of Synge’s plays completed to his satisfaction and staged during his lifetime, with his direct input into their production; they have also received regular productions since. It was not the least of the merits of the staging by the Druid Theatre Company of Galway in the west of Ireland of Synge’s theatrical canon in 2006, dubbed the DruidSynge project, that it provided a rare opportunity to see Deirdre of the Sorrows on stage. The most interesting feature of the Druid production of Deirdre were those moments coloured by the contemporary violence of Northern Ireland. They served as a reminder that, if Synge was the ‘house playwright’ to the Druid Theatre Company, cofounder Garry Hynes was also the original director of Martin McDonagh’s blood-soaked Leenane trilogy. In the DruidSynge production of the six Synge plays, The Tinker’s Wedding was the only one to receive a thorough updating. This bold decision served to remind audiences how persistent a presence in Irish life travelling people are, and how consistently marginalised. The opportunity to see all of the plays on a single day (including an open-air staging on Inishmaan) underscored how powerful, coherent and consistent a worldview Synge’s drama presented. The settings of the individual plays were simplified and minimalised for their joint staging; but visible from first to last were the white ‘boards standing by the wall’59 from Riders to the Sea. They served as a stark reminder of the presence of death throughout Synge’s dramatic world, whether in the stark tragedy of his first and last plays, or the riotous black comedy with which the subject is treated in The Shadow of the 76

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Glen and The Playboy of the Western World. At the close of Deirdre of the Sorrows and of the entire DruidSynge project, a young boy carried onstage a framed portrait of J.M. Synge. This closing touch was a timely reminder almost a hundred years after his death of how potent and influential Synge’s presence remains in contemporary Irish theatre.60

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CHAPTER 4 SHAW AND THE REVIVAL: THE ABSENT PRESENCE

In his two magisterial literary studies, Inventing Ireland (1995) and Irish Classics (2000), Declan Kiberd has persuasively made the case for George Bernard Shaw to be considered an Irish writer.1 But when it comes to critical studies and histories of the Irish Dramatic Revival, Shaw is usually omitted. He receives only passing mention in three such: D.E.S. Maxwell’s A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891–1980 (1984); Christopher Murray’s Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up To Nation (1997); and Robert Welch’s The Abbey Theatre 1899–1999 (1999).2 The reasons are not far to seek. By the time the Abbey Theatre was founded, Shaw had been resident in England for almost thirty years and had written a series of plays set there. He is traditionally seen, as Chapter 1 established, as belonging to that group of Anglo-Irish playwrights who made a reputation on the London stage with a succession of brilliant, witty comedies satirising English life. Wilde, the supreme embodiment of the tendency, died at the end of the nineteenth century. But in marked contrast Shaw’s life and playwriting career survived well into the twentieth (he died in 1950, at the age of ninety-four). While he continued to reside in England and have his plays premiered by Harley Granville-Barker at the Royal Court Theatre and in other London venues, this did not preclude an active interest and involvement on Shaw’s part in the Irish Theatrical Revival, to which his 1904 play John Bull’s Other Island is a major contribution. But there were also other significant involvements in Irish theatre by him, including the Abbey’s staging in 1909 of The Shewingup of Blanco Posnet, a Shaw play which the Lord Chamberlain had banned for performance in England. In relation to that event, Yeats and Lady Gregory argued passionately not only against those who found Blanco Posnet offensive but equally against those who contended ‘that it is not a befitting thing for us to set upon our stage the work of an Irishman, who is also the most famous of living dramatists’.3 As this chapter will show, Shaw continued to wield a strong influence on the Irish theatre movement through a sustained interaction with Yeats, Gregory and Sean O’Casey from across the Irish Sea.

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The anti-Shaw prejudice It is a singular phenomenon that virtually no major twentieth-century Irish dramatist since the Revival has had a good word to say about Bernard Shaw or his plays, a prejudice which has helped to enforce his exclusion. Samuel Beckett indicated an interest in three important plays of the Irish Dramatic Revival – Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, Synge’s The Well of the Saints and O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. But he stated this preference by way of dismissing George Bernard Shaw’s entire theatrical oeuvre. Asked by actor Cyril Cusack to pen a tribute for the centenary of Shaw’s birth in 1956, Beckett responded: ‘I wouldn’t suggest that G.B.S. is not a great play-wright, whatever that is when it’s at home. What I would do is give the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk’s Well, or the Saints’, or a whiff of Juno, to go no further.’4 The reference is to Shaw’s 1928 play, The Apple Cart. Of contemporary Irish playwrights, the greatest of them all, Brian Friel, had this to say in 1972 in the opening lines of a piece in the TLS: ‘It is time we dropped from the calendar of Irish dramatic saints all those playwrights from Farquhar to Shaw – and that includes Steele, Sheridan, Goldsmith and Wilde – who no more belong to the Irish drama than John Field belongs to Irish music or Francis Bacon to Irish painting.’5 And Friel does this in an article whose very title – ‘Plays Peasant and Unpeasant’ – draws on even as it ironises and revises Shaw’s collective title for his plays of the 1890s, ‘Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant’. This strident exclusion order did not prevent Friel from drawing on John Bull’s Other Island in his 1980 play, Translations, with the returning Irish prodigal bringing his English friend with him, and the latter falling in love with the local Irish colleen. And there is a strong Shavian feel to the structured debate between Hugh O’Neill and Archbishop Peter Lombard in Friel’s 1988 Making History as to whether truth is an absolute criterion in the writing of history. Perhaps it is no accident that the presence of Shaw in Friel’s drama should make itself felt in two of his plays for the Field Day Theatre Company, given the didactic impulse fuelling the enterprise.6 But the Irish playwright who started the anti-Shavian stance and who seems to have contributed to making it de rigeur is W.B. Yeats. He did so, proving he had learned a trick or two in satiric portraiture from George Moore. In his prose autobiography Yeats reacted to and described Shaw in the following unforgettable image: ‘Presently I had a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing-machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible 80

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thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.’7 The occasion provoking Yeats’s nightmare vision of Shaw as an endlessly smiling sewingmachine was the joint staging in 1894 at the Avenue Theatre in London of Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire. The term Yeats employs to describe Shaw’s play which has stuck is ‘hatred’ but the fuller description is richer, more ambiguous and revealing: ‘I listened to Arms and the Man with admiration and hatred. It seemed to me inorganic, logical straightness and not the crooked road of life, yet I stood aghast before its energy.’8 There is certainly evidence to support the view that Yeats, while he may have admired the man – ‘Yet I delighted in Shaw, the formidable man [who] could hit my enemies and the enemies of all I loved, as I could never hit’9 – found Shaw’s plays anethema to all he valued in the theatre and certainly did not want them staged at the Abbey. They were prose to his poetry, comedy to his tragedy, didactic where he wanted evocation. Much of the evidence points to the positive influence of Lady Gregory in having Shaw’s plays staged at Ireland’s National Theatre. But the situation is more complex than that, as this chapter will examine.

Shaw’s direct encounter with the Irish Dramatic Revival Shaw was aware, at one remove, of the three-year Irish Literary Theatre experiment; unlike Synge and Joyce, he did not attend any of the three annual productions. He became directly aware of the burgeoning development of a new Irish theatre when, in March 1904, the year of the Abbey Theatre’s opening, he attended the programme of plays presented by the Irish National Theatre Society at the Royalty Theatre in London. There were two plays by Yeats. The King’s Threshold presented a political conflict between the king and the poet Seanchan (pronounced Shanahan) who, having been banned from participating in the Council of State, retaliates by going on hunger strike. The play had strong resonances in the contemporary unsettled political climate of Ireland and was to acquire particular relevance when the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, died on hunger strike sixteen years later. The other Yeats play was The Pot of Broth, a peasant play of the type that was already coming to the fore in the work presented by the Irish National Theatre. Unusually for Yeats, it was a comedy and (though this was not acknowledged at the time) was co-written with Lady Gregory, who had not yet emerged as a dramatist in her own right. Yeats and Gregory’s The Pot of Broth, in which a rascally tramp tricks two householders into believing 81

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the stone he places in a pot has magical properties, is a farce. Yeats identified Shaw’s Arms and the Man as a farce, and attributed a great deal of its theatrical success to this fact: ‘For the first few minutes Arms and the Man is crude melodrama and then, just when the audience is thinking how crude it is, it turns into excellent farce.’10 There is some wonderful business in the Shaw with the old coat belonging to the heroine Raina’s father which she has bestowed upon the departing male intruder, Bluntschli; he sets the cat among the pigeons when he comes back to the house to return it, along with the incriminating portrait Raina has signed and given to him. As Raina helps her father into his old coat, she expertly and simultaneously extracts the incriminating portrait from the pocket. Similar sleight-of-hand is deployed by the tramp in the Yeats and Gregory farce as he conjures the ingredients by which the stone may produce a pot of broth. Yeats and Gregory had been reluctant to send Padraic Colum’s Broken Soil to London, a peasant play, granted, but one which was more realistic than the overt poetry of the others; but the players insisted on its being included. (It was also the first play of the movement written by a Catholic rather than a Protestant.) The contrast between Colum’s stark and intimate portrayal of his Irish characters and the romanticism of the other plays would not have been lost on Shaw. And the season announced the arrival of an important new playwright in the two one-act masterpieces by Synge, which did so much to determine the cultural grounds on which the new national theatre would stake its claim. The Shadow of the Glen in particular showed an anti-idealising representation of Irish life which had an immediate influence on John Bull’s Other Island, the play Shaw was about to write for the new movement, as Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel has shown.11 Shaw was particularly struck to learn that Annie Horniman, who backed the Shaw and Yeats joint London production of Arms and the Man and The Land of Heart’s Desire of a decade before, was the benefactress of the new theatre being built in Dublin. These London productions of the new Irish theatre were directed primarily at Horniman, as the final stage in an elaborate process of persuasion, and a week later on 4 April 1904 Yeats was able to announce to the company back in Dublin that she had agreed to finance their theatre.

John Bull’s Other Island and the Abbey Theatre Yeats also took the opportunity on the same visit to issue an invitation to the London-based Irish playwright, who had since the death of Wilde become 82

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the foremost dramatist of the English-speaking stage. As Shaw put it in the ‘Preface for Politicians’ of 1906, ‘John Bull’s Other Island was written in 1904 at the request of Mr William Butler Yeats, as a patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre.’12 Despite issuing the invitation, Yeats’s response to the play Shaw delivered in September 1904 displayed just that profound ambivalence which he had already expressed in regard to Arms and the Man: a combination of admiration and hatred. In his letter to Shaw responding to John Bull, he naturally accentuated the positive: ‘You have said things in this play which are entirely true about Ireland, things which nobody has ever said before, and these are the very things which are most part of the action.’13 But even here Yeats has to begin by saying that he had been ‘disappointed by the first act and a half of the play’14 in an approach which is uncannily similar to the criticism he would voice twenty-five years later of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie. Rather than regarding the Shaw and O’Casey plays as the consistently developed and intricately interwoven pieces they are, Yeats breaks them into discrete acts, dismissing half as disappointing or trivial, and elevating the other half by praising its theme. Shaw’s own take on Yeats’s ambivalent reaction was that he ‘got rather more than he bargained for’ and that there were two strikes against his play: in Shaw’s view it was ‘beyond the resources of the new Abbey Theatre’ and was also ‘uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland’.15 Both agreed the play was overlong, but whereas Yeats gave his own, Synge’s and Willie Fay’s views on what should be cut, Shaw resisted, insisting that ‘[a]ll the tissue seems to me vital: I can’t get the blue pencil in without cutting an artery’.16 But there was also the resource implication of casting the play. Willie Fay had noted that, though John Bull’s Other Island was ‘a wonderful piece of work [and] full of fine things’, ‘the difficulty of getting a caste [sic] for it would be considerable’.17 This latter reason was emphasised when the decision was made not to present the play as part of the opening of the Abbey Theatre in December. Ironically, Willie Fay was to play the part of the farmer Matt Haffigan for the Barker-Vedrenne English production of the play just after he left the Abbey in 1908. But Willie Fay could just as readily have played the Englishman Tom Broadbent, given his wide experience of touring Ireland and England enacting a wide variety of theatrical roles in the fit-ups. And his brother Frank, who balanced his brother’s more practical experience of the theatre with an intellectual interest in contemporary continental drama and in the speaking of verse on stage, would have played 83

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beautifully opposite him as the Irishman Larry Doyle. Any of the leading male members of the company could have done well by the third member of Shaw’s triumvirate, the defrocked priest and mystic, Peter Keegan. In Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, which the Abbey successfully premiered in 1909, there are fourteen speaking parts as opposed to the twelve of John Bull, requiring American rather than Irish (or English) accents, and the Abbey appeared to have no problem in filling them. And how was it that the Company, essentially the same in its ethos and constituency whatever the change in individual personnel, could mount a full-scale production of John Bull at the Abbey in 1916? There was with Shaw, even in the London theatres which were accustomed to three-act and four-act plays, always the question of length, even when he advocated that if audiences refrained from breaking up his lines to laugh, his plays would have a shorter running time. With the Irish National Theatre Society, as the programme of plays presented in London that spring made clear, the one-act form was paramount. But this was to prove less the case with the move into their new permanent home at the end of 1904, the increased resources and the constant demand for new plays. Synge had already broken away from the one-act form with the unproduced Tinker’s Wedding and all three of his theatrical offerings at the Abbey were in three acts. Lady Gregory supplied one-act comedies to counterbalance Yeats’s oneact tragedies; but increasingly she rebelled at this restricted (and subordinate) role and as her range broadened into history plays like The White Cockade and tragedies like Grania she expanded from the one-act to the three-act form. Yeats alone remained committed to the poetic concision of the one-act form and this dramatic preference can be discerned as contributing to his final, negative judgement on Shaw’s play as ‘fundamentally ugly and shapeless’.18 But Shaw had not placed all of his eggs in the Abbey’s basket. As Roy Foster puts it, ‘Shaw cannily kept his options for an English production open throughout, and when [Yeats] returned to London he was able to see [John Bull] done experimentally by J.E. Vedrenne and [Harley] Granville-Barker at the Court theatre’19 on 1 November 1904, which is when he registered his negative view to Lady Gregory. At the Court Theatre, and with the inspired collaboration with Granville-Barker, Shaw found a group of actors and a style of theatre ideally suited to the complex production demands of his plays. Like the Abbey, the Court actors were an ensemble motivated by an idealism very different from the commercial London theatre.20 They understood the innate theatricality of his plays but also the sensitivity which 84

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his language demanded. The Court had held off producing Shaw’s previous play, Man and Superman, because of its inordinate four-act length and the question of whether it could even be staged. They were ready to move with a production of an uncut and scene-changing John Bull’s Other Island. It proved an immense critical and commercial hit, consolidating their style and laying the groundwork so that Shaw could write his next play Major Barbara specifically for the Court. It is tempting to speculate how things might have turned out otherwise for the countries’ two national theatres had events gone differently. If Yeats and the Abbey Theatre had produced John Bull’s Other Island in 1904, it would have developed the company’s acting style and foregrounded a less restrictive sense of the ‘peasant quality’ which came to dominate, define and limit their product. It would also have militated against the later rejection in 1929 of both O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie and Denis Johnston’s Shavian The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ Instead, the first production of John Bull’s Other Island in London cemented the Barker-Shaw alliance at the Court and led them to discuss laying the possible foundations for an English National Theatre, even if its fruition was to take another sixty years. But how might that initial programme have looked, and looked differently, if John Bull’s Other Island had actually been staged at the Abbey’s opening in 1904? On 26 December, the double bill was Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News. Almost six weeks later, on 4 February 1905, the Abbey premiered J.M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints. I wish to take out the Lady Gregory, and bring in Shaw’s John Bull, to align the three plays by Yeats, Synge and Shaw and to consider them together. What emerges is the fact that, despite the many differences in theatrical style, all three are very similar in structure and concern, and appear strongly motivated by the desire to address the historical moment in which an Irish national theatre was coming into being. I would like to take Michael Holroyd’s description of John Bull as ‘a parallel series of discussions’,21 and apply it to the three works collectively. For all three are discussion plays, or one might rather say debate plays. Their dramaturgy is centred around a series of exchanges between characters holding diametrically opposing points of view. They all have a distinctly Shavian character which the presence of Shaw’s play would have made manifest but which its absence serves to conceal. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand is a one-act play but, at thirty-six pages, is considerably longer than any of Yeats’s other Cuchulain plays, most of which are less than half that length. It is so partly because of the double structure examined in Chapter  2, with its comic subplot mirroring as it mocks the 85

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heroic tragedy of the main plot. But it is also lengthy because of the extended series of debates between Cuchulain and King Conchubar in the main plot. That Shavian exchange pits the centralising, civilising influence of the king, who wishes to secure a settled society for his children, against the radical anarchic individualism of Cuchulain, who proclaims: ‘I’ll not be bound./I’ll dance or hunt, or quarrel or make love,/Wherever and whenever I’ve a mind to.’22 Cuchulain is eventually persuaded not to stand in the way of historical progress, but to curb his radical individuality, come into government and take an oath of loyalty to the king. This process may be seen as inevitable but the consequences for the warrior are tragic. With the slaying of his son Cuchulain leaves no heir and is consigned to history. Yeats, recalling vividly when he first saw The Well of the Saints in performance at the Abbey in February 1905, described it as ‘a day of triumph when the first act of The Well of the Saints held its audience, though the chief two persons sat side by side under a stone cross from start to finish’.23 That sustaining lengthy dialogue between the blind couple Martin and Mary Doul is interrupted and challenged by the arrival of, first, the local villagers and, then, the Saint who offers to cure their blindness. The idea of vision, of the limitations of physical sight and the insights of the blind bequeathed by Sophocles and Shakespeare, are relentlessly and metaphorically probed by Synge in his dramatic parable. Cured but disillusioned by what they see, the couple willingly embrace what one of the villagers calls a ‘wilful blindness’24 when their sight fails again and they refuse the Saint’s attempt to cure them a second time. In an eloquent speech Martin Doul defends the rights of the individual against the social consensus which the villagers are urging the Saint to secure:25 [I]f it’s a right some of you have to be working and sweating the like of Timmy the smith, and a right some of you have to be fasting and praying and talking holy talk the like of yourself, I’m thinking it’s a good right ourselves have to be sitting blind, . . . and we not tormenting our souls with the sight of the grey days, and the holy men, and the dirty feet is trampling the world.26 As P.J. Mathews puts it in ‘The Years of Synge: The Cultural Debates’ in Chapter 8: ‘In the refusal of the blind vagrant couple, Martin and Mary Doul, to accept the healing intervention of the Saint, Synge celebrates the right of the dissident to opt out of the reforming agendas of the moral majority.’ Like the other two plays, Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island is structured around a series of debates. They bear on national identity, playing off the 86

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Irishman as dreaming romantic against the Englishman as hard-headed pragmatist. Shaw excoriates the Irishman (and, by implication, himself) when he has Larry Doyle talk self-accusingly of ‘the heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming’27 which will not let him alone. As a result ‘[h]e can’t be intelligently political: he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht [the Poor Old Woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan] said in ninety eight’.28 This thrust at their 1902 play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, is one of the ways Shaw put it up to Yeats and Lady Gregory when he submitted John Bull’s Other Island to them and provides a key instance of the play’s critique of ‘the whole spirit of the neoGaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal’.29 Larry therefore puts his dreaming in the hands of his realistic friend Broadbent as they travel to his home place in Rosscullen for the first time in eighteen years. Their motives for doing so bear examination. For much of the time, and particularly when he is in Ireland, Tom Broadbent plays the Stage Englishman, the bluff, cheery pragmatist who is on good terms with everyone and frequently appeals to ‘common sense’. But before he departs for Ireland, Broadbent takes the precaution of having his valet Hodson pack a revolver and when asked why he is going replies that he is interested in developing an estate there. The sinister element emerges briefly when Broadbent reveals he is not going to Ireland as a single individual, albeit one motivated by capitalist self-interest, but rather on behalf of a ‘Land Development Syndicate’.30 When Larry Doyle later in Act One mentions his concern and upset at Broadbent having foreclosed on the mortgage of a former Rosscullen landowner and childhood friend of his, he is met by Broadbent’s pragmatic response: ‘But he wouldn’t pay the interest. I had to foreclose on behalf of the Syndicate. So now I’m off to Rosscullen to look after the property myself.’31 For all of Larry Doyle’s reiterated desire to live in the real world and not an imaginary one by allying himself with the Englishman, there is still a distaste for what parts of this ‘marriage’ involve. Larry’s own emotional reticence arises because he is not going to the Ireland Broadbent is ready to take on, but to visit the family and friends he left behind by emigrating to London almost two decades earlier. But once John Bull moves to Ireland in its remaining three acts an important third voice enters the debate between dreams and reality in the form of the visionary Peter Keegan. A defrocked clergyman who adheres to the high European Catholicism of Charlemagne and Salamanca rather than the parish-pump politics of Rosscullen’s parish priest, Father Dempsey, Keegan practices vegetarianism and opposes the cruelty of slaughtering animals (as his creator did), holding that all life and not just the human is 87

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sacred, and describes a life-changing encounter with a dying Hindu priest which bespeaks broad religious sympathies. Peter Keegan is, in Michael Holroyd’s words, ‘the first and most convincing of Shaw’s mystical sages’.32 The play’s magnificent close centres on a three-way discussion between Broadbent, Doyle and Keegan in which its politics are laid bare. In Act One Larry has given a more benign view of Tom Broadbent’s motives for travelling to Rosscullen as ‘a sentimental expedition’.33 A great deal of Broadbent’s behaviour in Ireland would appear to support this interpretation, particularly in relation to the woman who is waiting for Larry to return and claim her as his bride. When Broadbent first encounters Nora in a romantic moonlight scene by a Celtic round tower, in a scene worthy of and inspired by Boucicault, he is immediately smitten and declares his love for her. But Broadbent’s behaviour only appears sentimental. The larger pattern that emerges reveals that he is taking over from and changing places with his Irish friend and colleague, not just where Nora Reilly is concerned but also with regard to the seat in Parliament that Cornelius Doyle is preparing for his son with the support of the local power-brokers. Broadbent submits to the buffoonery of riding in a car with a pig because he knows the joke can be turned to his own political advantage. Larry comes to realise that the thick skin and pragmatically opportunistic nature of the Englishman will carry the day with the voters of Rosscullen, especially when secured by marriage to a local woman, in a way that his own questioning intellect never will. But if Larry Doyle expresses some concern for how the enfranchised natives are now exploiting the labourer Patsy Farrell as they in turn were exploited under the English, it is not long before he is moved to repudiate his local affiliations by declaring his faith in ‘men with capital’34 and amalgamating with his friend’s syndicate in the name of efficiency. The play’s ending fully discloses that Broadbent and Doyle’s partnership is not operating on its own but in the service of a global capitalist consortium on whose behalf they are buying up the land around Roscullen. In lines prophetic of Ireland’s economic downturn in 2008, Keegan realises they are offering the local sellers more money than the land is worth, so that they can foreclose on the mortgages. His final vision of his hopes for Ireland is as stirring and timeless as any speech in the Abbey Theatre’s more poetic repertoire: ‘[This] is holy ground. Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven; and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.’35 As M.J. Sidnell points out, ‘in Keegan of John Bull’s Other Island . . . one may see [Shaw’s] astonishment, irritation and admiration for poets and 88

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dreamers like Yeats’.36 When Larry protests one last time about the Irishman’s dreaming, Keegan speaks even more for his author and Shaw’s dramatic methods when he replies, ‘[halting and turning them to them for the last time] Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time’.37 Late in life, Yeats singled out ‘the moralizing of the spoilt priest [Peter Keegan]’ as one of ‘the events of life and art that had most [moved] me’.38 Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island is the only one of the three plays I have been comparing which is set in the contemporary moment of 1904; as one character asks, ‘[w]hat about Home Rule?’39 Yet the assumption that a form of legislative independence within the British Empire is coming underwrites all three as does the larger question of what kind of country the new Ireland will be, whether it will still find room for the marginalised, whether individual rights will be respected. These three Irish and Abbey Theatre plays mutually illuminate and refine each other, and indicate their shared characteristics more fully when the missing Shaw is restored.

The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet: An Abbey play? But if John Bull’s Other Island was not staged in Dublin at the Abbey in 1904 and so went on instead and without delay at the Court in London, the situation was reversed five years later. The Vedrenne-Barker company had moved from the Royal Court to London’s West End in 1907–1908 with their latest Shaw programme and had come a financial cropper. Shaw may have undertaken The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet for Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s company to make back some of his money: the play is broad and raucous and set in a Wild West town with recognisable cowboy types, though it has a very serious core. But Blanco Posnet, unusually for Shaw, was a one-act play rather than another in the succession of three-act lengthy works he had recently been producing: John Bull in 1904, Major Barbara in 1905 and The Devil’s Disciple in 1906. And Shaw by this stage, after ten years of concerted and collective if largely fruitless efforts to abolish the censorship laws, surely knew enough about the Lord Chamberlain and his audiences’ areas of greatest moral squeamishness to anticipate what lines would strike home. Shaw remembers Beerbohm Tree, when he read the script of Blanco Posnet for the first time, as being ‘simply shocked by it, absolutely horrified’.40 Tree in particular objected to Blanco’s description of God as ‘a sly one . . ., a mean one’41 and to his charge that the woman in the trial who alleged she saw him on the stolen horse had had ‘immoral relations with every man in this town, 89

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including yourself, Sheriff ’;42 but Shaw refused to cut them. At the time, another theatrical event was absorbing Shaw, the meetings of the Censorship Select Committee before which he and other playwrights were being summoned to appear. So, predictably, when Blanco Posnet was in rehearsal in May in London, word came through that the Lord Chamberlain had refused it a licence. In June, Lady Gregory was in London to see the Abbey Company present The Playboy of the Western World and Cathleen ni Houlihan at the Royal Court, where she viewed the Abbey plays in the company of Shaw and his wife Charlotte. When Gregory visited them at Ayot St Lawrence on her last day in London, Shaw was ready and offered The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet to Yeats and herself to present at the Abbey. All three knew that the Lord Chamberlain’s writ did not run in Dublin theatres, and that therefore the Abbey could enjoy an artistic freedom unknown in London and could also challenge colonial rule by the exercise of that freedom; they had already been considering staging a version of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King with that aim in mind. Yeats and Gregory immediately accepted Shaw’s offer and staged the world premiere of his latest play at the Abbey on 25 August 1909. In the process, they had to face down Dublin Castle and the Lord Lieutenant, detailed accounts of which have not been lacking from Lady Gregory’s version in Our Irish Theatre on.43 Sinn Féin knew that if they demonstrated against the Abbey Theatre, as they had done during the run of Synge’s Playboy less than three years earlier, such a protest would be read as supportive of Dublin Castle. As Yeats wrote gleefully to his father: ‘The theatre made a good deal of money and is supported now even by Sinn Fein.’44 What the evidence suggests is that Shaw wrote The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet in the full knowledge and with the intention that it would be forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain, that the Abbey would then accept and stage it in its uncut version and that the result would draw ridicule upon that censorship. There is evidence in the play itself that Blanco Posnet was all along intended for the Abbey stage. Unusually for Shaw it was a one-act play, as so many of those still written for the Abbey (especially Yeats’s) were. Shaw even offered them another new one-act play, Press Cuttings, to make up the body of the programme. It will come as no surprise to learn that Press Cuttings was also turned down by the Lord Chamberlain. But Yeats and Lady Gregory had what they wanted, declined the offer and staged Blanco Posnet with two one-act plays of their own, Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan and Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward. But there is also internal evidence that Blanco Posnet was intended as an Abbey play. When Shaw was asked whether he wanted the players to adopt 90

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American accents he recommended instead: ‘I should play it in broad Irish, especially as that language will lend itself very congenially to the blasphemies with which the dialogue bristles.’45 Shaw’s comment licenses a parallel between the American Wild West and the west of Ireland. But it is also secured by the play’s being written with a strong awareness of and commentary upon Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and the rows it had raised at the Abbey in 1907. The one act Blanco Posnet in particular resembles the third act of Synge’s play, where both title characters are faced with the prospect of being hanged. This is for a crime – the killing of a father, the stealing of a horse – which much of the play leaves deliberately ambiguous as to whether it has been committed by them or not. Synge’s and Shaw’s citizens are close to hanging the accused men themselves, with scant reference to the forms of law. As Pegeen’s father says when approaching Christy Mahon with a rope: ‘Twist a hangman’s knot on it and slip it over his head while he’s not minding at all.’46 In the Shaw play, as the jury is about to be sworn in, the young men collectively rush Blanco and cry out: ‘Take him out and hang him.’47 Yeats was fond of citing Hugo’s line to the effect that, in the theatre, a mob became a people. These tumultuous years at the Abbey were part of this complicated process, at least part of which involved the people first becoming a mob. As Chapter 3 noted, there is a curious alignment in Synge’s Playboy whereby the audience in the Abbey Theatre and the onstage audience in the Mayo shebeen both become increasingly riotous in their behaviour, the former to protest the representation of the latter. In the Shaw play, the Abbey audience got to witness a further disquisition on the subject. With the prospect of a hanging before them, Christy Mahon and Blanco Posnet speak in an increasingly heightened, apocalyptic mode, one which deliberately invokes a religious register; it would be difficult to find an equivalent by an English playwright writing for the English stage, then or now. Christy’s speeches threaten to precede his own hanging with the killing of at least some of his opponents, ‘the way . . . you’ll have a gallous jaunt I’m saying, coaching out through Limbo with my father’s ghost’.48 There is something of the same evangelical fervour in Shaw as his Blanco Posnet concludes with what has been promised in its subtitle: ‘A Sermon in Crude Melodrama’. The issue is partly whether Blanco Posnet can be forgiven for stealing the horse when he has gone on to offer it up in a worthy cause, to help the young mother bring her seriously ill child to hospital: in the process he has had to sacrifice himself to inevitable arrest and hanging. As discussed in Chapter 2, Yeats’s first play, The Countess Cathleen, had caused controversy 91

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on two fronts: offending the nationalists by suggesting that Irish people would sell their souls for gold in a time of famine; and outraging doctrinal orthodoxy by having an angel appear to forgive the Countess for selling her own soul since it was done to redeem the otherwise forfeited souls of others. Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet goes even further in this theologically heterodox direction by raising the age-old question of how a benevolent God can coexist with the unmerited suffering of the innocent, since the young woman’s child (even with the aid of the horse) has died before reaching a doctor. As Blanco puts it in his sermon in comments directly aimed at his brother, the hypocritical minister: ‘Youre in the Lord’s confidence . . . What about the croup? I guess he made the croup when He was thinking of one thing; and then He made the child when He was thinking of something else; and the croup got past him and killed the Child.’49 Shaw rewrote these lines for the Abbey production, since he felt his meaning was not entirely clear. He wrote to Lady Gregory that for him the Deity was not just the God of Love but also the God of Cancer and Epilepsy and that He proceeded like a scientist by a kind of divine trial and error. The new lines read: ‘What about the croup? It was early days when He made the croup, I guess. It was the best He could think of then; but when it turned out wrong on His hands He made you and me to fight the croup for Him.’50 This may have clarified matters for Shaw, but it made the play not a whit less blasphemous. When Dublin Castle suggested the script of Shaw’s play be submitted to the Catholic Archbishop, Lady Gregory invoked Yeats’s controversial first play to reply: ‘We said we did not give into the Church when Cardinal Logue [Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh] denounced The Countess Cathleen; we played it under police protection.’51 Perhaps not only reminded of his early play and the religious controversy it caused but stimulated by the theologico-dramatic disputes over Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, Yeats undertook a major revision of The Countess Cathleen which was staged at the Abbey precisely three years later. In the event, the staging of Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet at the Abbey on 25 August 1909 was received in a markedly different way from the controversies and riots which attended the openings of Yeats’s Countess Cathleen and Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. It was applauded, not attacked, by the nationalists as a tilt against the Lord Lieutenant and Dublin Castle; and the audience enjoyed what they took to be an entertaining romp while seeking in vain for what had so offended the English censor. As inveterate theatregoer and Abbey Theatre architect Joseph Holloway reported in his diary: ‘The drama was followed with intense interest right up to the end, and 92

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heartily applauded . . . The scene Shaw has conjured up is lurid and strong – melodrama made tolerable by the genius of the author . . . The babble of voices expressing wonder at the Censor’s verdict on the play was a thing to hear and remember.’52 It went into the repertoire of the Abbey Theatre and was given an annual production there for the next seven years, until it was eventually joined in 1916 by John Bull’s Other Island, after which both figured at least once a year for more than two decades, until the death not of Lady Gregory in 1932 but of W.B. Yeats in 1939.53 After its successful and full production at the Abbey in Dublin, Shaw ‘requested a re-submission [of Blanco Posnet] to the Lord Chamberlain’s office; but the Lord Chamberlain gave the same decision’54 and the play remained unproduced in England.

O’Flaherty, V.C. and the Irish in World War I In 1915 Shaw wrote a third play for the Abbey, this time explicitly and directly, like John Bull and unlike Blanco Posnet. But O’Flaherty, V.C. was never staged there then or at any time in the future, once World War I had ended and conscription was no longer an issue. The play, like Blanco Posnet, is a one-act work. As Shaw pointed out to Lady Gregory: ‘Played straight through without interruptions, applause, or riot, it ought to take from forty minutes to forty-five to get through – longer than The Workhouse Ward, but on that scale, generally.’55 The following month, he wrote to Yeats that it was ‘by no means sure that it will be licensed in England’,56 so again this was a play written for the Abbey Theatre by Shaw with some awareness of the unlikelihood of its ever getting past the Lord Chamberlain. The setting is based on Gregory’s home Coole Park, ‘an Irish country house in a park’,57 where the idea for the play had germinated when Shaw stayed there some months earlier. The title part of Private Dennis ‘Dinny’ O’Flaherty was deliberately fashioned for Abbey actor Arthur Sinclair, who had just left the company over a row and had to be wooed back to prepare for it; and for the part of O’Flaherty’s mother, Shaw suggested that ‘Sara Allgood might, with an effort, condescend’.58 Allgood was much more suited to this part than the loose-living Feemy in Blanco Posnet where Lady Gregory thought ‘Miss Allgood does look very virtuous for a fallen woman’.59 The proposed casting of Sara Allgood as Mrs O’Flaherty was to anticipate her most famous Abbey role almost a decade later, as the mother of all Irish mothers Juno Boyle in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Once again, a Shaw play caused controversy for the Abbey and was opposed, not by Dublin 93

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Castle this time, but by the military authorities. They felt that conscription was far too volatile a subject to be staged during wartime and were far less convinced than Shaw upon reading O’Flaherty, V.C. that it was (as its subtitle proclaims it) ‘a recruiting pamphlet’. The argument of the play appeared to be the satirical one that young Irishmen would sign up for the war to see more of the world and to get some peace and quiet away from nagging mothers and wives. When the Rt Hon W.F. Bailey, one of the Estates Commissioners and an adviser of the Abbey, pointed out that ‘the whole question of recruiting is in a very critical stage’,60 Lady Gregory once more raised the cudgels on behalf of Shaw and the Abbey. But she was committed to going to the US on an Abbey tour and when she departed in November 1915 handed over to W.B. Yeats. Without the presence of Lady Gregory to mediate and ameliorate relations between them, Yeats and Shaw soon ran into difficulties. Yeats had no stomach for a fight with the military authorities in Ireland at a time of world war. As he reported to Lady Gregory, ‘I should say that my very first sentence had been that it was out of the question our fighting the issue.’ The subsequent exchange he reports between them is revealing: ‘Shaw, I thought, was disappointed. He said, if Lady Gregory was in London, she would fight it, but added afterwards, that he didn’t really want us to but thought you would do it out of love of mischief. I told him that was a misunderstanding of your character.’61 This rare exchange lays bare the complicated triangular relationship between Yeats, Shaw and Lady Gregory, with each of the men claiming to have the truer understanding of Gregory’s character and hence to know her better than the other. In the Yeats-Synge-Gregory triad of directors that ran the Abbey in the first five years of its existence, Yeats was the one who skilfully drew Synge and Gregory into a closer relationship than they would otherwise have enjoyed; here, Lady Gregory is the one who prevents Yeats and Shaw each vying to be cock of the walk. But on earlier occasions, as this chapter has demonstrated, Yeats had at least expressed ambivalence about Shaw’s various plays. Here, O’Flaherty, V.C. is simply dropped from possible production and never mentioned again.62 The play can be seen as a comic inversion of Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan with Mrs O’Flaherty described by her son as a ‘poor woman [who] kissed me and went about the house singing in her old cracky voice that the French was on the sea, and theyd be here without delay, and the Orange will decay, says the Shan Van Vocht’.63 But Yeats can scarcely have been offended by the satiric treatment of Cathleen ni Houlihan in O’Flaherty, V.C. since Shaw in John Bull’s Other Island had already made a similar point 94

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about the Irish needing to dress up a political question as a Poor Old Woman before they could address it; and Lady Gregory, who had at least an equal share in the composition of Cathleen ni Houlihan, did not take umbrage either. The cause of Yeats’s unambiguous opposition to Shaw’s play, as I read it, is that it takes World War I as its subject. Yeats’s attitudes in this regard are briefly touched on in the short contemporaneous poem, ‘On being asked for a War Poem’: ‘I think it better that in times like these/A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth/We have no gift to set a statesman right.’64 But the nature of his objections to writing about World War I as a literary subject only really emerged in the years after the war itself. In 1936, Yeats caused a sensation by omitting the celebrated World War I poets – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, etc. – from his edition of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935. In his Introduction, he justified his exclusion on the personal grounds that ‘I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war’ and on the more general objection that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’.65 In the Irish theatrical context, Yeats’s objections emerged in the course of the row sparked by the Abbey Theatre’s rejection in 1928 of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, as Chapter 6 will explore in more detail. His objection to O’Casey about the play was worded as follows: ‘you are not interested in the Great War; you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions’.66 In his spirited reply and defence, O’Casey strikingly cites Shaw’s work before zeroing in on Yeats himself: ‘You say “you never stood on its battlefields”. Do you really mean that no one should or could write about or speak about a war because one has not stood upon the battlefields? . . . Was G.B. Shaw in the boats with the French, or in the forts with the British when St. Joan and Dumois made the attack that relieved Orleans? And someone, I think, wrote a poem about Tir na nOg who never took a header into the Land of Youth.’67 It is striking in retrospect how much of The Silver Tassie is anticipated in O’Flaherty, V.C. Both of the women in Shaw’s play are motivated by materialism, his girlfriend Teresa by the gold chain O’Flaherty gives her, the mother by her son claiming that ‘[s]he’s thinking of nothing but to get me out there again to be wounded so that she may spend my pension’.68 The portrayal of the mother in O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie has little of the self-sacrificing 95

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quality of Juno Boyle in his Civil War play and is much closer in spirit to the termagant that is Mrs Flaherty, ‘a Volumnia of the potato patch rather than an affectionate parent’,69 as Shaw describes her. Instead, in the context of Ireland and World War I, Mrs Heegan’s reiterated concern is that, if her son Harry misses the boat, ‘my governmental money grant would stop at once’.70 Diarmaid Ferriter has written of the ‘thousands of Irish women whose husbands were fighting with the British army [and who] were also enjoying a standard of living they could not have afforded but for their husbands’ service’.71 The term used at the time of women in receipt of such funds was ‘separation allowance women’. Mrs O’Flaherty is explicitly identified as one of their party on several occasions during O’Flaherty, V.C. through such remarks as: ‘please God the war will last a long time yet: and may be I’ll die before it’s over and the separation allowance stops’.72 Ferriter cites the following description from the period of the ‘separation allowance women’s behaviour’ towards Sinn Fein candidates in the 1917 election: ‘in their drunken condition they were a frenzied and ferocious crowd to deal with’.73 By comparison with such contemporary accounts, the behaviour of Mrs O’Flaherty as she launches into ‘an appalling tempest of wordy wrath’74 towards the younger woman who has appropriated the gold chain appears moderate and the result of accurate historical reportage on Shaw’s part rather than a resort to Stage Irishry. Emboldened by the broadening of his experience in France, Private Dennis O’Flaherty is no longer the sexually intimidated and rather gormless young man who left Ireland to join the British army. The exchanges between Private O’Flaherty and General Sir Pearce Madigan indicate that the complacent and unquestioned feudal relationship between the Protestant squire and the Catholic tenant which existed before the war is exploded by their contrasting experience of the trenches. O’Flaherty recalls the horror of the day ‘that your comrade is killed in the trench beside you, and you don’t as much as look round at him until you trip over his poor body’75 while the general speaks of reading the newspapers at the front. The contrast inspires Private O’Flaherty to reflect on the transformation he has undergone. Asked by his mother what has happened to him, her son replies: ‘Whats happened to everybody, thats what I want to know. Whats happened to you that I thought all the world of and was afeard of? Whats happened to Sir Pearce, that I thought was a great general, and that I now see to be no more fit to command an army than an old hen?’76 In such passages, we are well on our way to the magnificent second act of The Silver Tassie. 96

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Shaw was unequivocal in his support of O’Casey’s play, writing to him: ‘What a hell of a play! . . . Of course the Abbey should have produced it . . . whether it liked it or not . . . It is surprising that [Yeats and Lady Gregory] fired so very wide considering their marksmanship.’77 Where Yeats in Acts Three and Four of The Silver Tassie had seen only a falling away, Shaw riposted: ‘There is certainly no falling off or loss of grip: the hitting gets harder and harder right through to the end.’78 Lady Gregory, who had gone along with the decision to reject The Silver Tassie, saw it staged in London and after a chiding by Shaw recorded a change of heart: ‘my mind goes back to the Tassie – we ought not to have rejected it – we should have held out against L[ennox] R[obinson].’79 With regard to Yeats and O’Casey’s play, Shaw concluded: Yeats himself, with all his extraordinary cleverness and subtlety, which comes out just when you give him up as a hopeless fool and (in this case) deserts him when you expect him to be equal to the occasion, is not a man of this world; and when you hurl an enormous smashing chunk of it at him he dodges it, small blame to him.80 The change of heart on the Abbey’s part about The Silver Tassie which Lady Gregory initiated at Shaw’s prompting led to the play being staged there in 1935 (three years after her death);81 even on that occasion, it was met with public hostility, the denunciation of the press and the Catholic Church and the resignation of one of the theatre’s directors, playwright Brinsley McNamara. Throughout the 1930s, as indicated earlier, at least one Shaw play a year was staged at Ireland’s National Theatre across the entire range of his dramatic output.82 Such regular production of Shaw’s plays at Ireland’s National Theatre during the last decade of Yeats’s life was at least in part a recognition of the extent to which Shaw continually put it up to the theatre’s directors to recall their radical origins. And in 1932 Yeats and Shaw, who had both won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the previous decade, were to collaborate in the founding of an Irish Academy of Letters.83 In his Journal of 1909, Yeats wrote that ‘[i]f we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are and try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves . . . Active virtue . . . is therefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.’84 George Bernard Shaw, in both his personality and his drama, performed that role of necessary other in relation to the Irish Dramatic Revival and in particular for Yeats in his fascinated, appalled, lifelong engagement with GBS.

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CHAPTER 5 LADY GREGORY: IRISH WOMAN PLAYWRIGHT

The emergence of a writer Two factors have contributed to the neglect of Lady Gregory as a playwright. One is the biological and gendered fact that she was a woman; the other, ironically, is the extraordinary number of roles she performed in her public and private life. This is particularly the case in relation to the Abbey Theatre, which she co-founded and where she was the dominant social force in many of the key confrontations, particularly with Dublin Castle. Probably the single greatest event in her life which helped to free her from the constraints of Victorian womanhood was the fact of her becoming a widow at the relatively young age of forty, when her (much) older husband died in 1892. A son, Robert, had been born the previous year; and motherhood was to be a central fact in her life from then until her son’s tragic death as a pilot in World War I. The poem Yeats wrote on the subject, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, attributes divided loyalties to Robert Gregory: ‘Those that I fight I do not hate,/Those that I guard I do not love;/My country is Kiltartan Cross,/ My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor’.1 But divided, even contradictory loyalties, apply much more to Lady Gregory (as the analyis of her plays will show) than they ever appear to have to Robert, the loyal son of Empire. After her widowhood, Gregory always wore black; but while preserving outward comformity to social propriety, she nurtured rebellious sympathies in terms both of her allegiance to what was expected of her as a woman and as a member of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry. Her widowhood gave her a powerful social position and inherited wealth but freed her from a great many of the constraints which formerly attached to her. Gregory now had the means to travel as she chose, not just in the wake of Sir William; and to command attention in her own right. These freedoms she deployed formidably in half a lifetime of service, her remaining forty years, to the cause of an Irish national theatre. None of this quite explains her emergence as a writer. Gregory’s father believed education was wasted on women, and so she was largely self-taught,

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an auto-didact like O’Casey after her.2 Her initial writings began as an act of service to her late husband, editing his letters and his journal. One can see how this supportive role transferred to W.B. Yeats. But her writerly relationship with Yeats was always more than as a mere amanuensis (even if she did type all his letters when he stayed at Coole Park). She may have been inspired by Yeats’s cultural summons to gather folklore, but she established her own credentials in that area before he ever joined her on her researches. And Gregory’s knowledge of the Irish language gave her an advantage Yeats could never match. Similarly, the dialect of Kiltartan speech that she perfected was something on which he depended and drew in his early plays; its unusual syntactic structure and other derivations from the Irish were something only to be equalled by Synge. The collaboration between Yeats and Gregory has already been looked at in relation to Cathleen ni Houlihan. It is important to note that she was later to remark: ‘If I had not met Yeats I believe I should still have become a writer.’3 It is also important to stress that the collaboration with Yeats was clearly a period of transition in Lady Gregory’s emergence as a dramatist in her own right. She was to go on to write, as Christopher Murray has pointed out, ‘forty-two plays in all, including translations, thirty-six of which were staged between 1903 and 1927.’4 Already, with the opening of the Abbey Theatre in December 1904, Yeats had his name on On Baile’s Strand while Gregory’s alone was appended as author to Spreading the News. And as Annie Horniman was to point out to Yeats in relation to the early years of the Abbey: ‘Lady Gregory’s work must be well treated – she is the best “draw” of the lot of you.’5

Spreading the News In one of the fascinating and revealing notes she appends to the play, Lady Gregory reveals that she first conceived of Spreading the News ‘as a tragedy’.6 That tragedy would have hinged around a young woman heading with confidence to market, and the stark contrast presented by the image of her return in the evening, ‘her head hanging, the heads of others turned from her, because of some sudden story that had risen out of a chance word, and had snatched away her good name’. But as Gregory goes on to write, ‘comedy and not tragedy was wanted at our theatre to put beside the high poetic work’ (she primarily cites plays by Yeats) and so ‘I let laughter have its way with the little play’. The dramatic kernel of her original idea remains in the finished play, Spreading the News, where a destructively malicious story 100

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suddenly arises out of a chance word. That story takes on a life of its own as it threatens potential acts of violence and a number of arrests, all of which are only narrowly averted. Gregory’s original thought of the play as a tragedy is not entirely banished, therefore, but has its influence and casts its dark shadow on the comedy she subsequently wrote. Furthermore, less than two years later, Gregory was to write a tragedy for the Abbey entitled The Gaol Gate. It was Yeats who insisted that Lady Gregory’s dramatic gifts be confined to comedy, as in this rather damning (and limiting) judgement on Gregory as a playwright: ‘Being a writer for comedy, her life as an artist has not shaken in her, as tragic art would have done, the conventional standards. Besides, she has never been part of the artist’s world, she has belonged to a political world, or one that is merely social.’7 This absolute distinction on which he is insisting between Lady Gregory as the writer of comedy and the male artist Yeats as the writer of tragedy breaks down in a number of ways, not least through the (suppressed) fact of their collaboration. And while Gregory’s comedies are themselves accomplished, what is so striking about her dramatic output is its range: comedy, tragedy, history, romance, adaptations and translations. Even as late as 1911, when evidence of that range had become plentiful, Yeats is still insisting on confining Gregory to comedy over what are now her active protests. The occasion is their arrival in New York at the commencement of the first Abbey tour in the US, when Yeats announces that Gregory had written “‘a comedy [Hanrahan’s Oath] on shipboard”. “No, no, it isn’t a comedy,” insisted her ladyship’.8 In her ‘Notes’ on the play, Gregory reveals how she cracked the comedy of Spreading the News. Initially, she could only think of Bartley Fallon (the character to whom all the misfortunes happen) as ‘dull-witted or silly or ignorant’,9 in other words as a comic buffoon, the very kind of Stage Irishman stereotype the Irish Literary Theatre had determined to abolish. Then she reveals that ‘one day by the sea at Duras a melancholy man who was telling me of the crosses he had gone through at home said: “But I’m thinking if I went to America, it’s long ago to-day I’d be dead.” Bartley was born at that moment’.10 Gregory has drawn on the inspiration of the man she spoke with at Duras for creating and getting the speech of her ‘melancholy man’ – in Spreading the News, Bartley speaks these lines about America verbatim shortly after he enters – but she has also found her characteristic form in the classic comedy of Ben Jonson. Like those in Jonson, Bartley Fallon is a ‘humorous’ character, in that his personality is determined by one of the four ‘humours’ – in his case, ‘melancholy’. And the fair in which Gregory’s play is 101

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set has clear antecedents in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.11 Like him, she brings an entire cast of characters to life in a fast-moving ensemble. As Christopher Murray has observed, its comedy depends on ‘split-second timing’12 in order for its misunderstandings to accumulate and shows how much Gregory already knows about the theatre. No character dominates in the play, not even the memorably oppressed Bartley Fallon, who always expects the worst to happen and is rarely disappointed. Rather, it is a rapidly-changing ensemble, in which no one character is able to become established. In this way, both the social fabric of the community is conveyed as well as the lack of agency they enjoy in their lives. Part of the comic mood is that of contradiction. When Bartley is asked to agree that ‘[i]t was a good fair’, he immediately comes back by saying ‘it was not a good fair, Mrs. Tarpey. It was a scattered sort of a fair’.13 He follows this with a traditional saying, ‘[i]f we didn’t expect more, we got less’ (31), which not only expresses a communal wisdom but a burden of historical experience. What we are aware of is the verbal exchange, one opinion being thrown over by another, as well as someone who has no choice but to voice a melancholy outlook. Rather than the characters determining what they speak, the case is more the reverse. Spreading the News suggests that what has agency here is language, that words have a logic and momentum of their own as they move from character to character. Seamus Deane observed of Sheridan’s plays (and in particular of Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals) that his ‘figures both command and are commanded by the language they speak’14 and this is no less true of Gregory’s comedy than of Sheridan’s or (as was observed earlier) of Wilde’s. In a way, Gregory provides an important link between Wilde and Synge. In her Spreading the News, as in Earnest and Playboy, an oral fiction is developed which soon takes on a reality of its own, with the presumed death of a character who is still all too alive or who never existed. What Gregory described as the Irish ‘incorrigible genius for myth-making’15 might also be described as an addiction to narrative. From a few stray details, the characters in the play rapidly construct an elaborate and melodramatic narrative in which Bartley Fallon has gone out with a hayfork to murder another character. This is based on giving a certain more than literal construction to the phrase ‘following after’ when one character tells another: ‘He’s gone up the road (jerks elbow) following Jack Smith with a hayfork’ (32). The one character on stage throughout (selling her apples) is Mrs Tarpey, who is hard of hearing. We appear to be being set up for a comic mishearing by Mrs Tarpey as a theatrical device to initiate the escalating misunderstandings. 102

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But the initial mishearing is rather a misinterpretation of what has been said, to which Mrs Tarpey makes her contribution when she mishears ‘[l]aying out a sheet on the hedge’ as ‘[l]aying out a sheet for the dead’ (34). The slipperiness of language is what is at issue here with words and phrases being seized and (mis)applied to a pre-existent scenario. It is clear that Synge learned a great deal from Lady Gregory’s drama in terms of speech and incident and from her farcical situations. In both cases the playwrights are aware of the serious underside of such comedy and do not shy away from the implications of a colonial history, as Boucicault did. There is a colonial figure in the play, an English magistrate who has previously served a term as adminstrator on the Andaman Islands. Everything he encounters among the west of Ireland ‘natives’ is referred to the system of surveillance he devised there: ‘When I was in the Andaman Islands, my system never failed. Yes, yes, I will change all that’ (29). It is apparent from the start that this pompous character is doomed to failure in the face of the verbal anarchy that soon erupts. His failure is in part due to the fact that this imperial outsider is reliant on a local policeman to ‘translate’ for him. When the Magistrate inquires after someone with the blandly anonymous name of ‘John Smith’, the person he is seeking is not correctly identified until ‘John’ is translated into ‘Jack’ and the identifying moniker of ‘Red’ (which would have been ‘rua’ in the Irish) is added. This is not the only play in which Gregory raises such ‘translation’ issues in linguistic exchanges between the Irish ‘natives’ and the British authorities. She does so by playing one kind of English, the ‘officialese’ of the colonial administration, against the Irish-inflected, idiomatic English of the locals, and showing how vast the gulf between them is. In an extraordinary scene, the Magistrate questions Bartley Fallon about his alleged murder of Red Jack Smith: Magistrate

Tell me all you know.

Bartley All that I know – Well, there are three estates; there is Limbo, and there is Purgatory, and there is – Magistrate

Nonsense! This is trifling. Get to the point. (39)

Empirical questions lead to metaphysical speculation. In the interview with contemporary playwright Conor McPherson in this book, he differentiates the world views of the English and the Irish as the horizontal and the vertical, with the first posing the question ‘how do I deal with the other people on that plane?’ and the second ‘standing on the earth [but] the concern is all

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going way up into the sky’. Spreading the News is not entirely free of its own colonial prejudices: that the Irish construct a homicidal story out of the random and the contingent, that they are only too ready to believe the worst of each other. But in the above scene between Bartley and the Magistrate articulating two utterly disparate and opposed worldviews the play manages at least temporarily to transcend its own prejudices.

The Gaol Gate Yeats’s statement, quoted earlier, denying Lady Gregory the role of an artist seeks to do so primarily by restricting her to ‘a social world’. But Lady Gregory did not exclusively occupy or fit entirely comfortably within that social world. Her artistic leanings could not readily be accommodated there and inspired her passionately and stubbornly held ambition to build a theatre in which they could be pursued. But bound up in her identity was a personal and political conflict between the Lady Gregory who presided in the west of Ireland at Coole Park and the Lady Gregory who presided at the Abbey, specifically in her role as playwright. That conflict emerges in downright contradictory and fascinating form in the opposition she mounted to having the Abbey Theatre Company stage her play, The Gaol Gate, as part of its programme of one-act plays when it toured to Galway for a week in January 1908. Lady Gregory was the most unequivocally positive of the Abbey directors about the issue of touring Ireland. As she wrote to playwright Padraic Colum in January 1906: ‘We meant to go to the country (my own chief interest in the scheme from the beginning) and to this end we must pay actors who will be free to go there.’16 Although Gregory travelled from Coole Park to Dublin on a frequent basis to witness productions of her plays, she did not join the company (as Synge did) in their travels around Ireland; her social class and gender would have prevented that. Gregory came into her own in this respect in the several months she spent with the players on tour in the US in 1911 and 1912. This is only one of the contradictions and complexities one encounters in relation to Lady Gregory – between her political awareness as director and playwright for an Irish National Theatre of the importance of touring Ireland, and her socially immuring herself within her social role as mistress of Coole Park. Those contradictions emerged when it came to choosing the plays to make up the programme of one-act plays for the week in Galway. Normally, 104

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Gregory’s comedies and the plays she and Yeats had co-authored formed the programme, since they proved the most popular. Synge fared worst, with Riders to the Sea the only one of his plays considered for performance outside Dublin. On the Galway occasion, Lady Gregory’s two comedies, Spreading the News and Hyacinth Halvey, did not exclusively fill the bill; rather, they shared the two programmes which the Abbey offered for the week with her political plays, The Gaol Gate and The Rising of the Moon (and Cathleen ni Houlihan, which was partly hers too, if the truth had been known). Contrary to the Abbey directors’ usual practice when planning a tour, the selection of plays was not agreed in advance by all parties involved. In Dublin, Willie Fay made the selection, with what consultation with Synge one cannot tell, but without reference to Lady Gregory. The response from that quarter was thunderous. Gregory wrote to Synge on 26 December 1907: ‘I am afraid from a letter from Fay Yeats sends me, that a break up must come. He has put on Gaol Gate for Galway (which I was particularly against for local reasons) and says he was given leave to choose the Galway programme – which he never was.’17 Matters between the Abbey’s three directors and Willie Fay had been coming to a head for some time over who had ultimate authority with regard to the players.18 This issue over the Galway programme appears to have been the final straw and to have precipitated the departure of the Fay brothers in January 1908 from the theatre they had helped found. In her letter to Yeats the same day, Gregory is more detailed and explicit about why she so vehemently opposed one of her own plays being staged locally: ‘I particularly didn’t wish to have Gaol Gate there in the present state of agrarian excitement, it would be looked on as a direct incentive to crime.’19 The scene is set outside the forbidding ‘gate of Galway Gaol’.20 Gregory’s short play (six pages to the fifteen of Spreading the News) focuses on the mother and daughter who arrive at the prison ‘just before dawn’ (137) to inquire of their man’s fate. The crime for which Denis Cahel and several other young men of the community have been imprisoned is described on the play’s first page as ‘moonlighting’. As the mother Mary Cahel puts it: ‘What call had he to go moonlighting or to bring himself into danger at all?’ (137). Chambers defines the term (in a specifically Irish context) as ‘a person who committed agrarian outrages by night about 1880, in protest against the introduction of the land-tenure system’.21 When the Gatekeeper appears, he reveals that Denis Cahel is already dead, that he was executed the day before. His account is brutal: ‘Those that break the law must be made an example of . . . A long rope and a short 105

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burying, that is the order for a man that is hanged’ (141). The women have come too late because they were unable to interpret the language of the official letter in which they were sent the news: ‘I wish we could know what is in the letter they are after sending us through the post. Isn’t it a great pity for the two of us to be without learning at all?’ (138). While Lady Gregory wrote in both Irish and English, and translated between the two languages, The Gaol Gate never specifies that the women are more fluent in their native Irish than the recently imposed officialese of English (which they may speak but are unable to read). What the play wants to stress is the political implications of two different kinds of English being spoken and the two different orders of reality they connote: one hierarchical and brutal, the other communal and interactive; what is dramatised is the colonial process by which one is imposed on the other. The primary political concern of The Gaol Gate rests with the question of whether the prisoner, Denis Cahel, had informed against those others with whom he was imprisoned. That concern continues even after the news of his death and animates the women’s further inquiries of the Gatekeeper. What he reveals is that Denis was identified by his footprints and that, since ‘[t]here was no witness given against the rest worth while’ (142), they were released. The young woman Mary Cushen rails against the setting free of all the other men while her husband was ‘made an end of ’ by asking: ‘What justice is there in the world at all?’ (141). But the mother interprets the outcome not along the lines of British justice but in terms of a son who has refused the blandishments of that system to keep faith with and sacrifice himself on behalf of the community to which he belonged: ‘Then the sergeant was lying [who] said Denis Cahel had informed in the gaol? . . . Did they ever hear in Galway such a thing to be done, a man to die for his neighbour? . . . One word to the judge and Denis was free, they offered him all sorts of riches’ (142). It is that community to which the mother and wife return at the end of the play and by which they will be welcomed: ‘The child he left in the house that is shook, it is great will be his boast in his father! All Ireland will have a welcome before him’ (142). As Cathy Leeney remarks in relation to The Gaol Gate: ‘Gregory’s lover Wilfred Scawen Blunt was imprisoned at Galway during the Land War in 1887–8, and in 1900 Gregory had written “The Felons of Our Land”, an article describing celebrations for guilty heroes on their release from prison.’22 In that article, Gregory makes the same distinction as the play when she says that the term ‘felon’ is applied to one who has committed ‘a crime in the eyes of the law, [but] not in the eyes of the people’.23 106

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During the Abbey’s five-night run in Galway on 6–10 January 1908, Lady Gregory did not put in an appearance at the Court Theatre until the Thursday and Friday nights. Synge wrote to Molly Allgood on the Thursday and, apparently oblivious to all that was going on, remarked: ‘It is queer that Lady G. hasn’t turned up.’24 As her correspondence with Yeats reveals, she says she did not ‘go before plays because it is such a nationalist programme’.25 And while she had encouraged nationalist friends to attend, she felt that she ‘could not ask “the classes” to come’,26 given the content of the Abbey programme. She also wanted to keep her distance from the company of actors, given the coming break-up with Willie Fay. The equivocal status of Synge in all of this, where he is clearly neither making one with the actors (to one of whom he is engaged) nor siding with his fellow directors, provokes Gregory: ‘I cannot speak to him [Fay] or to any of the company without knowing if you and Synge will back up what I say, and yet I don’t like to leave Galway unwatched.’ She is clearly torn between a desire to keep an eye on developments and the fear that if she goes in too soon, she may ‘hasten a crisis’. In the end, she only ventured in on the Thursday night, the second of the two performances of The Gaol Gate programme. Molly Allgood, prominently featured throughout the Galway programme, reported back to Synge in Dublin by the Wednesday that the company had ‘bad houses’, to which he replied on the Saturday: ‘L[ady] G[regory] told me how bad the House was on Friday, you seem to have had ill luck.’27 On Monday 13 January 1908, three days after Galway, on foot of an ultimatum from the Abbey directors concerning control of the company, William G. Fay, his wife Bridget O’Dempsey (one of the actors, whom he had recently married) and his brother Frank Fay formally resigned from the National Theatre Society Limited. As Willie Fay reveals in his autobiography, the director who delivered the final challenge in person was Lady Gregory: she ‘came to me to say that they were not disposed to make any changes, and what was I going to do about it? I did the only thing that was left to me – I resigned on the spot’.28 Following fast upon the heels of their resignation, he wrote to Gregory requesting permission for the Fays’ new company to perform certain of her plays in London; that permission was immediately forthcoming. Almost four years later, Lady Gregory went out on tour with the Abbey Theatre Players in the US and during the first touring engagement, in Boston on 27 November 1911, happily included The Gaol Gate in the evening’s programme. As she wrote of it later in Our Irish Theatre: ‘The Gaol Gate was put on first, which, of course, has never offended anyone in Ireland.’29 The notable exception was the author, who was mortally offended 107

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when it was played in her home town. In Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush Colm Tóibín has described Lady Gregory as occupying two worlds – that of the County Clare landowner and that of the Abbey Theatre writer of rebel plays – and managing them with some equanimity: ‘She was intelligent enough to manage the contradictions in her position, to allow her own response to her heritage to remain natural and easy.’30 Rather, one might say she managed them when some necessary distancing of one role from the other was concerned. When the two coincided, as on the occasion of the Abbey’s visit to Galway with The Gaol Gate, the resultant collision was more than even the redoubtable Lady Gregory could handle.

The Rising of the Moon If Spreading the News dramatised a great gulf between coloniser and colonised in Ireland, and the issue of where The Gaol Gate was staged opened up a conflict of loyalties within Lady Gregory herself, the play of hers where a dual allegiance is dramatised not only within the diegesis of the drama but within a single character is The Rising of the Moon (1907). It is also the play where her developing nationalist allegiances come to the fore. The Gaol Gate is set at the ‘side of a quay in a seaport town’31 which is not identified. But Gregory’s description of the inspiration for the play reveals that she had Galway in mind: When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung [and] I used to wonder if ever a prisoner might . . . slip away in the darkness by the canal to the quays and find friends to hide him under a load of kelp in a fishing boat, as happens to my ballad-singing man.32 The setting in a liminal space between the land and the sea is central to the play’s concerns and the central situation whereby a policeman tries to apprehend an escaped convict. The movement of sympathy and identification on Lady Gregory’s part between her own people and the locals is mediated by the shared activity of fishing, one for leisure, one for a livelihood. The play itself rings such changes on its power relations that the question is raised as to which of the two men is doing the fishing and which is on the hook. 108

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The Rising of the Moon begins with a clear-cut opposition between the law and the outlaw. The stage is filled initially with three Royal Irish Constabulary men in blue uniform, although one complains there should be ‘more police [brought] into the town’ (144) to apprehend a dangerous escaped criminal and suggests that the force is seriously underfunded and undersupported. The focus on economics is developed by the men’s onstage activity in putting up placards offering a reward. One of the policemen reflects that a hundred pounds is ‘little enough for the Government to offer for him’ (143–4) and presumes the reward will extend to promotion. But two of the three policemen are young. Signficantly the Sergeant, who is older and married, finds the sum attractive and is drawn by it all the way through to the play’s admiring penultimate line, ‘A hundred pounds reward! A hundred pounds!’ (151), when it has slipped through his fingers. So far, so clear-cut. But the breakdown of the opposition between policeman and felon which the play is going to develop to extraordinary lengths begins when the policemen reflect that there is also a cost to be paid when the escapee is apprehended: ‘And if we get him itself, nothing but abuse on our heads for it from the people, and maybe from our own relations’ (143). This theme is only fully developed once the Sergeant is left alone and the criminal enters, disguised. The latter’s aim has been intimated earlier by the knowledge the Sergeant displays of the scenario that is likely to unfold, the same one Lady Gregory imagined as a child: ‘If he got down here, his friends might have a boat to meet him’ (144). The description of the man on the poster is bland, anonymous, and little help in identifying him; but that abstractness also suggests a symbolic function, that he represents a much larger group. And there is an undisguised note of admiration in the Sergeant’s voice when he reflects what ‘the people’ are saying about him, in terms that differ hugely from the judgement of the law: ‘They say he’s a wonder, that it’s he makes all the plans for the whole organization’ (143). The play’s overt theatricalising – a feature of all Lady Gregory’s plays – is developed here by the man arriving in what is so evidently a disguise, identified as a ‘hat and wig’ (150), when he sheds it later in the scene. This meta-theatricality is made even more explicit in John Ford’s film version of The Rising of the Moon (1957), filmed on location in Galway and considerably opened up from the one-act play.33 The convict (Donal Donnelly) is shown making a daring escape from Galway Prison and ducking into the Irish-language theatre An Taidhbhearc, where a performance is in progress and where he dons his Tramp costume before exiting again. 109

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A further explicit theatricalisation is evident in the prominence given to music in The Rising of the Moon, a new development in Gregory’s drama. The stranger claims he is looking to sell ballads to buy his supper and introduces himself to the Sergeant as ‘Jimmy Walsh, a ballad-singer’ (144). In the course of the play, he will sing three ballads, granting us more and more of each until with the third, the name of which gives its title to the play, we get eight lines of ‘The Rising of the Moon’. This is a signal to his fellow republicans, who respond with an answering ‘whistle from below . . ., repeating the air’ (149). There is an anticipation by some twenty years of Bertolt Brecht in the use of music as a vital component in the making of political (or ‘epic’) theatre. As Brecht writes of his own practice in this regard: ‘the introduction of music meant a certain break with the dramatic conventions of the time: . . . the theatre’s offerings became more like virtuoso turns . . . Music made possible something which we had long since ceased to take for granted, namely the “poetic theatre” ’.34 At first, the stranger riffles through his sheet music, offering various titles to the Sergeant. When the latter orders him to move on, he replies ‘[a]h, wait till you hear it’ (145) and proceeds to sing from the ballad ‘Johnny Hart’, a political allegory about the seduction and betrayal of a young Irishwoman by a ‘Highland soldier’. This is a complex cultural moment in relation to the back and forth movement between oral and written cultures in Ireland. The frequently sung traditional ballad has been written down and printed for more widespread dissemination; but only regains its full force and potency when it is once more sung. In his script for John Huston’s acclaimed film of James Joyce’s short story, The Dead (1987), Tony Huston adds a scene explicitly referencing Lady Gregory and quoting one of her translations which has no precedent or example in Joyce’s source. It is part of the musical entertainment at the Misses Morkan’s annual post-Christmas party and a recognition on the part of the Hustons père et fils of the part verse recitation played in such Irish evenings. The piece from the Irish is most commonly known as ‘Donal Óg’, about a young woman betrayed in love, and Mr Grace (Sean McClory) identifies the translation as Lady Gregory’s. He begins to read it from a piece of paper but, as the emotion takes hold, the paper slips from his fingers and he speaks it straight out. As the film script puts it: ‘Mr. Grace has somehow managed to transform himself utterly into the spirit of the speaker. Finally he looks directly into the faces of his listeners.’35 Likewise, in her play, Lady Gregory brings in her knowledge of Irish music and ballads but gives it a dramatic context which is much more than mere traditional recycling. The play’s key dramatic moment occurs during the singing of the second ballad. The Sergeant has ordered the ballad-singer to ‘[s]top that noise’ (145) 110

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but undaunted the latter launches unprompted into the more nationalistic ‘Granuaile’, another version of Cathleen ni Houlihan or Mother Ireland. The Sergeant is concerned at the public singing of so overtly political a song ‘in these times’ (147). The man replies that it puts heart into him and is allowed to continue. When the singer reaches the line ‘Her lips so sweet that monarchs kissed . . .’, the Sergeant crucially intervenes and corrects him: ‘That’s not it . . . “Her gown she wore was stained with gore.” . . . That’s it – you missed that’ (148). In any traditional song or poem, the interpretation can vary in the content of individual lines, while keeping faith with the overall narrative. The telling point here is the Sergeant’s detailed familiarity with the ballad and the revealing fact that the line he comes up with is considerably more political and sanguinary than the anodyne version being sung. The ballad singer seizes on the opportunity to build a common history between the policeman and the felon he is pursuing and to argue that the former has traded in his allegiance with ‘the people’ to work with ‘the law’ (149). He identifies himself as the man on the placard by taking off his hat and wig. But the Sergeant reverts to the language of the law (‘the force’) and the convict, who ‘thought to do it [effect his escape] with my tongue’, now puts his hand in his breast for a gun. The potentially tragic scenario which has all along shadowed the comic exchange between the two now looms into view for an intimidating moment but is banished by the sudden return of the other policemen. The Sergeant sends them on their way and allows the self-professed ‘friend of Granuaile’ to escape. There has been a complex and comic doubling throughout the play to the point that, as Christopher Murray puts it, ‘one suddenly sees that they are mirror images of each other’.36 This split self is dramatically realised when they sit back to back on a barrel, looking out for the man whose wanted poster is prominently displayed beneath. We are well on our way in this little play to Vladimir and Estragon standing back to back in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1955) on the lookout for a man who is endlessly awaited but who never appears in the course of the play.

The Workhouse Ward Whereas during her lifetime and for many decades afterwards Lady Gregory’s plays proved extremely popular and were regularly staged, they are now never seen, only read. The Abbey Theatre’s centenary programme of 2004 served only to highlight the dearth of productions of Gregory’s plays in the contemporary context, when her deserved place on a triple bill 111

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of one-act plays joining Synge’s Riders to the Sea (in Irish) and Yeats’s Purgatory was taken instead by George Fitzmaurice’s The Dandy Dolls (1914). However fascinating this harsh folk play from County Kerry, Lady Gregory deserved more and better than the staged reading of Spreading the News she was allotted. Yet I would argue that despite the lack of production her plays still make their presence felt on contemporary theatre because they are both more experimental and more enduring than has generally been acknowledged. As she writes in Our Irish Theatre in relation to her 1908 play The Workhouse Ward: ‘one has to go on with experiment or interest in creation fades, at least so it is with me’.37 Her plays have their effect both in themselves but also through their relation to certain contemporary Irish playwrights and by the unacknowledged extent to which work at the cutting edge of the contemporary stage draws on texts usually regarded as quaint and antique. I would like to examine that proposition by bringing Gregory’s Workhouse Ward into relation with Martin McDonagh’s The Lonesome West, first staged by Garry Hynes for Druid Theatre, Galway, in 1997. The comedy and characterisation of The Workhouse Ward are founded upon two old men endlessly squabbling and heaping verbal (and sometimes physical) abuse on each other. When there is a respite in the quarreling, we know it is only temporary, and that the two men cannot long cease from goading each other. Precisely the same dynamic operates between the two brothers in McDonagh’s The Lonesome West, as the following extracts from the two plays demonstrate. The Workhouse Ward (The old men lie down and are silent for a moment.) Michael Miskell Maybe the house is not so wide as what she says. Mike McInerney Why wouldn’t it be wide? Michael Miskell Ah, there does be a good deal of middling poor houses down by the sea. Mike McInerney What would you know about wide houses? Whatever sort of a house you had itself it was too wide for the provision you had into it.38 The Lonesome West Coleman Who’ll next be getting married round here, so? . . . Valene Me probably’ll be the next one getting married, as handsome as I am . . . 112

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Coleman Who’d go marrying you, sure? Even that no-lipped girl in Norway’d turn you down. Valene (pause. Angrily.) See, I’m stepping back now . . . I’m stepping back, like Father Walsh said and I’m forgiving ya, insulting me.39 The main activity here is verbal. An element in one statement is seized on and developed as the key animating principle in the second, as the basis of the retort. The words become weapons in a sustained verbal battle which we witness from start to finish of each play and which can clearly be seen to continue long after the curtain. The sense of the plays’ duration is of a temporary entering (and leaving) a ceaseless continuum. Both dramas deftly manage to suggest a lifetime of such activity between the two characters. When Mike McInerney’s widowed sister comes to take her brother out of the workhouse ward, and he asks to take his companion with him, she rapidly identifies the man in the other bed: ‘For pity’s sake! Michael Miskell is it? That’s worse again. Yourself and Mike that never left fighting and scolding and attacking one another! Sparring at one another like two young pups you were, and threatening one another after like two grown dogs!’ (177). This closely echoes Lady Gregory’s own description of the two old men in her play: ‘They fight like two young whelps that go on fighting till they are two old dogs!’40 There is much talk of dogs in The Lonesome West, notably the violence which has been meted out to Valene’s pet dog, Lassie. Coleman finally owns up to killing the dog, in a speech which recalls and parodies Christy Mahon’s first account of killing his father: ‘the deed was done and he dropped down dead with not a fecking peep’.41 When Mike McInerney attempts to explain to his sister why he and Michael Miskell cannot be separated, he does so in terms which are as explicitly theatrical as they are psychological and which serve as a key metadramatic comment on the presence of the male double-act in the Irish theatrical tradition: ‘the two of them together would make some sort of a decent show’ (177).42 For all their squabbling, none of the characters wishes to be on their own, as we saw earlier. There is an incipient egalitarianism, a base democracy, in the co-equal presence of two people sharing the same stage. Similarly, for the socialist in Bertolt Brecht, it was as much a necessity in the field of human relationships and society as on the stage: ‘For the smallest social unit is not the single person but two people.’43 This is a religious as well as a social imperative. As Mike McInerney argues with his sister in The Workhouse Ward: ‘It is what I often heard said,

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two to be better than one . . . I do be weak an odd time . . . and this man does be weak an odd time with the swelling in his knees . . . but the two of us together it’s not likely it is at the one time we would fail.’ (177) The echo of The Book of Ecclesiastes is unmistakable: ‘Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.’44 Lady Gregory would have had the Bible read to her regularly as a child, as something to be heard and listened to (‘it’s what I have often heard said’) rather than to be read, as much oral folklore as anything she heard from ‘the people’.

Grania Lady Gregory had a particular genius for writing plays in the one-act form. They may have been intended originally to complement Yeats’s (who kept the commitment to one-act plays to the end of his playwriting career) but Gregory’s display dramatic concision, formal brilliance and packed dialogue. As the analysis of The Workhouse Ward demonstrates, she possessed a particular interest and skill in duologues, though the interest in ensemble was there from the start. When she moved to history and saga plays, Gregory tended to favour the three-act form and, though these are not without interest, that interest does not sustain itself unremittingly across the length of the three acts. This is distinct from Synge, who moved boldly and definitively into the three-act form with The Well of the Saints and pushed it further in his two final plays. Gregory’s Grania is an exception to this generalisation, written as it is with an unrelenting urgency and passion across three acts. Perhaps that is because it can clearly be seen as Gregory’s most overtly feminist play, the one most clearly constructed to challenge the male hegemony in both her social world and at the Abbey with her two male co-directors, Yeats and Synge. The latter was generally hostile to Gregory’s plays, not least because they were preferred to his on Abbey tours and because of Yeats’s defence of them. Yeats was more equivocal about Gregory’s playwriting than is generally assumed, as has been shown. In the case of Grania, his attitude went to an extreme of dismissiveness. Unusually for Gregory, the play (written in 1910 and first published in 1912) never received a production at the Abbey. No reason was ever given but Richard Allen Cave has argued persuasively that it resulted from Yeats’s opposition.45 This is certainly supported by Gregory’s own account of Yeats’s response when she 114

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tells him about a new play which focuses exclusively on ‘three lovers, one of whom had to die’: ‘When I told Mr. Yeats I had but these three persons in the play, he said incredulously, “They must have a great deal to talk about.” ’46 This is rich coming from Yeats, who in his dramatic version of Deirdre removed all but one of the Sons of Usna and concentrated on three main characters, Deirdre, Naoise and Conchubar (there is a fourth in Fergus but he is largely absent from the stage after the first third of the play). Lady Gregory’s choice of Grania as her theme makes clear her explicit decision not to write a dramatised version of the Deirdre legend, as so many Revival playwrights had done. Gregory clearly declares the reason for her preferring of Grania when she writes: ‘I think I turned to Grania because so many have written about sad, lovely Deirdre, who when overtaken by sorrow made no good battle at the last. Grania had more power of will, and for good or evil twice took the shaping of her life into her own hands.’47 In particular, she confronts the question of why Grania refuses a self-inflicted death to follow her lover and instead ‘turn[s] back to Finn in the end’.48 The radical answer she proposes deconstructs this most romantic of traditional narratives from within. Grania is a rare example of Gregory drawing on the saga material which she knew so well as the basis of a play; but her remarks make clear that she only employed ‘enough of the fable on which to set . . . the three lovers’ and further that the question she wishes to pursue is going to take her on a revisionist track beyond ‘the beaten path of authorised history’.49 The three acts of the play structurally resemble Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows: a first act in which a beautiful young woman whom the aged High King is determined to marry falls in love and goes into exile with a young warrior; a second act, set in the place of exile after many years, where the two lovers determine to return from their place of isolation to the court; and a third in which the three encounter each other once more and play out the doomed scenario. What is so striking about Gregory’s first act is the degree of sexual frankness expressed by the heroine and the extent to which the playwright challenges stereotypes of female behaviour. The usual theme of the unnatural union between an old man and a young woman, so much a feature of Revival plays, is present here, with the initial appearance of sexual naiveté and innocence on Grania’s part. This is never entirely dispelled, and gives her a freedom from conventional behaviour that she has not yet learned to acquire. Grania declares her willingness to marry Finn and indicates that she has already exercised her freedom of choice by turning down the suitor her father promoted: ‘My father was for the King of Foreign, but I said 115

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I would take my own road.’50 But the King of Foreign, described by Grania as ‘dark and wild looking’, is not to be so readily dispelled. Though offstage throughout, he and his dangerous sexuality will play a crucial role in the drama’s unfolding, adding a necessary third to the triangular relationships which so inform Grania. As Cathy Leeney has pointed out: ‘the play sustains a shifting triangular model of desire’.51 Finn’s obsessive jealousy declares itself as he asks pointed questions in order to verify Grania’s claim that she has never been in love. Her story of the young man who rescued her dogs from some vicious hounds confirms his worst suspicions, as she openly declares: ‘my thoughts went with him for a good while, and sometimes he came through my dreams. – Is that now what you would call love?’ (183). When Finn brings in his most famous warrior Diarmuid, there is a double recognition between the two young people which they both manage to withhold from Finn. But when Grania returns to the tent and speaks her heart to the cloaked figure she mistakenly imagines is Diarmuid, the die is cast. This is the first in a series of substitutions in the play; the mistaking of Finn for Diarmuid here suggests there may not be as absolute a difference between the two men as Grania initially thinks there is. In her frank declaration of desire, she pointedly makes clear that she is ‘not ashamed’ (189). The decision by the two lovers to leave is complicated by certain conditions on which the two men insist. Here, the conflict of loyalties that has been argued as central to Gregory’s drama is projected along gendered lines. Diarmuid is torn between his loyalty to Finn and his love of Grania; he therefore insists on taking her away but keeping her celibate: ‘I will not forsake her, but I will keep my faith with you . . . It is not as a wife I will bring her, but I will keep my word to you, Finn’ (190). What emerges most strongly in this first act, and which will remain prominent throughout, is not the love between Grania and Finn but the romantic attachment between the two men, in the homosocial bond of the warrior. As Finn says to Diarmuid when the latter threatens to leave: ‘You are more to me than any of my comrades or my friends’ (188). It is strikingly clear in the contrast between the end of Act One and the beginning of Act Two that sex has occurred in the interim. A bed is placed in the centre of the tent in which Diarmuid lies post-coitally sleeping while Grania is singing a love song (‘Waken darling, darling waken’) and making breakfast. She goes over to the bed and stirs him by ‘put[ting] her hand on him’ (192). Looking into her face, he remarks how ‘there is a new light in [her] eyes’ and addresses her as his ‘wife’. But this sexual congress has not been instantaneous, a passionate overwhelming of dutiful restraint, as the 116

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rapid succession of the acts might suggest. Instead, seven years have supervened, as in the Deirdre plays, and that entire time has been spent by Grania and Diarmuid in a state of enforced chastity. Every year, as per the terms of the contract he has insisted on fashioning with Finn, Diarmuid has sent him a loaf of bread, ‘white and round and unbroken’ (190), to signify that Grania’s virginity is intact. At the start of Act Two, Grania is baking cakes of bread on the fire. When Diarmuid later takes one from her violently and flings it to the floor, she completes the gesture by taking up the cake, ‘break[ing] it again and again’ (199), and giving it to Finn’s messenger. That messenger is (in an unlikely but metatheatrically apt move) Finn himself disguised as a beggar and wearing a mask. As she hands the broken bread to the beggar, there is a real sense that she sees through his disguise: ‘Say to him that as that bread is broken and torn, so is the promise given by the man that did right in breaking it. Tell Finn, the time you meet him, it was the woman herself gave that to you’ (199). The presence of the disguised Finn keeps the triangular relationship directly on stage before us. But it is also replicated by the incident that has brought the seven-year celibacy to an end. It was not something Diarmuid decided by himself or was persuaded to by Grania. Rather, his male desire was provoked by a fit of passionate jealousy when he unexpectedly came upon Grania in the King of Foreign’s arms: ‘you were in my arms, not his – my lips were on the lips he had nearly touched, that I myself had never touched in all those seven years’ (194). If Grania sensually reflects that ‘it was a long, long kiss’, she is even more keenly conscious of ‘[a]ll the years we were with ourselves only, [when] you kept apart from me as if I was a shadow-shape or a hag of the valley. And it was not till you saw another man craving my love, that the like love was born in yourself ’ (196). This unillusioned recognition that love is best ‘kindled’ for the man through the eyes of another lies at the heart of Grania’s resolve to return to society and remain no more in the isolation and exile of nature. The third act returns the two lovers to Finn’s court. The series of substitutions grows more intense and concentrated in this final act. Expecting Diarmuid, Grania is confronted with Finn. The long speeches between them parallel the loneliness and sexual frustration they each experienced throughout the intervening seven years. Grania is clear, however, as to where the blame lies, that Finn is responsible for the period during which she and Diarmuid should have been ‘lovers and alone’ (205). The mortally wounded body of Diarmuid is brought in and the love story plays itself out to the death. But, in Gregory’s most sexually daring substitution and reversal, the liebestod is not between Diarmuid and Grania but between the two men, 117

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with Grania as the excluded woman.52 As Finn declares to the dying Diarmuid: ‘it is beyond the power of any woman to put us asunder’. (210). If there is a tragic recognition, it is Grania’s: ‘His desire was all the time with you yourself . . . Why would I fret after him that so soon forgot his wife?’ (212). Grania makes good her claim on society by insisting on taking up a role as Finn’s wife, even though he no longer wants her in a one-on-one rather than a triangular relationship: ‘You are craving to get rid of me now . . . But I will not go! I will hold you to your word! (212)’ At the end of the play, Grania goes out to confront the derisive laughter of the crowd, to face it and to face it down. When she does so, the laughter ‘stops suddenly’ (214) and the play ends. When it came to facing down the derision of the Abbey Theatre audience at either The Playboy of the Western World or The Plough and the Stars, that role usually fell to Yeats, who seized it with both hands.53 But when it came to facing down Dublin Castle over Shaw’s play, Lady Gregory was to the fore in asserting the power of her social role. Her own plays provided no less of a challenge to contemporary views, particularly with regard to women and the writing of plays. We are still only beginning to come to terms with her formidable achievement in that area.

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CHAPTER 6 THE ARRIVAL OF SEAN O’CASEY

Contemporary urban working-class drama W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge were both born in Dublin, but you would never guess it from their plays. Their primary identifications were with Sligo and Wicklow respectively, the places where their families originated. In their plays the rural is foregrounded over the urban as the symbolic site of a national drama, the repository of national values as the least colonised and most uncorrupted location of ‘the people’. With Lady Gregory, who was from the country, the case was different; the west of Ireland was her home, even if the class she represented on stage (as with Yeats and Synge) was not her own. But what of Dublin, the country’s capital, with its teeming population and its location for the political conflicts which were shaping the emergence of an independent Ireland? There were urban plays at the Abbey from the outset. A particularly interesting example is St John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage, staged there in 1911, where the city represented on stage is Belfast, not Dublin, with the play focusing on sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Ben Levitas has traced a genealogy of working-class drama through such playwrights as Fred Ryan, Terence MacSwiney, Ervine and Andrew Patrick Wilson, describing Sean O’Casey as a ‘late flowering’ of the genre.1 P.J. Mathews writes of Fred Ryan’s The Laying of the Foundations (1902) in Chapter 8 that it was ‘one of the first plays to shift the action from a rural to an urban locale’. In December 1917 the Abbey staged a play entitled Blight which, in Hugh Hunt’s words, exposed ‘the horrific living conditions in the city’s slums’.2 The author was Oliver St John Gogarty, a doctor who had treated some of its inhabitants but also a poet, friend of Yeats and prototype of James Joyce’s Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Abbey actor Gabriel Fallon attended Blight with a friend, Sean O’Casey, who commented afterwards that he felt he could do a better job of representing not only the conditions but the life in Dublin’s impoverished inner city.3 This was no idle boast. It took some time, and five years of having his plays sent back, albeit with encouraging comments, before The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey was accepted by the Abbey Theatre in early 1923. Only one change was

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requested: that the original title, On the Run, be altered, since a play using that title had already been staged there. The Shadow of a Gunman was premiered at the Abbey in April 1923 and, for the first time in a long time, full house notices were posted. Sean O’Casey was in his early forties when he had his first theatrical success, quite late in life. The details of that life have always been a matter of dispute, particularly after O’Casey wrote a six-volume series of prose autobiographies, beginning with I Knock at the Door in 1939. These detail the difficult conditions of O’Casey’s upbringing in inner city Dublin; the youngest of a large family, he was the third son to be called ‘John’, the first two having died in childbirth. O’Casey’s father died when he was only six, leaving a widowed mother to bring up a large family. Sean himself was a weakly child, with severe trachoma resulting in a lifetime of chronically poor eyesight.4 Much of his schooling was at home and this made him a ferocious autodidact, who read voraciously and was not slow in airing his opinions. There is no doubt that O’Casey overcame a great deal to become a writer; and this played no small part in the fact that he was over forty before he succeeded. He held a succession of jobs, as a junior clerk, working on the railways, etc., but a more consistent sign of where his interests lay is his political development and his writing, often in combination. There was an early conversion to the Gaelic League, when he changed his name (from John Casey), not only learned but taught Irish and supported the League’s boycott of the Abbey Theatre over its staging of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907.5 The name change is interesting. One would assume that Sean O’Casey is the Irish form of John Casey; but the more correct version is Sean O Cathasaigh, a form the writer used for a while. Rather, although it appears authentic, ‘Sean O’Casey’ is an artful hybrid of the Irish and the English forms of his name. O’Casey’s first political involvements, as one would expect given his interest in the Irish language, were republican. But with the Dublin Lock Out of 1913, where he came under the influence of the socialist politician Jim Larkin who mobilised the tram workers to unionise and strike, O’Casey definitively moved from republicanism to socialism, a move which was to colour the treatment of Irish political events in his subsequent plays. O’Casey’s earliest writing was in the form of political songs and ballads, usually in a markedly satirical vein. ‘If the Germans Came to Ireland in the Morning’, to the air of ‘I’m Off to Philadelphia in the Mornin”, gives the flavour. He was to make astute use of this talent for pastiche in the deployment of fragments of popular songs and ballads in his plays. O’Casey’s earliest 120

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books arose from and dealt with the Irish Citizen Army, a socialist group formed by James Connolly during the Lock Out after Larkin was released from prison. O’Casey drafted the ICA’s constitution, which was adopted at Liberty Hall on 22 March 1914. He was to write the history of the Irish Citizen Army and a biography of Thomas Ashe, a friend who died on hunger strike protesting his imprisonment as a ‘criminal’ after his involvement in the Easter Rising. Ironically, by the time he wrote and published its history, O’Casey had resigned from the Irish Citizen Army, in protest against the encroachment of middle- and upper-class nationalists like Countess Markievicz into what he regarded as a working-class socialist institution. The prose autobiographies represent O’Casey as working-class and he certainly dressed the part, in a cloth cap, long coat and hobnail boots. Yeats was happy to accept him as the authentic voice of working-class Dublin, not least because it vindicated the theory of a ‘popular theatre’ in ‘An Open Letter’ (1919).6 But research on O’Casey’s life has increasingly established that the O’Casey family, with the father Michael drawing a salary as a clerk, was lower middle-class and that their housing, as his most recent biographer Christopher Murray puts it, was ‘always rented accommodation [and] was never “slum” housing in the common understanding of that emotive word’.7 With the early death of the father, there is no doubt that the O’Casey family was plunged into poverty, since Michael Casey left no pension and the small entitlement his death provided was spent on the funeral. The O’Caseys moved into more and more cramped and impoverished housing conditions, in a social and financial decline very similar to that suffered at around the same time by the family of James Joyce. But unlike Joyce’s remorseless representation of the endless house moves suffered by his family in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man O’Casey’s autobiographies take the impoverished tenements as a given for the Dickensian prose narrative of his upbringing. In the plays, there is the direct and detailed representation of the appalling social conditions his family witnessed; but there is also the distance and detachment of the outsider come into the midst of his working-class characters.8 As the stage directions make clear, he observes them from the perspective of a social anthropologist: ‘her [Juno Boyle’s] face has now assumed that look which ultimately settles down upon the faces of the women of the working-class: a look of listless monotony and harassed anxiety’.9 The other key feature of the O’Casey family is that they were Protestant, not Catholic. That there could be Protestant as well as Catholics among the Irish lower-middle and working classes in Ireland flies in the face of the common perception that the two denominations in the country were 121

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absolutely divided along class lines, and that all Protestants came equipped with horses. The social make-up of O’Casey’s plays is predominantly Catholic, but he is always careful to make one of the main characters in the ensemble a Protestant. Adolphus Grigson in The Shadow of a Gunman protests his loyalty to his Orange lodge as a good Irish unionist and asserts that he has ‘the authority of the Bible’ for ‘keep[ing] Mrs. Grigson in her place’.10 Bessie Burgess in The Plough and the Stars sees her son safely off to the front to defend king and country. Both Adolphus Grigson and Bessie Burgess are residents of the same tenements as the Catholic characters. And yet in Abbey Theatre productions of the plays during the 1970s and 1980s, at the height of the Northern ‘Troubles’, these two Dublin workingclass Protestants were consistently portrayed with Northern Irish accents, as if they had been displaced by magic from Belfast to Dublin, lest the audiences have to conjure with the social reality. O’Casey does not deny his family’s Protestantism in the prose autobiographies, but he does suppress the father’s evangelicalism and the family’s unionist politics whereas in the greater objectivity of the plays these facets of his background can be represented. The three major plays which O’Casey had staged in the Abbey Theatre throughout the 1920s are often referred to as the ‘Dublin trilogy’: The Shadow of the Gunman (1923); Juno and the Paycock (1924); and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The playwright himself never gave warrant for such a description. And what the repeated use of the term does is to elide and erase the fact that O’Casey wrote a fourth play, The Silver Tassie, three of whose four acts are set in Dublin and which he submitted to the Abbey in March 1928 in the reasonable expectation that it would be accepted and staged there. The previous three had been, to great critical and commercial success (the controversy over The Plough being one of the surest signs in Irish theatre circles of that success). But the notorious rejection of The Silver Tassie by Yeats, Gregory and Lennox Robinson proved otherwise. For that play directly represented Irish soldiers caught up in the carnage of World War I, whose contested status after the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin led to the war’s erasure as a subject from the national record. The play itself was accordingly first staged in London; but it was put on in the Abbey in 1935 (an event which proved predictably controversial) and has had occasional productions there since. The Silver Tassie is as much an Abbey play, therefore, as the other three (no subsequent O’Casey play was to be accepted or premiered there) and with its restoration to the record the four plays should rather be described as the ‘Dublin quartet’. 122

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That restoration makes the scope of O’Casey’s dramatic and historic project in these plays even more clear. Each of his four Dublin dramas takes recent key historical events in the emergence of an independent Ireland as its topic and setting: The Shadow of a Gunman is set in May 1920, a mere two years before the date of its composition, during the Anglo-Irish War/War of Independence; Juno and the Paycock is set during the Civil War of 1922–3, with Johnny Boyle on the republican side; The Plough and the Stars goes back a full decade to the foundational event of Easter 1916 to contest its status; and The Silver Tassie likewise to the Great War. It is often maintained that a sufficient length of time needs to pass before historic events can be represented, that some kind of critical distance is required before any kind of objective viewpoint can be adopted. This is a questionable concept – the study of history remains a battlefield of contending interpretations long after the original events have transpired, as centenary commemorations of World War I in the UK have demonstrated. Irish history is very much a matter of unfinished business, with few events achieving anything like a unanimity of response or anything resembling closure. Most notoriously of all, it is still a part of republican ideology that their two key goals remain unachieved: the restoration of the Irish language and the reunification of the country. These issues were even more incendiary when O’Casey was writing and the Abbey was staging his plays, in each case a decade or less after the events represented. The plays are themselves a political intervention and have had a critical influence on how those historic events have come to be interpreted.

The Shadow of a Gunman O’Casey may have supported the Gaelic League boycott of Synge’s Playboy in 1907. But the evidence of The Shadow of a Gunman indicates that he had repaired the omission in the fifteen years since. There is a clear connection between the two plays, with the fabrication of the role of a man of violence bringing unprecedented approval to the purveyor of the lie. And there are clear echoes of the love scenes between Christy Mahon and Pegeen Mike. When Minnie Powell first describes Donal Davoren as ‘a poet an’ aren’t all the girls fond of poets?’ she goes on to make a profound causal link between poetry and violence when she finally identifies him: ‘I know what you are . . . (in a whisper.) A gunman on the run!’11 As Pegeen Mike says to the Playboy: ‘I’ve heard all times it’s the poets are your like, fine fiery fellows with great 123

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rages when their temper’s roused.’12 But O’Casey also displays a knowledge of Lady Gregory’s drama. Language exercises the same constitutive power in both playwrights: a story – the belief that Bartley Fallon in Spreading the News is a murderer, the belief held throughout the tenement in the O’Casey play that Davoren is an IRA man on the run – takes on a life of its own which no individual character can control through what Gregory termed the Irish penchant for myth-making. But there is more to O’Casey’s first staged play than just a reiteration of familiar Abbey tropes. For one thing, the change in locale from rural to urban creates a very different atmosphere. What Pegeen Mike stresses in Synge’s play, if all the men go off to the wake, is the isolation she will face. People appear in the shebeen to see the father slayer for themselves but they come from a landscape that is desolate and threatening. The same holds true for those on the Aran Islands. Sean O’Casey’s city streets and tenements, by contrast, are thronged with characters, of an extraordinary range and vivacity. Part of the drama derives from their coming on one after the other throughout the play, a feature which led less enamoured reviewers to liken his play to a succession of music-hall or vaudevillian turns. Donal Davoren’s wish to be left alone and in silence to get on with his writing stands little chance against the increasing incursions of the other tenement dwellers. Here is a major contrast with Synge: where Christy Mahon desires such company, Donal Davoren for the most part shuns it (the exception is Minnie Powell, to whom he is attracted). But there is a further dimension of crowdedness in the play: for the tenement gives out onto one of the main thoroughfares of a crowded capital city: in this case, Mountjoy Square (thinly disguised as ‘Hilljoy Square’), just to the north of the River Liffey. If the external world is never far away in an O’Casey play, that external space is relentlessly historicised in a manner remote from the practices of Yeats, Synge or Gregory. A primary effect of this is to transform comedy into tragedy. O’Casey defiantly labelled each of the ‘Dublin trilogy’ a tragedy (with The Silver Tassie a ‘tragi-comedy’). And yet each of these three plays contains a great deal of laughter which both Dublin players and audiences have been happy to milk over the years, frequently to the consternation and criticism of visiting theatregoers from other countries. The plays move from comedy in the early scenes to fourth acts or conclusions which are unrelievedly tragic. Given the tendency in Dublin to maximise the laughs in O’Casey, it is salutary to be reminded by Fiona Macintosh of how much O’Casey’s plays conform to the model of classic Greek tragedy through the informing principle of death. Macintosh adds further that one of Yeats’s 124

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original ambitions for the Abbey was ‘to hear Greek tragedy spoken with a Dublin accent’.13 The context for O’Casey’s first three plays is akin to that of the refuge in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957): ‘Outside of here it’s death.’14 With the curfew imposed during the War of Independence, Shields and Davoren in the second act and half of The Shadow of a Gunman not only stay off the streets but cower down in their individual beds and hope there will not be a raid. The transformation which occurs from the first to the second act is the making real through the proximity of death of the purely verbal or fictive claims made at the outset. Initially, Donal Davoren has been flattered by the attention of the tenement dwellers and, even though there is no basis other than rumour for the allegation, is happy to play up to and perform the proffered role of gunman. As part of that role, Davoren has accepted a letter explicitly addressed to the IRA from an aggrieved tenant and has promised to pass it on. In Act Two, when the house is raided, that mere formula of words becomes a potentially incriminating document which Donal hastily seeks out to destroy. Mere verbal byplay in The Shadow of a Gunman turns strikingly literal. The play begins at midday, with Seumas Shields determinedly resisting every effort to rouse him and Davoren remarking that a ‘land mine exploding under the bed is the only thing that would lift you out of it’ (5). Shields’s friend arrives and leaves behind a bag which remains unopened until well into Act Two. When it finally is opened, the bag turns out to contain bombs: ‘My God, it’s full of bombs, Mills bombs!’ (51). The play is O’Casey’s application of the dramatic philosophy expounded by Shaw in one of Peter Keegan’s final lines from John Bull’s Other Island: ‘[E]very jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.’15 Once the bombs are found, they cannot be unsaid or merely wished away as Shields has done when equivocating about the time he was supposed to get up. They have to be disposed of and the two men prove only too ready to accept Minnie Powell’s offer to hide them in her room, thus precipitating the play’s tragic turn at the close. The stage space of The Shadow of a Gunman is fairly evenly divided between Donal Davoren and Seamus Shields, and both men are present throughout Act Two. In his first staged play, O’Casey is beginning to work up what would become one of the signature features of his plays, the male double act. It would be further developed through the interaction between Captain Boyle and Joxer Daly in his next play, Juno and the Paycock, but the ground is laid out in this one. There have been paired characters before in such Revival plays as Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand and The Cat and the Moon (1926); but there the interdependence between the two men has been as 125

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much physiological as psychological. Here, there is nothing physical binding Donal Davoren and Seamus Shields together; but they display throughout a parasitic psychological dependence on each other. Like a pair of music-hall comedians, Donal and Seamus trade lines and bits of songs and rely on that interaction to keep the drama and their relationship going. That double act is not just mutually supportive but also contains a good deal of recrimination, verbal undercutting and contradiction. Just as Yeats in On Baile’s Strand used the farcical interaction of the Fool and the Blind Man to undercut the tragic heroism of Cuchulain and Conchubar, the male double act in O’Casey is used to the same anti-heroic end; but because the mythic and heroic characters have been removed, only fools and pretenders remain. At one point, Shields tacitly compares himself to Cuchulain while demonstrating the superior quality of the braces he is trying to sell: ‘they’d do Cuchullian, they’re so strong’ (7); but when he bends over and breaks them, Davoren sardonically remarks: ‘That doesn’t look as if they were strong enough for Cuchullian’ (8). The two men only come together in an act of self-preservation and cowardice, covering for each other while leaving the young woman exposed to danger and, as it turns out, death. Nicholas Grene has stressed the similarities between Sean O’Casey and Donal Davoren, the lower middleclass writer forced to live in a tenement with its working-class dwellers; and it has been habitual to identify Seamus Shields with Mícheál Ó Maoláin, a friend with whom O’Casey lived for five months in a Mountjoy Square tenement.16 But Shields has characteristics which are no less drawn from O’Casey, as when he recalls ‘the time when I taught Irish six nights a week’ (9). The playwright has split himself between the two male characters so that neither can be said to speak for him or represent his views and in order to subject his contradictory background and character to auto(self-)critique through the medium of drama. A great deal has been said and written about the finer character of the women characters in O’Casey’s Dublin ‘trilogy’ when compared to the men. Minnie Powell certainly shows an independence of spirit which impresses Donal Davoren; Mrs Grigson is a source of endless patience and concern for her alcoholic husband; and Mrs Henderson’s bossy assertiveness carries over from the men in the tenement to the soldiers who try to arrest her when she goes to Minnie’s aid. All of this female activity contrasts positively with the play’s consistent undercutting of male verbal braggadocio with acts of cowardice. But the women’s actions appear no less ideologically determined. Minnie Powell is attracted to Donal Davoren because she projects on him her romantic fervour for Irish republicanism. As she says when viewing his poems, 126

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which stylistically mimic Shelley while repudiating the Romantic poet’s political radicalism: ‘I’d love to be able to write a poem – a lovely poem on Ireland an’ the men o’ 98’ (16). By taking the bombs and hiding them in her room, Minnie enters more authentically into the role of a gun-wielding republican than Davoren ever does. And when she is arrested and taken aboard the army lorry, she is heard ‘shouting bravely, but a little hysterically, “Up the Republic”’ (58). Shields refers ironically to Minnie at one point as a ‘Helen of Troy come to live in a tenement’ (37) in what can be taken as a clear reference to Yeats’s comparison of the republican Maud Gonne to Helen in ‘No Second Troy’. And there is a loaded reference by Shields to ‘Kathleen ni Houlihan [who] is very different now to the woman who used to play the harp an’ sing “Weep on, weep on, your hour is past,” for she’s a ragin’ divil now, an’ if you only look crooked at her you’re sure of a punch in th’ eye’ (39). The shadow of a gunman falls on men and women alike in the world of O’Casey’s play.

Juno and the Paycock With his next play for the Abbey, O’Casey narrowed the gap even further between the period in which the play was written and staged and the historically significant events it represented. Juno and the Paycock was premiered on 3 March 1924, playing to full houses and leading Lady Gregory to conclude: ‘This is one of the evenings at the Abbey that makes me glad to have been born.’17 Juno is set during the height of the Irish Civil War, an event which had only been formally ended less than a year before, with the declared ceasefire of 25 May 1923 following ‘a government decision in February to offer amnesty to those prepared to surrender’.18 As Diarmuid Ferriter’s careful phrasing here suggests, not every republican was prepared to lay down arms. For, as he goes on to state, ‘the IRA had not surrendered arms or acknowledged the legitimacy of the new state’ which fell short of the full republic they demanded; ‘nor was there an unequivocal end to IRA violence, which continued at a low but significant level’.19 This, then, was the atmosphere in which O’Casey’s play opened, one in which the Civil War was not as definitively or comprehensively concluded as the new Free State government might have wished and in which the passions fuelling that traumatic event had by no means been extinguished. In her study of modern Irish drama and Greek tragedy, Fiona Macintosh focuses almost exclusively on Johnny Boyle in O’Casey’s play rather than the more usual emphasis on Captain Boyle, his long-suffering wife Juno and 127

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hanger-on friend Joxer Daly. Macintosh does this to remind us that, according to his friend Gabriel Fallon’s account, O’Casey had originally planned to write ‘a play which would deal with the tragedy of a crippled I.R.A. man, one Johnny Boyle. He mentioned this play many times and always it was the tragedy of Johnny’.20 By concentrating her analysis on Johnny Boyle, Macintosh serves to remind us of this fact and of the play’s tragic status. There is one extraordinary scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s otherwise static film of Juno and the Paycock (1930) where, during a discussion at the kitchen table about ‘the killing of a person’ (106) during Act Two, the camera tracks increasingly closer to the table and passes through it into a long close-up on the silent figure of Johnny Boyle, played by a young John Laurie with a shock of black hair and terrified eyes, who eventually bursts out with: ‘Is there nothin’ betther to be talkin’ about but the killin’ o’ people?’ (106).21 With this level of trauma we realise that we are in the presence of an individual who is more dead than alive, a living spectre who, as Macintosh phrases it, ‘does not reside fully in the land of the living’.22 When news of his killing by fellow IRA men for the betrayal of Robbie Tancred arrives in Act Three, it comes as no surprise and merely completes a process of dying that has been unfolding throughout the play. Although Johnny Boyle and Robbie Tancred are both republicans, the house in which the play is set cannot be identified solely as republican. Rather it operates as metaphor for the country as a whole when Juno twice mentions a neighbour Mrs Mannin who has lost a ‘Free State soldier son’ (115) (significantly ambushed by an IRA squad led by Tancred) and that every single family in the household has suffered a loss. The politics of the larger situation are applied to the family when Captain Boyle assures Joxer that he is tired of his wife’s criticisms: ‘Today, Joxer, there’s goin’ to be issued a proclamation be me, establishin’ an independent Republic, an’ Juno’ll have to take an oath of allegiance’ (89–90). The republican refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the English king required by the negotiated treaty had been one of the precipitants of the Civil War. This patriarchal statement by the Captain may be seen as part of the play’s alleged anti-republican stance. The Abbey gained a subsidy from the new government in 1925, the first of its kind in the English-speaking world. Lionel Pilkington has argued that the granting of this subsidy derived from the theatre offering ‘unambiguous support to the new Irish state’ and its staging of plays ‘that were directly concerned with satirizing anti-Treaty militancy’.23 I think ‘satirizing’ hardly describes adequately the representation of the Civil War’s ‘militancy’ in Juno and the Paycock. If the Captain expresses an anti-republican stance in his 128

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handling of domestic affairs, his ‘friend’ Joxer takes a very different view. Boyle is repeatedly compared by his wife and others to a peacock for his habit of ‘strutting around’; but when it appears that he has inherited a considerable sum of money from a dead relative, Joxer concludes that ‘the house couldn’t hould them lately; an’ he goin’ about like a mastherpiece of the Free State counthry; forgettin’ their friends’ (126). The Captain and Joxer may be regarded as unreliable witnesses, disabled by self-interest, but the countering political charges of their private behaviour, and the deployment of Civil War metaphors to describe it, are remarkably even-handed. The behaviour of the Captain and Joxer provides a great deal of entertainment, at least in the play’s initial stages; their derivation from the comic Stage Irishman of Boucicault’s melodramas was discussed in the first chapter. They are another of O’Casey’s male double acts, more accomplished than that of Davoren and Shields in The Shadow of a Gunman. Here a calland-response operates between the pair, with the Captain calling out for Joxer and the latter, always just within earshot, responding that he is only waiting on the ‘call’ (137). This ‘call’ is not to a political or military operation, as the language might suggest, but to an elaborate theatrical performance in which the two men respond to the poverty of their surroundings by a compensating richness of verbal elaboration. So, when the Captain talks of proceeding to a promised job, he does so with an elegance of language which belies the overworn, faded actuality of the clothes he is wearing: ‘I’ll slip on me oul’ moleskins afther breakfast, an’ we can saunther down at our ayse’ (76). The ‘job’ which Boyle is talking about is a fiction designed to deceive Juno. Joxer is a little slow to respond to his prompt from the Captain about the job at Killester but soon picks up on his cue and begins elaborating: ‘The foreman at Killesther – oh yis, yis. He’s an oul’ butty o’ mine – oh, he’s a darlin’ man, a daarlin’ man’ (75). The duo then construct an elaborate scenario, with quoted dialogue and substantiating details, about a promised job for the Captain. But Juno is not persuaded by what she rightly perceives is a transparent fiction, a sham: ‘them yarns won’t go down with Juno’ (76). What complicates this fictitious scenario is that it almost exactly replicates an earlier scene in Act One when Jerry Devine, a young socialist who is romantically interested in Mary Boyle, comes by looking for the Captain with the offer of a real job. The details are congruent: the foreman of ‘the new job that’s goin’ on in Rathmines’ (72) (a more respectable address than Killester) is a friend, not of Joxer’s, but of a priest, Father Farrell, who has promised that if the Captain shows up, the foreman will give him ‘a start’ (79). Captain Boyle and Joxer 129

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have clearly invented the Killester job between them in an act of elaborate myth-making. But the conscious parallel and symmetry between the two scenes of a job offer work to undermine the solidity, the reality, of the former. How ‘real’ or meaningful is a temporary job of manual labour, not applied for or unionised, but relying on clerical clientilism? And what of the notorious pains in Captain Boyle’s legs? They only seem to manifest themselves when, as his wife avers, there’s ‘a genuine job goin’ ” (77). But they may well be real for Boyle himself; and at least some truth in his assertion that ‘[n]obody but meself knows the sufferin’ I’m goin’ through with the pains in these legs o’ mine!’ (80). I am suggesting a greater degree of ambiguity on these matters from the play and playwright’s part than is usually assumed, often beyond the awareness of the individual character, while not intending to exonerate the Captain and Joxer completely from their fecklessness. In The Shadow of a Gunman, Seamus Shields has a temporary job selling jerry-built braces. He is also a wide reader displaying real signs of cultural aspirations, as James Moran emphasises: ‘[Shields] recognizes quotations from Shelley and Shakespeare’.24 A neighbour Mr Gallogher’s remark, therefore, is not entirely without irony: ‘Mr. Shields is a man of exceptional mental capacity, and is worthy of a more dignified position’ (29). O’Casey’s plays repeatedly raise the issue of the lack of a proper outlet or expression for the mental abilities of his characters in their working lives. The Captain does not admire his daughter’s middle-class aspirations and ridicules her choice of improving literature in one of the play’s funniest jokes: ‘she’s always readin’ lately – nothin’ but thrash, too. There’s one I was lookin’ at dh’other day: three stories, The Doll’s House, Ghosts, an’ The Wild Duck – buks only fit for chiselurs!’ (85). Here are three plays by Ibsen condemned as unfit for adults while being read and admired by a good many in an Abbey Theatre audience. The Captain and Joxer repeatedly refer to books they have read and admire, usually of a more populist kind. In this case, Joxer responds to the Ibsen putdown by asking: ‘Didja ever rade Elizabeth, or Th’ Exile o’ Sibayria?’ (85). He’s still at it in the play’s penultimate line, with a reference to the prose tale on which Boucicault based his famous play: ‘D’jever rade Willie . . . Reilly . . . an’ his own . . . Colleen . . . Bawn?’ (147). The reason for the pauses is that Joxer is stupefied by drink, the characters’ non-verbal escape from an intolerable reality. The point is that these men are not uncultured. Stephen Watt helpfully tabulates the literary store which the characters in O’Casey’s plays draw on: ‘Irish ballads steeped in nationalist politics . . .; references to well-known songs, and the host of historical allusions they generate.’25 These quotations may often be no more than partial but the readiness with which the apposite 130

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phrase, proverb or literary allusion is found by Joxer is impressive, even if he is unable to provide the lead on the one occasion he is called to do so and stammers to a halt after a few lines. John ‘Jackie’ Boyle’s most elaborate performance, of course, is as the ‘captain’ of a seafaring vessel, which has precious little basis in the circumstantial reality of his life in a Dublin tenement, but allows him scope and some kind of freedom in its geographical, imaginative and linguistic amplitude: ‘Sailin’ from the Gulf o’ Mexico to the Antanartic Ocean . . . I seen things, Joxer, that no mortal man should speak about that knows his Catechism’ (88). All of this changes when the main plot device kicks in and Mary’s new boyfriend, the suave Charles Bentham, reads the family the will in which they have been left a fortune. At the start of Act Two, the Captain has adopted a new role: as a man of business and consequence. But unlike his earlier performance, this one is bad and lacking in assurance, as he ‘signs a paper [and] puts it into the case’ (99) with an air of bogus authority. His verbal selfconfidence is no less undermined, as revealed by his inability to follow through on explaining the financial term ‘Consols’ to his wife. Juno’s behaviour, too, is negatively transformed by the promise of new-found wealth, her sturdy independence of character now undermined as she becomes (in Nicholas Grene’s words) ‘sycophantically ingratiating with’ Bentham.26 But the main transformation is in the set. The stage directions at the start of Act Two call for more furniture: ‘[e]very available spot is ornamented with huge vases filled with artificial flowers [and] crossed festoons of coloured paper chains stretch from end to end of ceiling’ (98). An expensive gramophone player is carted on stage during the act and blares out ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ as the Tancred funeral takes place. But the illusion cannot last. As it becomes apparent that no money is forthcoming since the will was misread and that the Boyles have been living on credit, the change is reflected in the stage space. In Act Three a string of visitors arrives to take away objects from the stage: Needle Nugent the tailor enters to reclaim his newly-made trousers from the back of a chair; a neighbour, Maisie Madigan, comes by looking for the money she has loaned and, when it is not forthcoming, takes the gramophone player off to the pawnshop. (For good measure, Joxer lifts a bottle of stout to which he is not entitled.) The process of stripping the stage escalates with the arrival of a pair of repo men to take away the new furniture. As they finish, two more men arrive, this time in trench coats, to remove the mutilated but still living body of Johnny Boyle from the stage for questioning: ‘They think you might be able to know somethin’ about them that gave the bend where Commandant Tancred was shelterin” (120). Johnny is never 131

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restored to the stage in Act Three where news of his death is brought to the tenement. The curtain falls briefly during this Act – when it lifts again ‘the most of the furniture is gone’ (144). It is to this empty space that a drunken Captain and Joxer return for the final scene. In Joe Dowling’s acclaimed and influential production at the Gate in 1986, a vulture-like Joxer (played to shoulder-struggling perfection by John Kavanagh) swooped down on a prone Donal McCann, pocketed his last sixpence and excited. If O’Casey wrote a drama that sided with the anti-republican politics of the new Irish Free State, as Lionel Pilkington has argued, the area of his theatre which proved most challenging to the Ireland of his time was that of sexual politics. Even before bringing both a prostitute and an Irish flag into the same space [a pub] in The Plough and the Stars, his plays confronted and challenged the sexual morality of the time. In Act Three of Juno and the Paycock, the first sign that the money has disappeared is the simultaneous disappearance of Charles Bentham. He may also, as Juno surmises, have thought the Boyle family was not socially good enough for him. But the main motive would appear to be that Mary Boyle is pregnant by him and he has no intention of marrying her. Much of Act Three is centred on the visit by mother and daughter to the doctor and the confirmation that Mary’s paleness and lassitude have been caused by a pregnancy. The men in the Boyle family are single-minded in condemning her. The Captain does so with threatened violence: ‘if I lay me eyes on her, I’ll lay me hans on her, an’ if I lay me hans on her, I won’t be accountable for me actions!’ (137). Johnny the republican patriot is a self-righteous prig on matters of sexual morality: ‘She should be dhriven out o’ th’ house she’s brought disgrace on!’ (135). When the socialist Jerry Devine offers to take Mary back, he breaks off when he finds out she is pregnant. Juno’s act of feminist solidarity with her daughter may be couched in the language of maternity, when she declares that the new baby will ‘have what’s far betther [than no father] – it’ll have two mothers’ (146). But it is a feminist act nonetheless, standing up to the patriarchal morality which would banish and abuse a woman who has a child out of wedlock. Juno’s support is also allied to the critique of matrimony which she and the play have been advancing throughout. The accumulating loss of credit applies both to the Boyle family’s financial standing in the society but also to its lack of credibility as a family. Juno has been struggling throughout to hold the family together, and may be accused at least in part of creating a strain of chronic dependency, especially in father and son. But the play ends with the falling apart of the patriarchal family, as Juno no longer works hard at promoting the myth that the man is the head (she, not 132

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the Captain, is the one who works). She recognises that the time has come to strike the standard Abbey set of the kitchen for the last time and leave the bare stage with her daughter, for them to face the future together. The moment may well recall Ibsen (whose A Doll’s House had finally been staged at the Abbey the year before) but is even more akin to Bertolt Brecht in its defamiliarisation of the domestic.

The Plough and the Stars If O’Casey’s first two plays for the Abbey had chimed with the public’s mood of disillusionment over the War of Independence and the Civil War, the situation was very different when it came to The Plough and the Stars (1926) and its dramatic treatment of 1916. The more the post-1916 direction of Irish politics had seen a fatal sundering of views, the more the Rising was promoted as the foundational event of a free Ireland, one whose proclamation ‘guaranteed religious and civil liberty to all its citizens’. The first two acts of O’Casey’s play are set in the run-up to the Rising in November 1915; the second two during Easter Week itself, with the fighting at its height between the rebel leaders located in the General Post Office and the British army training direct fire on them. In Act Three, the following dialogue takes place: The Covey An’ then out comes General Pearse an’ his staff, an’, standin’ in th’ middle o’ th’ street, he reads the Proclamation. Mrs Gogan What proclamation? Peter

Declaring an Irish Republic.

Mrs Gogan Go to God! (205–206) There is no direct quotation from the Proclamation and, however her response is interpreted, Mrs Gogan has little to say about it. The most of her concern is directed towards her consumptive child, Mollser, whose thin, emaciated body has been brought into the sunlight and who will die before the play is concluded. But The Plough and the Stars contains a great many quotations from Patrick Pearse’s own writings, even if it does not quote the jointly penned Proclamation. In the previous act, set in a public house, a large window reveals the silhouette of ‘a tall man who is speaking to the crowd’27 and whose speeches can be heard by the drinkers. The Voice of the Man, or the Speaker 133

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as he is most often referred to, is never explicitly identified, at least in part so he can remain and be viewed as symbolic. In the course of the act, the drinkers pause on four occasions to listen to the Speaker, whose speeches hymn the praises of blood, heroism, manliness and militant warfare. All four are drawn from the essays and speeches of Patrick Pearse, often word for word (though with editing), which Susan Cannon Harris and Christopher Murray have identified as ‘The Coming Revolution’, ‘Peace and the Gael’, and the graveside panegyric on the Fenian, O’Donovan Rossa.28 Ironically, the one entitled ‘Peace and the Gael’ is the most sanguinary, arguing that ‘war is a sacred duty’ and that ‘we must not flinch when we are passing through that uproar; we must not faint at the sight of blood’.29 Or, as O’Casey’s Speaker puts it: ‘Bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing’ (182). The listeners in the play approve the sentiments and, clearly metaphorically intoxicated by the reiterated imagery of blood, demand more drink. The final speech is played out when three of the Irish revolutionary soldiers have come into the pub. They pledge their allegiance to the new tricolour flag of Ireland, which has displaced and absorbed the Irish Citizen Army’s socialist flag of the Plough and the Stars, to pronounce: ‘Th’ time for Ireland’s battle is now – th’ place for Ireland’s battle is here’ (201). The language between the two is continuous. The play’s use of Pearce’s most sanguinary speeches, ironised by the public house framing, has generally been seen, and was by the audience at the time who protested so vociferously, as a full frontal attack on the Rising leader in particular and 1916 in general. But O’Casey’s critique of and intertextual exchange with Pearse goes even further and is more deeply embedded in The Plough and the Stars than just the Speaker’s admonitions in Act Two. In the following act, the heroine Nora Clitheroe has gone in search of her husband Jack who is off fighting in the conflict as a member of the Irish Citizen Army. (Jack is one of the three uniformed combatants we have seen pledging the flag in Act Two). Fluther Good, one of the tenement dwellers, whose surname loses its irony as the play progresses, goes in search of the vulnerable and pregnant Nora and manages to bring her back. Nora decries what she has seen, not as courage but as fear, going on to argue: ‘there’s no woman gives a son or a husband to be killed –if they say it, they’re lyin’, lyin’, against God, Nature, an’ against themselves!’ (208). Her next line indicates that Pearse is the specific target: ‘One blasted hussy at a barricade told me to go home . . . That I wasn’t worthy to bear a son to a man that was out fightin’ for freedom . . .’ (208). Patrick Pearse’s most famous poem was entitled ‘A Mother’, which begins: ‘I do not grudge them, Lord, I do not grudge/My two strong sons that I have seen go 134

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out/To break their strength and die, they and a few,/In bloody protest for a glorious thing.’30 One of the most formidable opponents faced by O’Casey, Yeats, Gregory and Lennox Robinson (who had taken over the direction of the play when the original director refused to proceed) was Mrs Pearse, the mother of her two dead patriot sons, seated in the Abbey for the fourth performance of the play, as one of a formidable array of republican women who attended. If Nora is told by the women in the barricades to ‘go home’ in Act Three of The Plough and the Stars, it could seriously be questioned if by that stage she has a home to go to. The stage directions at the start make clear how she is striving to improve her material circumstances and construct a home of impeccable bourgeois respectability: ‘The room directly in front of the audience is furnished in a way that suggests an attempt towards a finer expression of domestic life’ (151). When Nora interrupts another of the incessant and childish altercations that repeatedly break out between her Uncle Peter and the Young Covey, she remarks: ‘Are yous always goin’ to be tearin’ down th’ little bit of respectability that a body’s thryin’ to build up?’ (165). But more than these two individual characters are going to tear down, undermine and ultimately render delusional the domestic middle-class home Nora is trying to build up. The forces opposing her are both internal and external, private and public. Nora’s husband, Jack Clitheroe, is wooed to stay at home by his wife rather than attend the joint meeting of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army which has been called for that evening. He does so moodily and resentfully, since he would prefer the homosocial companionship of his fellow soldiers to the company of his wife. It is only when Nora promotes herself coquettishly and sexually that his interest in her is reignited, as she displays the new hat he has bought for her birthday and asks for a cigarette. But when his ICA companions arrive and inform Clitheroe that he was promoted to commandant, a fact that Nora has deliberately suppressed, he turns his violence on her: Clitheroe (Fiercely.) You burned it [the letter promoting him], didn’t you? (He grips her arm.) Well, me good lady – Nora

Let go – you’re hurtin’ me!

Clitheroe You deserve to be hurt . . . (178) Initially, Jack has entered the scene to protect his wife from the aggression of their Protestant neighbour Bessie Burgess. But increasingly it becomes clear

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that Nora has more to fear in that line from her husband. This scene of domestic violence is played out in public in Act Three when Jack and his two companions (one of them seriously wounded) return briefly to the front of their tenement home. Nora’s efforts to restrain and keep him there result in her being thrown violently to the ground. Whatever about the original Abbey staging in 1926, contemporary productions always make clear that this act of violence is being visited upon a visibly pregnant woman. Connecting these scenes may suggest that Nora is the ‘heroine’ of the play, as Juno (albeit with some qualification) is of Juno and the Paycock, and that the developmental arc of the play follows her in a similar way. But this is far from being the case in The Plough and the Stars, since Nora disappears entirely from the stage throughout the lengthy second act. In positively engaging with the plays of Sean O’Casey, and ultimately accepting them for staging at the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory had advised him that his strong point was character and that he should follow and develop that in his writing.31 O’Casey may be said to have done that in his first two Abbey plays, where what audiences tend to remember and discuss are the Joxers and the Junos. But he had begun to move away from a concentration on character in this play and was to go even further in The Silver Tassie. In Juno and the Paycock, the setting remained the same throughout, the one set of the Boyles’ living room, even as it went through the extraordinary transformations outlined earlier, first festooned with garish rubbish before being stripped bare. The Plough and the Stars nowhere signals more clearly its epic dramaturgic ambitions than in its radical reconfiguration of space. All four of its acts require a major set change; Acts Two and Three move out into the public sphere before there is the belated and futile retreat in Act Four into Bessie’s tiny attic room, where the final scenes play out. The two other women from Act One, Mrs Grogan and Bessie Burgess, reappear in the pub for a memorable set-to; and all the men are of course present in this masculine space. But if Nora’s absence from the pub is not socially unusual for a respectable and pregnant young woman, her dramatic removal is shocking. Her space is occupied by Rosie Redmond, an attractive young woman plying her trade as a streetwalker. As Susan Cannon Harris has pointed out, ‘Pearse and Rosie are in direct competition for the attentions of the pub’s customers . . . [with] O’Casey using sexuality to make the most direct statement so far of his quarrel with sacrificial rhetoric’.32 Fluther, the least ideologically infected of the men, is the only one to show Rosie any respect; they exit together to Rosie’s place as Clitheroe and his soldiers go off to train for combat. The presence of the Irish tricolour flag in a pub and the presence of 136

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a Dublin prostitute on stage made Act Two of the play the most contentious alike to audiences and to the government-appointed member of the Abbey Board (and erstwhile censor), George O’Brien. But Yeats and Gregory proved just as adept at handling the new Free State government as they had Dublin Castle two decades earlier and, as Christopher Murray puts it: ‘Yeats cleverly soothed O’Brien and traded over cuts in the text while defending Rosie Redmond.’33 When O’Brien threatened to remove the subsidy, Gregory’s response to Yeats was unequivocal: ‘If we have to choose between the subsidy and our freedom, it is our freedom we choose.’34 If Nora Clitheroe is absent from the stage throughout Act Two, she is scarcely restored by Act Three. As mentioned earlier, she has gone out from the tenement to the barricades in O’Connell Street to find her husband and bring him home. When she is rescued and retrieved by Fluther, she still seems astray: ‘Her eyes are dim and hollow, her face pale and strained-looking’ (207). After this brief appearance on stage, she is led inside, only emerging when her husband appears with the two other men. Nora’s efforts to persuade him to stay prove futile. The men exit, leaving a pregnant woman alone and lying on the street, until Bessie puts aside her former belligerence and takes her in. Jack Clitheroe has made his decision to follow Cathleen ni Houlihan and to undergo a sacrificial death which will be remembered for ever. When Captain Brennan enters Bessie’s attic in Act Four to report Jack’s death in combat, his confident assertion that ‘Mrs. Clitheroe’s grief will be a joy when she realizes that she has had a hero for a husband’ is undercut both by Bessie’s terse reply – ‘If you only seen her you’d know to the differ’ (231) – and the spectacle Nora presents when she comes on stage, delusional and oblivous to her immediate surroundings. In place of the actual setting, an impoverished room with a coffin containing both her dead infant and the consumptive Mollser, Nora imagines that she is in her home waiting for her husband to return and preparing his tea. When her fantasy is cut across by ‘a burst of rifle fire’ (214) Nora tragically realises the double loss she has sustained: ‘Jack, Jack, Jack! My baby, my baby, my baby!’ (243). If the play works to deconstruct the place of home as that to which women like Nora should both aspire and be consigned, it is prescient on the Constitution which a republican Irish government under Eamon de Valera (who had fought in the Rising) would construct eleven years later in which women would be located exclusively within the home. The play’s final scene is harrowing. In seeking to move Nora away from the window, Bessie is shot by a sniper and endures a prolonged death scene. Her final words provide neither consistency or comfort, as Bessie moves from denouncing Nora as ‘you bitch’ (244) to pleading for her assistance. But 137

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Nora is dead, the third female corpse in the room, and Bessie dies alone and unsupported, turning finally to God in one of her beloved Protestant hymns. She confronts her own ebbing mortality in a graphic description: ‘I’m bleedin’ to death, an’ no one’s here to stop th’ flowin’ blood!’ (244). The fulsome blood imagery activates and responds to the blood imagery of the Speaker in Act Two. Bessie Burgess’s solitary, meaningless death declares that bloodshed is neither ‘a cleansing [nor] a sanctifying thing’. The scene ends with the two British soldiers coming in, realising they have inadvertently ‘plugged one of the women of the ‘ouse’ (245), making a cup of tea and joining in the offstage singing of ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. The final God’s-eye view is a fitting close for a play that has increasingly rejected character in favour of a Brechtian objectivity. Garry Hynes’s revolutionary production of The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey in 1991 adopted a Brechtian approach by shaving the characters’ heads, stripping away the naturalistic accretions and highlighting the social conditions in which O’Casey’s people are forced to operate. As Brian Singleton observes: ‘Theatrically [Hynes] adopted a distancing style which aimed at defamiliarizing the play.’35 Never was this more the case than at the end when Marie Mullen as Bessie Burgess delivered her dying lines straight to the audience and held out her hands to them. The answer to the Brechtian question: ‘How could this have turned out differently?’ clearly does not lie within the proscenium of the play nor within the social history of the 1916 Rising. Rather, it is to be sought outside in the society to which an Irish audience is returned at the end of the play, where the revolution has still to be fully achieved.

The Silver Tassie If The Silver Tassie is known for one thing, it is its rejection by the Board of Directors of the Abbey Theatre in 1928. There may have been differences of opinion between their individual views, but any idea that the matter could have been settled by the Abbey demanding changes to the text and the acceptance of these by O’Casey seems unlikely in the extreme. Lady Gregory’s comment to Yeats, quoted earlier, that they should have ‘held out against Lennox Robinson’ indicates the degree of his opposition.36 According to Murray, Robinson wanted all three of the play’s Dublin acts to be in a tenement setting, not just the first.37 All three directors appear to have wanted just what O’Casey suspected, a play in the same theatrical mode and milieu as the ‘Dublin trilogy’. The first act of The Silver Tassie is somewhat 138

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misleading in this regard. It is set in the Dublin tenements, with yet another version of the male double act in Sylvester Heegan and Simon Norton and an aged mother waiting with concern for her soldier son to return home. But appearances can be deceptive; and the presence of other, newer theatrical elements alone suggests a different development. There is also the precedent of O’Casey’s previous play, The Plough and the Stars, which moved far beyond the tenement domesticity of its first act in both location and style. When Yeats objected that the Tassie was without a dominating character, O’Casey was quick to reply that the same held true of The Plough. In the figure of Cuchulain, Yeats in his own plays held to the idea of a central heroic figure, however contextualised by farce; whereas O’Casey through the development of his plays had consistently gravitated towards a theatrical ensemble. What Yeats most objected to in any artistic treatment of World War I was the anonymity which mass warfare promoted. He was far less reluctant to treat the much more small-scale and local Easter Rising in his work, where he could name the individual leaders of the Rebellion. In the war scene of Act Two of The Silver Tassie, none of the individual soldiers is identified. Though two of them are described in O’Casey’s stage directions as being ‘very like’ Harry Heegan and Teddy Foran, the two soldiers from Act One who have returned to the war front, that identification is never made explicit or insisted upon.38 This anonymity of character is one of the features of German expressionism, a theatrical style which had begun to infiltrate The Plough and the Stars (in the play’s pub scene and ending, especially) and which is prominent in The Silver Tassie. As J.L. Styan points out, ‘O’Casey’s interest in expressionistic techniques was the immediate cause of his break with Yeats and the Abbey Theatre’;39 it would have equally drawn Lady Gregory’s ire. What I earlier labelled ‘Brechtian’ might more accurately be defined as ‘expressionist’ in O’Casey’s theatre. A key element is that ‘the characters for the most part remain nameless and impersonal, often moving grotesquely’, 40 as is the case with the Croucher in Act Two, tied to a ramp and given a death’s head make-up. Not just the impersonality of O’Casey’s soldiers, but all of the features of expressionism are to be found in Act Two of the Tassie, as Styan makes clear. Characters do not speak but intone the lines, which are frequently staccato and clearly intended to be part of a larger verbal pattern: 1st Soldier Twelve weary hours. 2nd Soldier And wasting hours. 3rd Soldier And hot and heavy hours. (34)

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The set is dominated by a giant howitzer gun to which the soldiers pray and which turns and fires at the act’s close. No sounds are heard; ‘[o]nly flashes are seen’; and ‘the Soldiers load and fire with rhythmical movements’ (52). The men’s movements are mechanical and deterministic, at the furthest remove from individual psychology; and the entire act is clearly impressive as a set piece on its own terms. Yeats referred to it rather sniffily as ‘an interesting technical experiment’.41 Which is where the real theatrical problem with The Silver Tassie arises, even for its admirers. Act Two has always had a great many theatrical resources lavished on it, starting with the elaborate Augustus John set for its 1929 premiere in London. This standalone quality has also suggested from the start that the play’s expressionist elements are almost entirely confined to Act Two; even J.L. Styan sees them only surfacing at the end of Act One, and views the play as returning to realism in its final act.42 Christopher Murray rightly suggests that what O’Casey and the Abbey Theatre directors should have been concerned with was ‘finding a unified production style’.43 In her 1987 Dublin production of the play, Rough Magic director Lynne Parker placed the entire four acts of the play in Act Two’s setting of ‘the jagged and lacerated ruin of what was once a monastery’, with visual prominence given to Christ’s arm in the life-size crucifix leaning ‘outstretched towards’ a statue of the Virgin Mary (32). Parker’s solution has the salutary effect of underlining just how carefully the four acts of The Silver Tassie, despite superficial differences, are bound together through a careful and consistent interweaving of theatrical elements. With this in mind, it could be said of Act One what O’Casey specifically indicates about Act Two; that ‘every feature’ of the familiar Dublin tenement scene ‘seems a little distorted from its original appearance’ (48) in the earlier plays. The chief impression created by the laboured comic interchanges between Sylvester and Simon is that they are a rather jaded rerun of the Captain and Joxer. Certainly, the lines have little of the verbal brio of those exchanges and much of the vitality seems drained from them. Perhaps that is because these are much less rounded characters than the earlier comic pair. Sylvester is nominally Harry Heegan’s father but if that responsibility did not impinge much on Captain Boyle’s sensibility, it does so even less on how Sylvester Heegan is represented and played. In Garry Hynes’s Druid production of 2010, Eamon Morrissey and John Olohan presented a theatrically inventive pas-de-deux throughout, climaxing in Act Three’s efforts to get Sylvester into the bath. This was far less reliant on the lines and far more on a comic elaboration of physical mime. The by now iconic figure 140

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of the O’Casey mother is also present in the first act but, as indicated in Chapter  4’s discussion of Shaw’s O’Flaherty, V.C., Mrs Heegan is far less concerned about her son Harry’s welfare than she is about getting him back on board ship safely and in time, in order not to lose her maintenance money. The more serious issue that, if Harry misses the boat, he will be up on a charge of desertion, is voiced not by her but by his friend, Barney Bagnal. The other soldier, Teddy Foran, does not make a naturalistic entrance, but is first heard upstairs destroying his tenement home. The ostensible motivation is jealousy at the blooming appearance of his wife and her transparent desire to get him back on the boat also. J.L. Styan describes the expressionist style of ‘ecstatic’ acting as expressing ‘tormented emotions [in which] actors might erupt in sudden passion and attack each other physically’.44 When Teddy Foran makes his entrance, he does so with a bowl in one hand (which he smashes on the floor) and a hatchet in the other; he has been preceded by his wife, her hair awry and with a cut eye, who has taken refuge under the bed. When Teddy is finally persuaded to return upstairs, sounds of further smashing are heard. Mrs Foran, in the act’s penultimate lines, describes her household as having been converted into ‘a mad an’ muddled heap’ like the flotsum an’ jetsum of th’ seashore’ (31). The same image, of flotsam and jetsam, resurfaces in Act Three to describe the smashed bodily remains of the still living soldiers in the hospital. Any love interest in the play is soon put to other purposes. At the level of characterisation, Susie Monican, who holds out romantic hopes for Harry Heegan, and Jessie Tate, who is the present and future object of Harry’s desires, are little more than trophy women for the soccer star who has won the coveted Silver Tassie cup three times running. What Susie does throughout Act One is to maintain a running biblical commentary on the action. This is tangentially linked to her turning to religion in frustration over losing Harry to Jessie. But no degree of motivation can cover or render realistic the extraordinary outpouring of religious imagery which she voices; if she performs it as a chorus, it is one which is not separate from the action. Susie Monican’s first speech is directed at the two old men and the banal triviality of their conversational exchange: ‘When the two of yous stand quiverin’ together on the dhread day of the Last Judgement, how will the two of yous feel if yous have nothin’ to say but “[h]e broke a chain across his bisseps”?’ (15). There is the same mix here of high and low, of philosophical and farcical, as there would be later in the plays of Beckett. The naming of the Last Judgement sounds an apocalyptic note that will resonate throughout The Silver Tassie. Susie punctuates the act by sticking her head in the door 141

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repeatedly to remind the audience as much as the tenement dwellers, ‘God is watching you!’ This biblical vein is even more pronounced in Act Two, with the Croucher (as J.L. Styan puts it) ‘chant[ing] a grotesque version of Ezekiel like an auditory echo of the grisly set itself ’.45 But as Murray has noted, O’Casey the Protestant was also drawn to and interested in Catholic liturgy.46 And so ‘voices sing the Kyrie Eleison within the ruins, and these are picked up by the intoning of a bunch of wretched soldiers as they return from fatigue’.47 The act, as mentioned earlier, is set in the ruins of a monastery and the lighting picks out the crucifix and the statue of the Virgin. Dominating all is the big howitzer gun, to which the soldiers pray at the climax: ‘We believe in God and we believe in thee’ (51). Act Three is set in a hospital, in which a degree of anonymity is maintained from Act Two by the numbers which the patients are assigned and by which they are identified. Susie Monican has now sexualised herself to attract the predatory doctor and little of her evangelical rhetoric remains. But the hospital is run by an order of nuns and the set accordingly features ‘a pedestal on which stands a statue of the Blessed Virgin’ (53), thereby maintaining continuity with the war zone. The Sister of the Ward enters late in the act on her way to chapel, carrying rosary beads and wearing a crucifix, and pauses to enquire of the wheelchair-bound Harry Heegan: ‘Keeping brave and hopeful, Twenty-eight?’ (73). Where Harry has earlier berated the banal routine enquiries of the secular staff as to how he is feeling, he responds to the nun with a ‘softly’ in his voice, moved as he is by the spiritual concern animating her form of words. In Act Four, the dance at the Avondale Football Club draws all of the play’s able-bodied characters into a hedonistic celebration of life, thereby continuing the choreographic movements which bind all four of the play’s acts together. The wheelchairbound Harry Heegan and blinded Teddy Foran, pushed to the sidelines, are the characters who now speak in a biblical idiom of what the ‘Lord hath given and man hath taken away’ (96). No place is found in the revel for Harry to sing a spiritual, as promised, so instead he hums quietly to himself: ‘Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home’ (100). Teddy finally beckons him away, ‘home to where the air is soft’, and the two men exit together, ‘Sylvester pushing the chair, Teddy’s hand on Harry’s shoulder, Mrs. Heegan slowly following’ (96) in O’Casey’s profound renovation and theatrical transformation of his male double act. W.B. Yeats may have concluded, dismissively, that in Acts Three and Four of The Silver Tassie there was ‘nothing’, but as O’Casey was quick to remind him, ‘where there is nothing, there is God’.48 142

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There was not to be another new O’Casey play premiered at the Abbey Theatre during Sean O’Casey’s lengthy lifetime (he died in 1964, at the age of eighty-four). On the occasion of O’Casey’s centenary in 1980, the then Artistic Director of the Abbey, Tomás Mac Anna, mounted an extraordinary season of the plays, many of them receiving Irish premieres. But the frequent revivals at the Abbey over the decades have continued to be of the ‘Dublin trilogy’, especially of the full-length Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, and this seems unlikely to change. In 2012, it was predictable but ultimately fitting that the National Theatres of Ireland and England, coming together in their first joint production, should choose to stage Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock in both capital cities.

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CHAPTER 7 THE REVIVAL FROM O’CASEY TO THE DEATH OF YEATS (1928–39)

Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ and the arrival of the Gate Theatre Despite the rejection of O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie in 1928, the following ten years of the 1930s was a key decade for Irish theatre in which a new Irish modernism was being forged. O’Casey’s play was an important element in that development, because of the amount of attention its fate attracted to the work and because like all of O’Casey’s plays it was rapidly published by his London publisher Harold Macmillan and could be read and studied. But although it was not premiered in Dublin but in London in 1929, renewed attention needs to be paid to the fact that the Abbey effectively rescinded its ban and staged the play there in 1935. That staging brought a very different kind of O’Casey play and a very different kind of theatre from the Abbey realist norm into the National Theatre’s repertoire, one in which there was a much greater emphasis on design and choreography and a very different approach to character, something more akin to a fluid theatrical persona. These anti-naturalistic, expressionist theatrical features in O’Casey’s Silver Tassie were even more to characterise the first play by an important young playwright, Denis Johnston (1901–84), a Dublin-born Protestant who practised law but whose real interest was in the theatre. His experimental play, originally entitled Shadowdance, was submitted to the Abbey Theatre in 1928 and was in turn rejected. Johnston tells an amusing but bitter story about this: Walking back from Sorrento with Mr. Yeats he gave me what was probably the most incisive criticism this play has received. ‘I liked your play,’ he said, ‘but it has one or two faults. The first is, the scenes are too long.’ He was silent for a time . . . ‘Then,’ he added finally and after considerable thought, ‘there are too many scenes.’ Needless to say I was grateful for this opinion.1 145

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There is a strong contrast here between Johnston’s dry and witty tone and the emotional rhetoric of O’Casey in responding to the rejection of their two plays by the National Theatre in the same period. The double exclusion of two overtly experimental works would suggest that the Abbey Theatre had become increasingly conservative in its programming and had lost touch with its founding ideals. O’Casey suggested as much when he remarked on the revealing contrast between the Yeats who spoke high-mindedly about an art theatre and its ideals and on the other hand rejoiced in a playwright like O’Casey primarily for his ability to draw full houses.2 From the late 1920s on, as this chapter will explore, Yeats was increasingly bringing his own experiments back to the Abbey stage, finally getting The Dreaming of the Bones produced and writing new plays like The Words Upon the WindowPane for staging there. It therefore seemed as if he was resisting all theatrical innovation but his own in the theatre he had co-founded. And there would be some truth in that, also. But the situation was more complicated than that. And Denis Johnston’s play, renamed The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ after its Abbey rejection, serves best to illuminate the complexities. For one thing, even though the Abbey Theatre had rejected Johnston’s play, it received its premiere there on 3 July, 1929. Had the Theatre undergone a change of heart? Not exactly, though it did exhibit some remorse by contributing the sum of fifty pounds towards the production. The play was presented, not on the Abbey main stage, but downstairs in the recently opened Peacock Theatre, which the government subsidy had made possible. This 102-seater space, which allowed for the National Theatre to complement the increasingly conservative and mainstream fare on the main stage with an experimental programme, had opened in November 1927 and was to operate until the Abbey Theatre fire of 1951. The Peacock’s inaugural production was Georg Kaiser’s From Morn Till Midnight; its director was Denis Johnston. The following year Yeats invited Johnston to direct King Lear on the main stage; as Hugh Hunt points out, it was the Abbey’s ‘first attempt at a Shakespeare play’. Yeats and Gregory praised the ‘magnificent’ acting of F.J. McCormick in the lead, but were less happy with expressionist elements in the acting and design.3 Nevertheless, the ageing Abbey directorate increasingly realised that the time was ripe for a changing of the guard and had their eye on Johnston as a future director. Lennox Robinson, who was increasingly interested in contemporary European theatre, in 1919 drew Yeats into the founding of the Dublin Drama League, a subscription-only club which rented the Abbey on Sunday and Monday nights for productions of a range of contemporary world theatre: 146

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Strindberg (more than Ibsen); Arthur Schnitzler; Luigi Pirandello; Ernst Toller; Leonid Andreyev; Eugene O’Neill; Susan Glaspell; and W.B. Yeats.4 Many of the regular Abbey company, so prominent in the O’Casey plays – F.J. McCormick, Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields, Sara Allgood – performed in these plays. But the nucleus of a new company emerged with Johnston and his actress wife Shelah Richards at its helm, whose preference was much more for the contemporary world theatre of the Dublin Drama League than for mainstage Abbey revivals of the Irish theatre’s classics. So, when Johnston’s play was premiered at the Peacock in July 1929, it appeared under the auspices of a brand new theatre company, which used the Peacock for the first two years of its existence before locating, moving to and transforming into a theatre a space at the end of O’Connell Street. This was the Gate Theatre and it was the creation of two remarkable men, Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, who had met and fallen in love while touring Ireland in fit-up theatre. One may say that it was a love affair between the Irish and the English; but the situation was more complicated than that. MacLiammóir played the role of an Irishman off stage as well as on, appearing in the Dublin streets in full make-up, speaking in a rich, sonorous Irish tone and writing a daily diary in Gaelic. After his death in 1978, it transpired that MacLiammóir was English, not Irish, born one Alfred Wilmore in London but had reinvented himself as an Irishman when he fell under the spell of Yeats’s writing.5 MacLiammóir mainly acted and designed; he was to play the lead role in Johnston’s play. Edwards also acted but his brilliance was as a director, with a formidable stage technique: controlled histrionic action with a blend of the performative and the realistic; a choreographic precision of overall movement; and an unparalleled technical skill in lighting to convey the atmosphere of a play. The two partners found their ideal vehicle in The Old Lady Says ‘No!’. As MacLiammóir writes in his theatrical autobiography, All For Hecuba: ‘With its majestic vocal orchestration, its deadly malice, its influence of Toller and Joyce, its dream-like atmosphere, its flashes of low comedy, its looming chaotic background of Dante’s purgatory . . ., it read, as Hilton remarked, like a railway guide and played like Tristan and Isolde.’6 The Old Lady’s opening, featuring the political figure of Robert Emmet in 1803 preparing for a failed revolution by bidding farewell to his beloved Sarah Curran, brandished its traditionalism by being made up mainly of quotations from nineteenthcentury nationalistic songs, poems and ballads (ironically, it was the only scene Lady Gregory liked). If it looked like a Boucicault historical melodrama, with the arrival of British redcoats and Emmet outfitted in ‘a green tunic, 147

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white-plumed hat, white breeches and Wellington boots’,7 it sounded more like an Abbey play, especially when its verbal pastiche included passages from Yeats’s Deirdre. The actor playing Emmet gets hit on the head by a British redcoat’s rifle and falls to the ground. The play is halted and a doctor summoned from the audience to attend to him; Johnston’s exposure to such plays of Pirandello as Henry IV in the Dublin Drama League was paying off. The time shifts to the play’s present, with the Emmet figure (or the Speaker, as he is known) wandering through 1920s Dublin with all of the bustle, noise and machinery of a twentieth-century metropolis. To signal the crucial moment of transition from the conventional nineteenth-century love scene into the ‘mind’ of the protagonist, director Edwards worked out a rhythmic interaction between syncopated percussion and stroboscopic lighting. The unparalleled theatrical sophistication for the Irish stage of Johnston’s play required Edwards’s experience of world drama, in particular his skill at transforming a fixed conventional setting into a fluid psychological space.8 In Act Two, there is an O’Caseyan scene in a tenement room where a Johnny Boyle-like figure dies and the room is invaded by politicians and prominent citizens wishing to be associated with his funeral. At the end of the scene, as the blind fiddler prepares to sing and play, ‘the walls of the room seem to [f]ade apart’ and ‘[u]pon the back-cloth two great SHADOWS appear gesturing and posturing in time with the music’ (118). As Chris Morash emphasises, nothing could be further from the Abbey’s simultaneous ‘dominant production style [of] confining the actors within a box-set that varied little from one rural play to the next’.9 Vivian Mercier has written of Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ as ‘the only work by an Abbey theatre dramatist . . . which is integrally conceived as a satire’.10 The play’s satiric intent is to expose the gap between the ideals of republican nationalism and the day-to-day realities of Free State citizens, whether it is the Southside Trinity College students from the college’s dramatic society or the two young Northside women looking to ‘click’. An intermittent but consistent presence throughout is the working-class flower seller, who offers her ‘four bewtyful gre-in fields’ (71) in a deliberate echo (and reversal) of Cathleen ni Houlihan and who is played by the same actress as Emmet’s beloved, Sarah Curran. Many of the parts are doubled throughout, a key expressionist technique, as in O’Casey’s Silver Tassie. The Speaker is disturbed by the doubling, notably when he responds to Sarah’s voice and is instead confronted by the flower-seller offering her sexual favours. Part Two transports us to the drawing-room of a government minister, where the satire of contemporary Dublin is strongest. This is the Minister for Arts and Crafts (on 148

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this, Johnston was prescient, since no such ministry was created until the mid1990s) who is hosting an at-home with his wife for a select gathering. Present are thinly disguised versions of Sean O’Casey, the painter Patrick Tuohy and the novelist Liam O’Flaherty, with O’Casey providing the rudest but funniest choric commentary. However, their presence suggests that the artists in the Free State have been co-opted, especially when they are told there is to be no mention of politics. The ghost at the feast is the exiled James Joyce, on whose writings and form Johnston’s play consistently draws. As Mercier notes: ‘The phantasmagoria that follows . . . resembles the “Circe” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses’,11 with its dream-like metamorphoses. And the play’s final speech is Joycean in its loving evocation, after all the satire is played out, of Dublin as ‘[s] trumpet city in the sunset . . . [w]ilful city of savage dreamers’ (122–3). Mercier’s description of The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ as an Abbey play is strange, given its rejection there and its nine subsequent productions at the Gate Theatre from 1929 until 1957, with Edwards directing and MacLiammóir in the lead as Robert Emmet. But like the Tassie, Johnston’s play was written for and submitted first to the Abbey. His very next play, The Moon in the Yellow River, was produced there in 1931, another satire on the Free State which provoked hisses at its opening night. As Christopher Murray puts it, Johnston throughout his career ‘oscillated between Gate and Abbey’.12 At one level, the Abbey and the Gate established a dual dominance and a rivalry which continues to the present day. The contrast was once memorably described by playwright Brendan Behan as Sodom and Begorrah. But the Gate’s emphasis on staging contemporary European plays on an avant-garde model had developed from the ten-year experiment of the Dublin Drama League set up by Robinson and Yeats (with the very active involvement of Yeats’s wife George, who translated Pirandello’s plays for her husband). And, at least during the 1930s, there were similar as well as contrasting plays at both theatres. Even Lennox Robinson began to alternate his original plays between the two theatres. George Bernard Shaw featured regularly on both stages, with the Gate bravely staging the six-part Back to Methusaleh in 1930. Wilde’s plays, by contrast, were almost exclusively the preserve of the Gate and culminated in MacLiammóir’s acclaimed one-man show, The Importance of Being Oscar, in the early 1960s, directed by Edwards (naturally). There is no doubt, either, that the Gate was not without influence in increasing the Abbey Theatre’s attention to design. Yeats drafted in his artist-daughter, Anne Yeats, as the Abbey’s resident designer in the late 1930s and gave her as her first assignment the stark minimalism of his 1938 play, Purgatory. In hindsight, the most notable performer at the Gate in the 1930s (other than 149

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MacLiammóir and Edwards) was a brash sixteen-year-old American actor who showed up at the theatre in October 1931 and demanded an audition. His name was Orson Welles and he subsequently appeared in six productions at the Gate. In 1949, he returned the compliment when making a film of Othello (with himself playing the Moor). Hilton Edwards was cast as Desdemona’s father, Brabantio; but MacLiammóir secured the plum role of Iago and delivered a silky performance with a strong homoerotic subtext.13

The second Lady of the Abbey: Teresa Deevy The 1930s saw the emergence of a number of important playwrights, the most significant of whom was Teresa Deevy (1894–1963). She became the most important Irish woman playwright since Lady Gregory and may to some degree have been seen by the Abbey as filling the very large absence caused by Gregory’s death on 22 May 1932. The dates are not quite congruent. Deevy’s first play to be accepted by the Abbey (like O’Casey before her, she had submitted several) was Reapers in 1930. As Cathy Leeney reveals, Deevy had hoped it was Gregory who had ‘approve[d] the play for production, [but] was surprised to hear that it was in fact Lennox Robinson that supported her work’14 and went on to direct it. Between 1930 and 1939 six of Deevy’s plays were produced on the Abbey stage. Her best, the one to be examined here, was Katie Roche (1936), a three-act development of the theme she first adumbrated the year before in the one-act The King of Spain’s Daughter. In both plays a free-spirited and iconoclastic young woman is increasingly oppressed by the social conditions of the time (primarily, though not exclusively, the obligation to marry) even as she responds to patriarchal pressure with wit and a yearning for a freedom which she is not granted. As Cathy Leeney writes, Teresa Deevy’s drama ‘explores . . . the harsh dynamic between personal aspiration and social suffocation’.15 But though a woman like Gregory and having to deal with much of the same ideological and gender constraints, Deevy is different in many ways. She is not a landed aristocrat but someone who had to make her way in the world; her father died when she was three and as a result of Ménière’s disease in her late teens, she lost her hearing and accordingly had to give up on her career ambition to be a teacher. And yet her plays reveal an extraordinarily acute sensitivity to the nuances of speech and the use of silence as a means of masculine control that anticipates the plays of Pinter. Also, Deevy is a Catholic rather than a Protestant, the first to feature in this study. Although 150

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Catholic playwrights as well as Protestants had featured at the Abbey from the outset (Padraic Colum would be an example; T.C. Murray another) they did not quite enjoy the same status as the three director-playwrights of the National Theatre and even when there was a class shift (as with the lower middle-class O’Casey) the religious affiliation remained the same. But by the 1930s the Irish Free State had consolidated itself and both the numbers and social prestige of Anglo-Irish Protestants were in decline; Catholics were become the risen people and from now on Catholic playwrights would dominate Irish theatrical practice. But religious affiliation was cut across by issues of gender. As mentioned earlier, the consolidation of the Catholic Church after the Fianna Fáil government took power in 1932 under former republican Eamon de Valera led to the Constitution of 1937, in which the position of women in Irish society was accorded only a couple of sentences and then only to assert that women’s proper place was in the home.16 This is where the other great difference emerges with Deevy. She wrote plays neither about some mythical otherwhere or about the key political conflicts but rather about the social milieu of the contemporary moment of Ireland in the 1930s. In doing so, she demonstrated the increasing grip of a patriarchal narrative on Irish society and how the disillusioned post-revolutionary atmosphere bore down most heavily upon women. Katie Roche centres on the relationship between the eponymous young woman and an older man called Stanislaus Gregg who intends to marry her. The latter is introduced as ‘a short stoutish man of about forty-five’17 who comes slowly into his sister’s cottage as the play opens and stands by the window. Katie, who then enters bearing a tea-tray, is described as ‘not quite twenty’ (8) and, in the one additional piece of information Deevy supplies about her, is distinguished by ‘a sort of inward glow, which she continually tries to smother and which breaks out in delight or desperation according to circumstances’. In a Peacock production of 1994, where the title part was played by Derbhle Crotty, director Judy Friel beautifully conveyed Katie Roche’s ‘inward glow’ of youthful possibility by starting the play with Katie already on, standing at the window in the afternoon sun and basking in its light. As a result of this, Stan’s muted entrance was all of a piece, the first inevitable clouding or, to use Deevy’s term, smothering. Any possible equality that might exist between this man and this woman is heavily undercut not only by the age difference but by the givens of the social, economic and symbolic relations between them – all the more relevant in that he has come expressly to ask her to marry him. The economic conditions are not equal. Katie, as we all too readily see from her entrance, is 151

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employed as a domestic in the Gregg household and is always on the watch for the return of her employer, Stan’s older sister Amelia. But Stan’s relationship to Katie is more exactly that of her employer, since it later emerges that he is the one who provides his sister with the subsistence on which she lives. In this cash nexus, Stanislaus Gregg economically controls the lives of the two women in the play. That the proposal of marriage to Katie Roche by her ostensible employer’s brother alters very little in the power relations governing her existence is borne out in Act Two’s depiction of the early months of their married life, where Katie reacts to the return of Amelia by rushing to prepare her tea. But in addition to the employer–employee relationship and the age difference between the couple the play later discloses the morally disturbing revelation that Stan has had Katie in mind as a sexual partner since she was a child and that he could literally have been her father, since as a young man he was in love with Katie’s natural mother: ‘I loved her; I could have knocked down the world for her. But – she said I was too young’ (14). On more than one occasion, Katie is reminded she is fortunate to be receiving such an offer since, as a child born out of wedlock, she bears the social stigma of illegitimacy. She briefly considers becoming a nun. The proposal is scoffed at and even the audience can see that this wildly impulsive young woman is not about to go quietly into a convent. The idea was formed early in life by Katie’s reading of the Spiritual Maxims and the lives of women saints – one of the few female role models available to her outside marriage. Her reservations about the convent derive from personal experience: ‘When you’d be working for nuns you’d never be finished. (Moves about her work.) In at half-eight every night. But they had a grand library’ (12). Katie’s experience of the nuns would derive from the long-prevalent practice in Ireland of farming out illegitimate children (especially young women) to work as unpaid labour in convents. She has been rescued from institutionalisation in a Magdalene Home, first through adoption by Mrs Roche, then by working for the relatively benign Amelia. The stigma of illegitimacy can be erased in only a few instances: entering a convent she imagines to be one of them. Deevy’s Katie Roche is a reworking and a feminist critique of Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen, which also looked at the younger woman oppressed by marriage to an older man. In the Synge play, the figure of the Tramp arrives to offer the woman a romantic alternative. There is a tramp in Deevy’s play too, a wanderer of the roads called Reuben, who intervenes significantly in the dramatic action, once in each of the three acts. The Tramp who appears 152

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in the Gregg cottage is looked to by the young woman as a wise man, a Christian ascetic who yet retains his pagan intimacy with the natural world. But his gentleness does not last long. In Act Two, Reuben urges Katie to be a good wife to Stan and when she does not appear to take his admonition seriously, he raises his stick and ‘with surprising vigour . . . hits her across the shoulders. KATIE collapses on to a chair. Groans. Silence’ (59). The stick is now wielded, not by the husband (as in the Synge), but by the Tramp. Katie rallies to defend herself by reiterating her notion that she comes of aristocratic stock and is told in turn by Reuben that he is her father. This disclosure, scarcely credible on the level of probability, is absolutely accurate in terms of the play’s symbolic and social values. It serves to establish the complicity between the Tramp and the husband. When the former urges the latter to beat his wife, Stan responds with ‘surprise’. He has his own more civilised methods of maintaining control: the weapons of speech and silence have now replaced the big stick. The romantic conceptions of herself that Katie owns and brings into her marriage with Stan are intimately related to Teresa Deevy as a playwright working within the inherited patriarchal structures of Irish, as indeed of most, theatre. For this heroine conceives of her life as inherently theatrical and of her identity as a restless search for the role that will most fulfil her desires. The experience of married life teaches Katie that her view of what is dramatically acceptable does not accord with that of her husband. This fundamental difference in their views is confirmed by what Stan says in responding to one of Katie’s gestures: ‘Very romantic. You’re not taking part in theatricals now’ (63). Her exercises in personal style and self-fashioning work against the shortcomings and fragmentations of the society in which she has been raised. The more general question that emerges for her is: what am I to do, what course of action to pursue to lead a meaningful life? In Act One, Katie’s energies have sought an outlet by seeking to go to a dance, to celebrate the annual regatta. The time is August and the season connects the dance with the idea of a harvest festival. In the design of the 1994 production at the Peacock, a cornfield was visible outside the door, in a deliberate visual reference to Joe Vanek’s celebrated design for Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa four years earlier. Set not only in the month of August but in the same year as Katie Roche was first produced at the Abbey (1936), the lives of the five women who are central to Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa bear on Deevy’s heroine.18 The 1930s was the period in Ireland when clerical and political opposition to dancing of both the foreign (‘jazz’) and native (‘crossroads’) variety was mounting. By the time Taoiseach Eamon de Valera 153

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came to apotheosise those comely maidens dancing at the crossroads in a speech in 1943, they had ceased as a social reality (dances were now held in scrupulously monitored halls) and become almost entirely symbolic. Amelia opposes Katie going to the dance on the grounds that dancing is neither ‘nice’ nor respectable and that she would not wish it for herself. Despite Katie’s plea to Stan to intervene on her behalf, he backs up his sister in her disapproval, not wanting to see the young woman he is courting make herself cheap or moving outside the strict control of his gaze. Katie’s failure to go to the dance lingers over the rest of the Deevy play as much as that of the Mundy sisters does over Friel’s. In Act Three, Katie asks her young friend Michael into the house for a drink. Like the visits of Patch Darcy to the married Nora Burke in Synge’s play, this is bound to be misunderstood. From Stan’s point of view he must read it as a betrayal of the absolute hold he thinks marriage has conferred on him. But Michael is no less cocky on this score, seeing himself as the romantic male chosen by the disappointed wife. He reads a great deal into her asking him in, while Katie bridles against the assumption that the choices implied by her behaviour amount to no more than a choice between men: Michael What a great fool you were, Kate. Katie (Steps back from him.) Michael Maguire, do you think I regret the thing I done? Michael So what made you call me to come in an’ I passing? . . . Katie I had ever a great love for your music. (54) In reaction to this, Stan’s first move is to remove himself from the house and return to the bachelor life he has enjoyed all his days. When he returns in Act Three to tell Katie he has decided to live with her again, his discovery that Michael has been in the house leads him to tell Katie that he plans on taking her away to a more restrictive life that is the virtual extinction of her person. Deevy’s ending resists the romantic allure of ‘away’ in the plays of Yeats and Synge, just as Lady Gregory had her Grania resist Diarmuid’s proposal that they go to the Land of the Ever-Young in the west. What Katie longs for instead is a life that could be lived in her own native place. There, the elements that have been at war within her, the forces to which she has been subjected by her liminality as a woman in the Ireland of the 1930s, might be integrated. Katie Roche’s final cry before being led offstage is for a home – a dwelling, a place, a country – in which she could live and be herself: 154

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Stan Go and get ready. We’re going at once. We’re not coming back . . . Get all of your things . . . Katie Is it . . . for always? (Silence. Stan goes to the window, stands with his back to her.) I’d like to come back. (Pause.) I’d like to live my life here. (Silence.) I’d like the two of us to live here . . . I think we’re meant for this place. (100–1) In 1938, Katie Roche toured with the Abbey Players to London, Cambridge and New York, as part of a bill comprising Synge and O’Casey. It was to be both the high point of Deevy’s career and the end of her association with Ireland’s National Theatre. When she next submitted a play, Wife to James Whelan, to the Abbey in 1942, Yeats was dead and Ernest Blythe had taken over as managing director in 1941, a position he was to retain for twenty-five years. The notoriously conservative Blythe rejected Deevy’s play and in Cathy Leeney’s words ‘made it clear that the theatre would not welcome further work from her’.19 Wife to James Whelan had to wait until 2010 to receive its first production, at the Mint Theatre in New York, where artistic director Jonathan Bank has been mounting a sustained campaign to present Deevy’s plays at the Mint on an annual basis.20 The play was also produced in London at the Arcola Theatre the following year. It has yet to be produced in Ireland, either at the Abbey Theatre or anywhere else.

Yeats’s Endgame The last ten years of Yeats’s life saw him return to the Abbey main stage as a practising playwright with greater force than at any time since the Playboy riots over twenty years earlier. During the interim, as Chapter 2 showed, he had left most of the practical administration of the theatre to others (Lennox Robinson, Lady Gregory, Northern Irish playwright St John Ervine, etc.) and had functioned mainly as an executive director. During that time, the plays Yeats continued to write had no permanent home, a necessity of which he made a virtue in his experiments with the Japanese Noh theatre, with its scenic minimalism and normal lighting. But Yeats remained anxious and increasingly determined to bring the fruits of his theatrical experiments back to the Abbey stage. He laid the groundwork for this in the previous decade in a number of ways. One was the Dublin Drama League which he and Robinson had co-founded in 1919 and which was running programmes of the more avant-garde plays in contemporary world theatre. The League 155

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staged three of Yeats’s plays: the Irish premiere of At the Hawk’s Well on 31 March 1924 with (touchingly) Frank Fay in the part of the Old Man. This was performed at home in Yeats’s residence in Merrion Square at the same time as O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock was running at the Abbey.21 Then, in May 1926, the Dublin Drama League staged a Yeats double bill at the Abbey itself: The Only Jealousy of Emer, with the artist Norah McGuinness not only designing the masks and costumes but performing one of the key roles; and The Cat and the Moon, Yeats’s comic version of Synge’s The Well of the Saints, with the male couple of a blind man and a lame man seeking out a saint to be cured. Then, in a bold move and a declaration of his intentions, Yeats sought out the young dancer Ninette de Valois, who was to go on to found the Royal Ballet, and invited her back to Ireland (de Valois was Irish-born) to found a School of Dance at the Abbey.22 In 1929 the Abbey staged Fighting the Waves, a prose version of The Only Jealousy of Emer, and brought de Valois onto the Abbey stage, dancing to a score by the contemporary composer George Antheil. The one surviving photograph shows how fully de Valois embodied the woman come from the Otherworld to spirit away the drowned Cuchulain. As Richard Allen Cave puts it, the dancer is shown ‘with arms and head flung back’ in a ‘provocative [stance] with a forwardthrusting pelvis’.23 Yeats wrote of the response to the production: ‘My Fighting the Waves has been my greatest success on the stage since Kathleen-niHoulihan, and its production was a great event here.’24 The presence of de Valois and the powerful effect of seeing his drama once more enacted on the Abbey stage stimulated Yeats into writing a great number of plays during the last ten years of his life. They are arguably his richest in the variety of theatrical styles they draw upon: a version of Christ’s Resurrection (1931) which is Shavian in its dialectical cross-talk; The Words Upon the Window-Pane, staged in 1930, still a ghost drama but in the rare form for Yeats of the naturalism he usually spurned and set in present-day Dublin; his own symboliste version of Wilde’s Salomé in The King of the Great Clock Tower, rewritten a year later as A Full Moon in March; the wildly absurdist The Herne’s Egg; the concentrated tragedy of Purgatory in 1938 and The Death of Cuchulain in 1939, where he submitted the myth of Cuchulain which he had helped create to a searching revision. Some of these plays were staged; some of them were not. In 1938, the young English director Hugh Hunt who worked at the Abbey in the 1930s (he had directed Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche in 1936) went to see Yeats in his Rathfarnam home about The Herne’s Egg and said he doubted whether a play which foregrounded bloodshed, murder, rape and suicide could be staged at the Abbey. Quietly, 156

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Yeats went to his desk, removed a script and handed it to Hunt, saying: ‘Perhaps this will do, instead.’25 So Yeats’s play Purgatory came to be staged at the Abbey in August 1938, in a starkly minimalist style which distilled a lifetime’s experience of theatre into one of his most powerful works. In what was also to be his last appearance on the stage of the theatre he had cofounded, Yeats spoke to the audience afterwards: ‘I wish to say that I have put into this play . . . my own beliefs about this world and the next.’26 This book began with the staging of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen in 1899; it ends with the Abbey’s performance of his Purgatory in 1938. The first drew several notable figures who had yet to make their mark: J.M. Synge, James Joyce and the two Fay brothers. The most significant presence at the second was Samuel Beckett. Beckett, barely known at this stage, had published a book of short stories (which was banned in the Irish Free State) and a novel, Murphy, which appeared in the same year as Purgatory. But there was no indication as yet, and would not be until well after World War II, that he might be a dramatist, let alone one of the most revolutionary and influential of the twentieth century. Beckett had attended several of the Yeats productions at the Abbey in the 1930s and his response was not always positive. In a letter to his friend, poet Thomas McGreevy, in August 1934, Beckett reports that he saw a double bill of The Resurrection and The King of the Great Clock Tower at the Abbey: ‘Balbus building his wall would be more dramatic. And the Valois rolling her uterine areas with conviction.’27 Emilie Morin points out the irony that ‘similar criticisms were directed against [Beckett’s] own plays much later’.28 The publication in 2009 of the first volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters confirmed that he attended the opening night of Purgatory at the Abbey and was at some pains not to miss it. Writing to fellow Irish poet and London publisher George Reavey on 3 August 1938, Beckett spoke with some anticipation of how ‘I hope to be here [in Dublin] for the first night of Yeats’s new play Purgatory next Wednesday week at the Abbey.’29 Only two performances of the play were scheduled, as part of a festival and symposium on theatre at the Abbey organised by Lennox Robinson. There is no direct or immediate response in Beckett’s subsequent correspondence to his attendance at Yeats’s play on 10 August 1938. The profound and long-meditated response was to come more than a decade later in the writing of En Attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot. A Dublin theatre-goer with a taste for the avant-garde who attended Yeats’s Purgatory at the Abbey in 1938 and Samuel Beckett’s first produced play, Waiting for Godot, at the little Pike Theatre seventeen years later would have been struck by the similarity of setting. What they have in common 157

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visually and in terms of design is a bare stage, stripped of representational scenery and with the minimum of props. Beckett’s Godot briefly gives the setting: ‘A country road. A tree. Evening.’30 Purgatory is no less terse: ‘A ruined house and a bare tree in the background.’31 In opting for a bare stage as the ground zero of its operations, the design of Yeats’s and Beckett’s plays acknowledges that we are in a theatre and are gathering for something special, something more akin to a ritual. There is the presence of the single tree, silhouetted against the surrounding bareness. Yeats’s text supplies more design specifics when the Old Man urges his son to ‘study that tree’ (1041) and says that he ‘saw it a year ago stripped bare as now’ (1042). The two tramps in Godot subject their tree to a similar scrutiny as they try to work out what kind of tree it is; the salient and similar point is that it too is stripped of leaves. The Old Man remembers it fifty years before when it was covered with succulent leaves. In Act Two of En Attendant Godot, the tree is now ‘couvert de feuilles’32 which Beckett reduced in his English language translation of the play to ‘the tree has four or five leaves’ (53). In both plays also, the minimal stage properties must be extended to provide a stone large enough for one of the characters to sit on. As the Beckett opens, Estragon is described ‘sitting on a low mound’ (11), struggling to take off his boot; he will sleep there on several later occasions. In Purgatory, the Old Man enjoins his young companion at one point to ‘[s]it there upon that stone’ (1043), though no such prop is specified in the text; again, a proportionally big enough stone will have to be supplied. Into this bare setting step two male characters who travel the roads together. As the younger man complains in Yeats’s opening lines: ‘Hither and thither, day and night,/Hill or hollow, shouldering this pack,/Hearing you talk’ (1041). The Old Man, his father, later describes himself as ‘a pedlar on the roads’ (1045). The two men are tramps, as Vladimir and Estragon are likewise, sleeping in the open, spending the night in ditches, surviving on scraps of food. It is clear that Beckett’s two tramps have suffered some sort of social and financial decline but in characteristic Beckettian fashion no specific details emerge. In Yeats’s play, however, far from being obscured or elided, the class dimension is foregrounded. The Old Man tells a life narrative of how he is the product of a mésalliance between the aristocratic young woman of the Protestant Big House and ‘a groom in a training stable’ (1043) (implicitly a Catholic). The Old Man has continued and accelerated this process of degeneration, as he reveals by identifying his son in brutal language as ‘[a] bastard that a pedlar got/Upon a tinker’s daughter in a ditch’ (1044). Although the terms of ditch, tinker and 158

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tramp are consonant, the tone is about as far as one could get from Synge’s romanticism. In Purgatory, when the two tramps wander on stage, it turns out that the place they have arrived at is not random. They have come to this location for a purpose which one of the two discloses (to the other and to the audience) and which he strives to see accomplished in the course of the play’s action. In the Beckett, the purpose of the two tramps’ waiting is to achieve a rendezvous with the enigmatic Mister Godot. It is Vladimir alone and consistently who insists on the meeting with Godot, even though when pressed for details by Estragon he remains vague. He does finally assert, however, in language with clear metaphysical overtones, that when Godot comes the two tramps will be ‘saved’ (88). Similarly, it is the Old Man in Yeats’s play who is solely responsible for their being there and explains the reason to an uncomprehending and refractory auditor, who insists his companion is mad and argues repeatedly that they should move on. The Old Man believes that the spirits of the souls in Purgatory are doomed to a cyclic recurrence, reliving ‘[t]heir transgressions, and that not once/But many times’ (1042) and that the living can help to release them from their bondage. Such, he believes, is the case with his mother’s spirit and he has arrived on this night, the anniversary of his conception, hoping to intervene and prevent its ever taking place. Any audience unaccustomed to Godot realises at some point during Act Two that it is in large measure formally repeating the experience of the first. The audience, if not Vladimir and Estragon, are spared a third act. But we have come to realise, by the end of the play if not before, that underlying the apparent randomness of Beckett’s drama is an exacting structure of formal repetition and cyclical return. The same is true of Yeats’s Purgatory where the one action the Old Man engages in – an act of vicious slaughter – is not sufficient to break the unrelenting cycle in which the ghost of his mother, he and by implication Ireland are entrapped. As Michael McAteer notes, the Old Man’s failure leaves him ‘perpetually entrapped in the sordid moment of his begetting [and] so anticipates Beckett [in] its combination of stasis and slow decay’.33 Far from bringing this complex drama to a close, as he intended, the Old Man’s act of murdering his son causes the structure of the play to begin to repeat itself: Hoof-beats! Dear God, How quickly it returns – beat – beat –! Her mind cannot hold up that dream. Twice a murderer and all for nothing, 159

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And she must animate that dead night Not once but many times! (1049) The Old Man’s tragic recognition that he and Irish history are caught in an endlessly repeated cycle which acts of violence perpetuate rather than end prompts the anguished cry, half-blasphemy, half-prayer, of Purgatory’s resounding final lines: ‘O God,/Release my mother’s soul from its dream!/ Mankind can do no more. Appease/The misery of the living and the remorse of the dead.’ Similarly, the second recurring appearance of the Boy in Waiting for Godot wrenches a cry for divine mercy from Vladimir, framed by two emphatic silences and pitched between hope and despair: ‘Christ have mercy on us!’ (86) W.B. Yeats died in Rocquebrune in France on 28 January, 1939. He kept writing to the very end, and with no loss of quality. His last poem, ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, imagines his mythic avatar making the transition from life to death and finding himself among the company of ‘[c]onvicted cowards’ who are urged to ‘sing and sing the best we can’.34 His last play, The Death of Cuchulain, brings the same persona into contact, not just with death, but with twentieth-century Ireland and the Easter Rising: ‘What stood in the Post Office/With Pearse and Connolly? . . . Who thought Cuchulain till it seemed/He stood where they had stood?’ (1063). If the poem is concerned with the (im)perfection of the life, the play confronts the profound contribution Yeats and the Abbey Theatre made to the emergence of a culturally confident and independent Ireland, one that deserves to stand beside the achievements of the political struggle. Yeats, Gregory and their fellow workers had seen through endless defections, splits and financial problems to ensure that the Irish National Theatre they had founded would go on. It still does.

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CHAPTER 8 CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Performance and Spectacle in (and out) of Modern Irish Theatre Paige Reynolds The Smock Alley Theatre. The Gaiety Theatre. The Abbey Theatre. The Gate Theatre. The Druid Theatre. The history of Irish drama is often understood as unfolding exclusively in renowned theatre buildings, in architectural spaces expressly intended to house performances. But whether the readings of bardic poetry before ancient kings, or the contemporary site-specific dramas staged in crumbling Georgian mansions or abandoned Magdalene laundries, Irish drama and performance have regularly appeared in surprising venues and manifestations. Theatrical performance traditionally has been understood as the live enactment of a dramatic text, as the staged interpretation of a written script performed in shared space and time by actors for an audience. But scholars have come to recognise that theatrical performance includes other dramatic forms not bound by texts, such as improvisation, guerilla theatre and performance art. In addition, they now regard spectacle, large-scale public events or exhibitions such as sporting competitions, political rallies or street parades as another mode of dramatic performance. Like theatrical performances, spectacles are productions intended for an audience and can be scripted, extemporaneous or a combination of both. Thus, not only dramatic performances in theatres, but also a vast range of other consciously executed live events unfolding in the world around us – such as motor car races, musical concerts, festivals, pageants, religious pilgrimages, funerals, cabarets, poetry readings, dances, circuses and historical re-enactments, among others – are now considered part of the vibrant, multifaceted theatrical topos of the Irish Dramatic Revival.1 Revivalist performance A deliberately capacious term, ‘performance’ describes a vast range of activities and events because, at its root, performance simply demands an

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element of consciousness, an awareness that something is being enacted before someone.2 During the Revival, performance provided a compelling tool in the construction and consolidation of Irish national identity by encouraging all citizens to act out their political and cultural affiliations through gesture, costume and dialogue. It furnished a model of identity widely accessible to the general public. Scholars such as J.L. Austin, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler and Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick have demonstrated the power of utterances to confirm or to reconfigure realities imposed by institutions such as the Church or the state.3 As a discursive strategy, David Lloyd notes, the performative describes ‘a consensual fiction that organises a community and its relations to authority’.4 A useful mechanism to understand state culture in early twentieth-century Ireland, the performative refers not simply to discourse, however. It also describes the widespread public display of culture, the use of the theatrical to introduce, confirm or challenge those ‘consensual fictions’. In this theatrical sense, the performative acknowledges the profound impact of drama and public spectacle on the behaviour of its audiences. During the Revival, performance as an extra-theatrical practice was haunted by the spectre of inauthenticity, by a widespread anxiety about fakery. In his 1892 inaugural address delivered before the National Literary Society, entitled ‘On the Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, Douglas Hyde condemned the Irish who manifested inauthenticity by behaving like ‘West Britons’, by imitating the English while ‘protesting as a matter of sentiment that they hate the country’.5 To stem this type of conduct, Hyde urged the Irish to refuse any behaviour associated with the English and instead to perform their authentic native identity by dressing in Irish-made ensembles, having an Irish surname, reading Irish literature and speaking the Irish language. In this speech, Hyde expressed his confidence that the public enactment of native Irish identity would advance the quest for independence. This position helps to explain why so many of the Revival’s cultural institutions relied on performance to educate individuals in how best to embody and project their Irish identity. For instance, the Gaelic League imagined that traditional musical performance might convey an ‘authentic’ form of Irish music to mitigate corrupting foreign influences. These musical performances might take place at organised Fleadhs, at informal sessions in pubs, or in homes where individuals could sing a ‘party piece’ before an intimate audience of family and acquaintances. Importantly, not everyone believed that ephemeral live performance was the best device to secure native musical 162

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tradition. Edward Martyn commended the 1898 Galway Feis for its ‘good country singing and piping’ and praised the Gaelic League’s Cumann Ceoil for seeking to preserve Irish folk music.6 However, he urged the Gaelic League to advocate for ‘mechanically reproduced’ traditional music and to record performances for the gramophone, rather than rely on ‘our average Irish musicians’ who ‘are the fitting representatives of our half-educated and over-dressed public’.7 The Gaelic League, with its remit to promote and preserve Irish language and culture, also played an important role in popularizing and codifying dance performance during the Revival. As announced in a 1906 letter to the Gaelic League’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, nationalists intended to eradicate ‘baneful, suggestive foreign dances such as the polka, the waltz, the Welsh Dance, the Cat Walk, the Cake Walk and all foreign monstrosities’ and to replace them with Irish step dance and céilí dancing.8 The Gaelic League sponsored mettings throughout the country to teach the distinct steps and formations of these native dances, as well as hosting regular céilís where members could then perform the dances. These performances, which conflated social and theatrical dance, showcased the amateurism that characterized the Gaelic League, as well as its commitment to sociability and performance. They were enormously popular events: the céilís held every Sunday in the Round Room of Dublin’s Mansion House would regularly fill the house with audience members.9 So popular were these events that by 1935, the Public Dance Halls Act was put into place to end outdoor and domestic gatherings for dance – in part to police the sexual behaviours these activities were attributed with incubating. The architects of the Revival also understood the power of sport as performance, and through the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884, they staged competitions of native sport such as hurling, camogie and Gaelic football. Like many other Revivalist organisations, the GAA was imagined as providing native spectacles that might squelch imported culture – in this instance, sports such as cricket and soccer – and thus offer activities ‘for self-respecting Irishmen who have no desire to ape foreign manners or customs’.10 The display of these sporting competitions before passionately engaged enthusiasts helped to secure a feeling of national confidence by celebrating the strength and dexterity of Irish men and women. The playing field became the stage, the players the actors, the cheering spectators the audience. The GAA was, and continues to be, enormously successful in drawing large and diverse audiences to its 163

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many stadiums and fields, thus providing a massive arena to display Irish identity – one much larger, and perhaps more broadly persuasive, than the Abbey Theatre.

The promise of Irish spectacle Public spectacle had played an important role in Irish cultural and political life prior to the Revival. In 1843, for instance, the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell famously organised a series of open-air ‘monster meetings’ to promote the repeal of the Act of Union (1800). A talented orator, O’Connell delivered his speeches before crowds in the tens of thousands, but his oratorical performances were accompanied by other exhibitions that further promoted his political and social agendas. During these meetings, for example, Temperance Bands advocating abstinence from alcohol performed music, costumed monitors carrying long painted sticks ensured the good behaviour of the crowds and members of the nationalist organisation Young Ireland demonstrated martial discipline by marching in formation carrying banners and flags. Also, these meetings were staged at sites communicating the historic potency of the Irish, including Clontarf, where in 1014 the Irish King Brian Boru had defeated the invading Vikings. Thanks in part to these activities, images, and locations super-charged with political meaning, as well as to the large audiences they drew, these events alarmed the British, who repressed the ‘monster meetings’ and arrested O’Connell. Historic political spectacles such as the ‘monster meetings’ demonstrated to the Revivalists the potency, and peril, inherent in large-scale performances. Spectacle might have been a vexed practice for the Revivalists to adopt, due in part to the efficacy of the British in organising triumphalist spectacles to communicate imperial dogma. However, the Revivalists cannily wrested the power of spectacle from the British and deployed it in the interests of Irish nationalism. For instance, when Queen Victoria visited Ireland in April 1900, she sponsored a ‘Children’s Treat’ in the Phoenix Park to generate support for the Boer War.11 In response to this event, a procession of roughly 20,000 children, waving flags and singing patriotic songs, marched to Dublin’s Clonturk Park, where they played Irish games and listened to antiimperial speeches from figures including Maud Gonne. Spectacles such as these were not important simply because they stimulated nationalist sentiment; they also inspired the formation of more 164

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durable institutions. The informal group of women who produced the Irish Patriotic Children’s Treat, for example, resulted in the formation of the nationalist organisation Inghinidhe na hEireann (The Daughters of Ireland).12 This women’s organisation advanced practices including the use of the Irish language and the wearing of Irish garments, as well as engaging in performative behaviours calculated to draw public attention, such as publicly harassing Irishmen who considered enlisting in the British army. Members of Inghinidhe na hEireann were crucial to the early years of the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey, and thus this spectacle played an important role in the establishment of the more traditional forms of Irish theatre. Finally, the various performances of these female activists confirmed their authority in the public sphere. By demonstrating that women’s theatrical display might advance diverse social and political agendas, the Irish Patriotic Children’s Treat set the stage for future activities ranging from the plays, protests and conferences of the Irish suffragists to the American lecture tours of republican women.13 The women protesting against Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars for its representation of the Easter Rebels had noted and honed the invocation of performance and spectacle to achieve political ends. As Lady Gregory observed, ‘These disturbers were almost all women who have made demonstrations on Poppy Day and at elections and meetings; have made a habit of it, the excitement.’14 These women brought the tactics of political street theatre into the Abbey Theatre, turning the stalls into a stage. The interaction between traditional theatre and political spectacle was rife during the Dramatic Revival, and not only in the seemingly ubiquitous theatre riots of this period. Political activists such as James Connolly, Geraldine Cummins and Susanne Day, Maud Gonne, Thomas MacDonagh, Terence MacSwiney and Patrick Pearse wrote, and sometimes performed in, traditional theatrical plays that promoted their political aims. Each of these playwrights was also a central figure in a large-scale political spectacle: Gonne in the Irish Patriotic Children’s Treat, Cummins and Day in Dublin Suffrage Week, Connolly, McDonagh and Pearse in the Easter Rising, MacSwiney in his own hunger strike and funeral during the Anglo-Irish War.

Theatre and spectacle in the Free State As the Dramatic Revival progressed, the power of the theatrical to rivet audiences and to inform political debates became more evident. And in fact, 165

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when the Irish Free State worked to secure its identity following the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, its architects regularly invoked the overtly theatrical tactics of traditional drama in order to convey messages to citizens through large-scale civic events. Of course, not all theatre and spectacle staged during this period had explicitly nationalist aims. National politics did not inspire the Dublin Horse Show at the Royal Dublin Society’s grounds in Ballsbridge, with its annual display of equestrian competitions, or the rodeos imported from America for those seeking a less genteel form of equine entertainment. And performances sometimes ran counter to the Revivalists’ expressed political agenda. For instance, amateur cabarets hosted under the auspices of Madame Bannard Cogley in 1920s Dublin playfully subverted Free State cultural and political authority with their variety format of gutter songs, poetry readings, dance and short plays.15 Elaborate public ceremonies and celebrations were not exclusive to the Free State in the years following partition. In 1935 alone, the city of Belfast witnessed the Silver Jubilee celebrations of George V, the funeral of Lord Edward Carson and the Royal Coronation visit.16 Nonetheless, the Free State was particularly attuned to the role played by spectacle in creating a sense of national identity and belonging. The power of sports to perform Irish identity had been confirmed by the success of the GAA, and was harnessed by the nascent Irish Free State. In 1924, the Cumann na Gaedheal government successfully revived Aonach Tailteann, an ancient Irish festival incorporating native sport and cultural pursuits.17 The Tailteann Games promised spectators sixteen days of pageantry and competitive sport celebrating all things Celtic. Before live audiences, participants competed in a wide variety of Irish and international sports such as hurling and athletics; pastimes including chess, sailing and billiards; and contests in dancing, theatrical performance, literature and crafts. Youthfulness and male virility were key concerns of the Tailteann Games. They promised to recalibrate models of Irish heroism, replacing the corpses of hunger strikers and those lost to violent conflict with the living and striving athletic body. Conveniently, sport sustained the efficacious celebration of self-sacrifice pervading the Irish imagination by asking players to sacrifice to the perceived advantage of group, team and nation, but not at the cost of life. Through sport, the state also provided audiences with a model of bourgeois, metropolitan masculinity in contradistinction to the hyper-masculinity of the physical force movement. An enormous success, the 1924 Games were attended by thousands of people, including the over 20,000 estimated 166

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to have attended both the motorcycle racing and aerial displays at Phoenix Park.18 Importantly, this state-sponsored athletic and cultural spectacle was in dialogue with Dublin theatre and other entertainments that demonstrated the variety of performances, both high and low, available during the Irish Dramatic Revival. The Queen’s Theatre presented Knocknagow or The Homes of Tipperary, a well-attended stage adaptation of the popular novel by Charles J. Kickham that rehearsed familiar tropes of Ireland and the Irish; at the Olympia, Jimmy O’Dea starred in the topical sketch Dublin To-night, which mocked the Games and their courting of foreign tourists; the Abbey offered popular revivals of Synge’s Riders to the Sea, Gregory and Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, and O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman, and the Dublin Drama League staged Luigi Pirandello’s metadrama Henry IV before small, elite audiences. Another compelling instance of the Free State’s use of political spectacle appears in the two Dublin Civic Weeks staged in 1927 and 1929. These events, perhaps taking their cue from the radical shifts in events characterising the variety show, offered participants an astonishing assortment of activities to attend or in which to participate, including lectures, sporting competitions, concerts and dances. As Joan FitzPatrick Dean notes, at the heart of these spectacles were historical pageants.19 During the 1927 Civic Week, spectators were presented with an opening parade through Dublin’s city centre that showcased hundreds of mythic, legendary and historical figures drawn from the Irish past; they were then treated to the ‘Grand Pageant of Dublin History’ in Trinity College Park, where short episodes depicted Irish history from the first century to the 1778 rise of the Irish Volunteers; and a ‘Historical Pageant and Tableaux’ staged at the Mansion House offered songs, musical performances, and tableaux vivants similarly commemorating events from Irish history. The most popular event of both Civic Weeks, as Dean demonstrates, was the military tattoo, in which firework displays boomed and Free State soldiers participated in mass gymnastics, precision drilling, military processions and even dramatic re-enactments in which they performed scenes of Irish martial prowess drawn from the seventeenth century before an audience in the tens of thousands. Less successful than the 1927 inaugural event, the second and final Dublin Civic Week in 1929 nonetheless launched the theatrical careers of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, and their Gate Theatre. In 1929, MacLiammóir staged The Ford of the Hurdles, a historical pageant with a cast of eighty-five that was composed of seven episodes depicting mythic and 167

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historical events including ‘The Rape of Dervogilla’ and the 1916 Easter Rising. This aggressively theatrical form of commemoration represented only myth and historical events prior to the Civil War – no doubt to avoid the friction threatened by public tributes to those lost in the recent conflict between the ‘Republicans’ and ‘Staters’.20

A spectacular case study: the 1932 Eucharistic Congress The Tailteann Games celebrated cultural and athletic talent through its spectacle and Dublin Civic Weeks sought to display and confirm the influential history and martial skills of the Irish. The 1932 Eucharistic Congress turned to religious spectacle to celebrate the moral authority of the Irish before native and international audiences. Catholic religious practice had long provided a potent and durable source of performance and spectacle in Ireland. Whether the ‘stage’ of the pulpit from which the priest spoke or the altar from which mass was delivered, the space and place of the Catholic Church invite comparison to a theatre. More explicitly, the Church harnessed visual spectacle and oral performance to communicate its history and doctrine: Christmas pageants and Passion plays commemorated important religious events, processions organised by the many devotional cults and confraternities in Ireland celebrated religious community; first communions, weddings and funerals marked the formation of individual religious identity. For instance, the masses and funerals held to honour republicans who died on hunger strike during the Anglo-Irish War, such as Thomas Ashe and Terence MacSwiney, were elaborate public ceremonies attended by tens of thousands of mourners. These funerals exposed the deliberate suturing of religious practice with political and cultural intentions, a tactic the republicans had successfully deployed at the 1915 funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. There, at the graveside in Glasnevin Cemetery, Patrick Pearse delivered his famous oration urging the thousands of mourning citizens in attendance to remember and honour the dead Fenian hero by resisting the British. The 31st International Eucharistic Congress, held in Dublin during June 1932, was the largest and most spectacular of the religious events staged during the Dramatic Revival. Eucharistic Congresses are large-scale gatherings that bring together Catholic religious and lay people from across the world for meetings and masses. The Dublin Congress was designed in 168

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part to commemorate the 1,500th anniversary of the arrival of St Patrick in Ireland, and the events of the Eucharistic Congress commandeered the capital city. The Congress began on Monday 20 June, when the Papal Legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri, arrived by ship into Dún Laoghaire harbour escorted by military aeroplanes flying in formation. He was greeted by roughly 50,000 people held in check by Catholic Boy Scouts who helped with crowd control during the week. On Sunday 26 June, the Congress concluded with over a quarter of the population of Ireland, an estimated one million people, attending an open-air mass in Phoenix Park, and then progressing for four miles to O’Connell Bridge, where over half a million people received a blessing from Cardinal Lauri. The Congress was intended to showcase and thus secure the authority and influence of the Irish state, as well as to heal the wounds of the Civil War, by celebrating an Ireland united in its Catholic identity. Hosted by the newly elected Fianna Fáil government, the Congress allowed the President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, who had been excommunicated during the Civil War, to display his fidelity to the Catholic Church.21 The Congress was also intended to soothe sectarian tension. One press report optimistically noted ‘the truly catholic sympathy which citizens of other Churches are extending to Roman Catholic Dublin’s pride in this great event’ and announced that the Congress provided an ‘interlude from politics at a time when political issues are especially grave’.22 However, press reports reveal that loyalists in the North tore down decorations and attacked pilgrims as they returned home from Dublin, suggesting that this event also may have helped to secure and consolidate partition.23 The explicitly theatrical aspects of the Congress were many. The twovolume Book of the Congress, as well as the extensive press coverage of the event, details the elaborate choreography that typified the week. Dublin even staged a dress rehearsal for the Congress in the form of the 1929 Catholic Emancipation Centenary Celebrations. The week’s mass meetings were held in public spaces during the evening, but during the day, smaller Congress meetings made literal the link between this event and the theatre: the Irishlanguage meetings were held in the Theatre Royal, the English-language meetings at the Savoy Theatre. As during the Tailteann Games, the cityscape was elaborately decorated: two ornamental pylons were temporarily erected to mark entrance to the city, where Cardinal Lauri was greeted by the Lord Mayor of Dublin; a large altar and colonnade were erected for masses in Phoenix Park; the Bank of Ireland at College Green, among other buildings, was bedecked with flowers and shrubs; informally erected shrines were 169

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put in place by local residents; and buildings all over the city showcased Papal flags, the Congress flag, and the Tricolour. In the midst of the worldwide Depression, which was attributed with reducing the number of foreign tourists for this event, Dublin attempted to conceal its poverty and decay with ornament. In his account of the Congress, the English writer G.K. Chesterton noted that ‘the slums . . . were the springs’ of a religious adornment that led him to feel ‘born again’ thanks to this ‘supernatural toyshop’.24 The vexed relationship of the Revival to modernity – and, more specifically, of the Dramatic Revival to the stage technologies that detracted from the authenticity and literary nature of drama – has helped to secure a sense, however inaccurate, that the Revival was largely antipathetic to technology. However, the Congress enthusiastically employed the latest gadgets to convey its messages to a broad audience. On the opening night, a skylight projected the word ‘Glorificamus’ into the Dublin evening skies, and the public address system used during the Congress was the largest in the world at that time. Each day, forthcoming events were announced in six different languages by loudspeaker, and masses were similarly broadcast throughout the city. As a result, Rory O’Dwyer writes, ‘Dublin became a virtual open-air Cathedral, as the entire Mass was broadcast to many throughout the city who, it was noted, could be seen giving all the necessary responses.’25 There, on the streets of Dublin, citizens could perform their faith and fidelity. The Congress was also broadcast across the island by the new Irish radio station, which eventually morphed into Radio Éireann and then RTÉ. During the Congress, however, technology did not isolate citizens: large crowds still gathered together in venues throughout Ireland and Northern Ireland to listen together to the broadcast of the final High Mass. The Eucharistic Congress did effectively capture international attention, however briefly. Like other large-scale spectacles staged after independence, it had been imagined as a tourist attraction bringing ‘visitors to Ireland from every part of the world’.26 Ireland was flooded with international pilgrims and priests, including a Native American training for the priesthood whose ceremonial tribal headdress fascinated the public. The Congress also demonstrated Ireland’s ‘theoretical unity’, as G.K. Chesterton described it. He asserted: ‘There has never been a modern mass meeting, of anything like this size, that passed off so smoothly, or with so few miscalculations or misfortunes.’27 On NBC Radio, Cardinal William O’Connell described the Congress for his American listeners: 170

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The sight of such a gathering was an inspiration. The hundreds of thousands kneeling with heads bowed, as the Sacred Host was raised in benediction above them, was a scene never to be forgotten by those who beheld it . . . Here indeed was exemplified the unity of Christ’s Church, for the thought and the sentiment and the faith and the devotion was the same in the hearts and the consciences of all these representatives of the various nations and races that inhabit the broad earth – here assembled in one hope, one faith, one love.28 Ireland, it seems, had through the 1932 Eucharistic Congress effectively performed its Catholic identity for the international public.

Conclusion In her study of contemporary performance in Ireland, Christie Fox claims that ‘the long tradition of Irish theatre is literary, text-bound, and privileges the author’.29 She, like Anna McMullan and Bernadette Sweeney, contends that late twentieth-century Irish theatre represents ‘a new type of Irish theatre in direct opposition to this tradition . . . [by offering productions that] de-privileged text and emphasised physical performance’.30 In these valuable studies, these critics ask that we regard drama not merely as a literary text and instead attend closely to its performance contexts. However, the transition from text to physical performance in contemporary Irish theatre seems less novel and surprising when we embrace a more capacious sense of the place and occasion for Irish theatre, as well as taking into account the copious manifestations of Irish performance. In fact, Irish theatre and performance have historically taken place not only in famous theatre buildings – beginning the moment the lights dim, the curtain rises and the actors begin performing the script – but also in the streets, in parlours, in graveyards, in classrooms and in any site where consciously performed behaviours unfold before attentive audiences. In this light, we can come to understand that Irish performance has always been free of the literary text, attentive to theatrical contexts – and astonishingly influential in the daily lives of Irish citizens.

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The years of Synge: the cultural debates P.J. Mathews The Irish Dramatic Revival could not have occurred without the emergence of an extraordinary generation of gifted and ambitious playwrights including W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey. Crucial, too, was the input of insightful directors and actors such as Willie Fay and the Allgood sisters, Sara and Molly. However, context is crucial, and it is conceivable that this nascent theatre experiment would not have gained traction had it not taken place during a time of momentous social, cultural and political upheaval in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth and during the early decades of the twentieth century. All too often, this period is misunderstood as one characterised by an indulgence in the past achievements of Celtic Ireland and an unhealthy fixation with the retrieval of dying rural folk practices. It is important to remember, however, that most of the protagonists of the Irish Dramatic Revival were deeply informed by the cultural and political debates of their own historical moment, and, in turn, made many significant interventions in the cultural disputes of the period. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy aspects of this moment in Irish history is the degree to which political discussion intruded into the aesthetic realm, and vice versa. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the least private of all the literary arts – the theatre. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many key theatrical performances of the time would engender vigorous debates and controversies, and in one instance, a full-scale riot. Nothing better encapsulates the particular dynamics of Irish culture at this time than the drama of J.M. Synge and the visceral responses it generated. Like many of the leading Dublin playwrights, Synge was born into the privileged world of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendency but came of age at a time of rapid decline for his own class. Born in 1871, Synge lived through the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell, the great nationalist campaigner for Home Rule, and witnessed the transformative role he played in Irish politics. Two decades later Parnell was dead, his memory enduring as a source of division rather than unity among Irish nationalists. In many respects the dark, gothic note so evident in Synge’s greatest plays has its origins in the exhaustion, bleakness and trauma of post-Parnell Ireland. Decades of agrarian struggle and nationalist agitation had ended in bitter disappointment with the failure to secure Home Rule, and no alternative strategy to solve Ireland’s problems had yet emerged. It is not surprising, therefore, that 172

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Synge’s plays should seek to expose a deep paralysis at work in Irish life. In the domestic incarceration of Nora Burke in Shadow of the Glen, the stagnant rhythms of Aran life in Riders to the Sea and the moribund social dynamics of Playboy of the Western World, Synge dramatises a wider national condition which pertained in that bleak interregnum in Irish nationalism between the death of Parnell and the emergence of the revolutionary generation of 1916. Yet, as Synge was delivering his critique of a jaded and depleted Ireland, signs were beginning to emerge of new initiatives to address the crisis. For the most part these initiatives were locally organised across the country to tackle both the material and the cultural problems of the day but, crucially, all were committed to the notion of ‘self-help’ – the idea that Irish problems could only be solved by the collective will of the Irish people rather than at the behest of parliament in Westminster. New initiatives such as the Gaelic League and the movement for agricultural cooperation led by Horace Plunkett mobilised thousands of people across Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century. One can detect in these burgeoning grassroots movements a greater level of commitment to local action as well as a growing sense of grievance in the face of British colonial rule in Ireland. Events such as the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 also had the effect of sharpening Irish opposition to British foreign policy as separatist Irish nationalists began to formulate independent attitudes to the South African War and to oppose British army recruitment campaigns in Ireland. By 1905 a new separatist political party encouraged by the stirrings at grassroots level was founded to take self-help politics to a new level. Sinn Féin, which in translation means ‘by ourselves’, would advocate the withdrawal of Irish politicians from Westminster and the setting up of a new sovereign Irish parliament in Dublin. It is not a surprise, therefore, that the ‘years of Synge’ (from the time of his early literary experiments in the mid-1890s until his death in 1909) should witness a great deal of political and cultural debate and upheaval as various interest groups and political movements emerged to agitate for alternatives to British colonial rule in Ireland. Paradoxically, what characterised cultural and political debate during these years was the significant degree of uncertainty and lack of consensus surrounding the nature of Irish identity, as various parties, movements and factions competed to promote their distinct visions of Irish destiny to the people of Ireland. In James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, famously brings the narrative to a close with 173

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his declared intention to ‘forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’.1 Yet it was on the stage of the Abbey Theatre that the uncreated lineaments of Irish identity were publicly fashioned, often in controversial circumstances in the early years of that theatre experiment. One should not underestimate the purchase of theatre on public discourse before the emergence of radio and film as popular media. This fact, coupled with the extraordinary rise of the Irish nationalist press at the beginning of the twentieth century, meant that the details of theatre productions were widely mediated nationally, well beyond the numbers who actually attended live performances. By consciously setting itself up as the national theatre, the Irish Literary Theatre (founded by W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn in 1897, with its first performances in 1899), later to become the Abbey Theatre, positioned itself as a pivotal arena for the fashioning of Irish national identity. Thanks to the depth of newspaper coverage garnered by theatre in general, every detail of this new initiative – aims and objectives, forthcoming productions, reviews and controversies – was relayed to hundreds of thousands of readers across the country, many of whom would never darken the door of the self-styled national theatre. In many significant ways the new national theatre venture was in alignment with other self-help initiatives. During the late Victorian period mainstream commercial theatres in Ireland relied on touring British companies to fill their programmes. The Irish Literary Theatre, however, was adamant in its resolve to provide a forum in which Irish actors would perform plays written by Irish playwrights. Despite the ad hoc nature of its early productions the aim was to produce plays that would be artistically ambitious, in opposition to the offerings of the commercial theatre that catered to popular taste. In this regard, the fledgling Irish national theatre can be seen as part of a wider modernist recoil from the triviality of popular culture across Europe as writers, artists and intellectuals began to draw sharper distinctions between high art and popular culture. One of the major ideas informing the early national theatre was the belief that the most important constituent element of Irish identity was a salient Celticism. According to this view, what distinguished the Irish people was their lack of engagement with the processes of industrial capitalism that had transformed British culture since the Industrial Revolution. Yeats, in particular, was drawn to the idea that Ireland had escaped the worst excesses of nineteenth-century utilitarianism and that Irish people still remained meaningfully connected to an ancient folk imagination that was predominantly oral in expression. In this respect he consciously worked 174

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against the influence of nineteenth-century liberals, such as Jeremy Bentham, who celebrated the rise of the newspapers as a triumph of reason over superstition. Writing of the de-mythologising power of the press, Bentham contended that ‘. . . before this talisman [the newspaper], not only devils but ghosts, vampires, witches and all their kindred tribes are driven out of the land, never to return again, for the touch of holy water is not as intolerable to them as the bare smell of printer’s ink’.2 It is not hard to see, therefore, how Yeats would come to associate journalism with a sterile modern world closed off to the wild mysteries of the imagination. These views had a profound influence on Yeats’s dramaturgy which was also informed by a clear hostility to popular forms, such as melodrama and music hall, much beloved by the commercial theatres. He hated what he regarded as the cheap trickery of the popular theatre and sought instead to promote an Irish drama that would be more contemplative and poetic. Such an approach, argued Yeats, would suit the Celtic temperament, which was open to the influence of an ancient spiritual world in ways that the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon mind was not. His focus on the ancient Celtic past also allowed him to bypass the contentious legacy of the Reformation in Ireland and the colonial acrimony that followed it. Since there are no Catholics and Protestants in Celtic Ireland, his investment in the pre-Christian world allowed him a means to express his indigeneity notwithstanding his own Anglo-Irish cultural heritage. Accordingly, Irishness for Yeats was best expressed in the great Celtic imaginative inheritance rather than in an affiliation to a particular language or religion. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Yeats’s Celticism, very much in evidence in landmark plays such as The Countess Cathleen and On Baile’s Strand, was not universally admired. The Catholic prelate Cardinal Logue was quick to attack The Countess Cathleen because of its contravention of orthodox Catholic theology and Frank Hugh O’Donnell criticised it for its representation of the Irish peasantry as ‘an impious and renegade people, crouched in degraded awe before demons, and goblins, and sprites ’ .3 To an advancing, bourgeois, Catholic class, the idea of an anti-modern Celtic Ireland was repugnant. As the Irish Ireland campaigner D.P. Moran put it, the ‘Celtic note’ represented ‘one of the most glaring frauds that the credulous Irish people ever swallowed’.4 Furthermore, one of Dublin’s foremost literary critics, John Eglinton, condemned Yeats’s anti-realist mythologising for not providing a solid basis for a new Irish literary enterprise. These legends, he argued, ‘refuse to be taken up out of their old environment and be transplanted into the world of modern sympathies’.5 175

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Many, though by no means all, of the critics of Yeats’s Celticism were doctrinaire Catholics who were threatened by what they perceived to be an attempt by Anglo-Irish figures such as Yeats and Lady Gregory to dislodge the central influence of the Catholic religion in Irish life. Catholic nationalists such as Edward Martyn believed firmly that Ireland’s historical struggle was against the coercive imposition of the Protestant religion through British colonial rule in Ireland. In this version of the national story the majority of the Irish people were configured as resolutely Catholic, having withstood pressures to jettison their religion since the time of the Reformation and suffered discrimination and marginalisation as a result of their steadfast adherence to their faith. This constituency looked to the example of Daniel O’Connell, the architect of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, as the great heroic figure of the nineteenth century. Catholic nationalists looked to their pastors for guidance not just in relation to moral issues but also regarding aesthetic matters. For this reason it was not uncommon to find Catholic clergy commenting on the latest theatre productions. Given the deep involvement of high profile Anglo-Irish figures in the early theatre movement it is not surprising that the new theatre should arouse suspicions among resolute Catholics. Furthermore, many were distrustful of what they considered to be the newfound interest in Irish peasant folk practices informing many of the new plays. One of the strange ironies of the Irish Revival is that at the very moment that Ascendancy writers and antiquarians became interested in recording and preserving the folklore of rural Ireland, Catholic interests were busy erasing what they considered to be embarrassing traces of a primitive peasant culture. Much of this cultural purging took place under the guise of the Devotional Revolution – a nationwide campaign to eradicate primitive and local forms of Catholic devotion associated with holy wells, local saints and ancient superstitions. Central to this endeavour was a clear attempt to refashion Catholicism as a respectable and modern religion with a standardisation of practices across the country. Much of the resistance to the work of Synge arose from the fear that his plays were heavily invested in unearthing the superstitions and local beliefs that Church authorities were so eager to discourage. By making a conscious decision to give voice to the robust and carnivalesque folk culture that he encountered during his travels around Ireland, Synge put himself at odds with a newly gentrified and selfaggrandising Catholicism. Throughout Synge’s plays one can detect a clear attempt to de-centre the authority of reforming priests and bishops. In most cases this is achieved by 176

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confining the clergy to off-stage roles. In Riders to the Sea the words of the young priest are exposed as platitudinous, empty consolations to a community more in touch with the deeper emotions of pagan Ireland. Synge’s most famous priest, Father Reilly in Playboy of the Western World, exercises a more prevalent authority in that play (despite his non-appearance on stage) but is clearly aligned both with an oppressive moral agenda and with the sectional interests of the advancing classes of publicans and strong farmers. It is The Well of the Saints, however, that most overtly critiques the reforming zeal of the Catholic Church. In the refusal of the blind vagrant couple, Martin and Mary Doul, to accept the healing intervention of the Saint, Synge celebrates the right of the dissident to opt out of the reforming agendas of the moral majority. Synge’s persistent attempts to undermine the Romanisation of Ireland and to expose the bourgeois pretensions of an upwardly mobile Catholicism lies behind much of the hostility to his plays and, undoubtedly, was a key factor motivating the disturbances during the opening productions of Shadow of the Glen and Playboy of the Western World. Much of the controversy generated by the early productions of the Abbey Theatre movement was created by the clash of competing ideas over what constituted the essence of Irish identity. Undoubtedly, advocates of Celticism were attacked by those advancing a more orthodox Catholicism. There were other forces in Irish life, however, who were wedded to the idea of a languagebased idea of national identity. According to this view, the cultural integrity of Ireland resided in the Irish language, which had produced one of Europe’s earliest literatures. As a result, the restoration of the Irish language as the spoken vernacular of the nation was considered central to the project of national revival. Crucial to the emergence of this idea was the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893 by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill. This organisation was founded as a response to the drastic decline in the number of Irish language speakers by the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike previous Irish language organisations that tended to be antiquarian in focus, the Gaelic League was motivated to restore Irish as a spoken language. The League set about achieving its aims with a two-pronged approach to the language revival. In the first instance it worked at local level to establish branches across the country, providing language classes and generally encouraging interest in the language. Secondly, the Gaelic League sought to increase the influence of the Irish language on national cultural debate, most obviously in the pages of the organisation’s newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light) which was edited by Padraic Pearse. 177

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Gaelic League personnel also defended the language against high profile attempts to discredit it. In 1899 two prominent academics from Trinity College Dublin, Robert Atkinson and John Pentland Mahaffy, attempted to undermine the Irish language by describing it in a public forum as a mere patois which had no place in the Irish educational system. The Gaelic League president, Douglas Hyde, who also happened to be an Anglican clergyman, vigorously defended the language against these claims. In doing so, Hyde demonstrated that Irish cultural debate could not be easily characterised as an ethnic ‘battle of two civilisations’ between Anglo-Ireland and Irish Ireland. Yet this did not allay the fears of a young Padraic Pearse who worried that the new theatre movement led by Yeats and Gregory would further weaken the status of the Irish language. Writing in An Claidheamh Soluis in the wake of the first performance of Yeats’s Countess Cathleen, Pearse expressed the view that: The ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre is . . . more dangerous, because less glaringly anti-national than Trinity College. If we once admit the Irish literature in English idea, then the language movement is a mistake. Mr. Yeats’ precious ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre may, if it develops, give the Gaelic League more trouble than the Atkinson-Mahaffy combination. Let us strangle it at its birth.6 In time Pearse would moderate his thinking and embrace the idea of an Irish literature in the English language. These early views, however, did express a belief among some of the more conservative elements within the Gaelic League that the Irish language should be the sole lingua franca of the national theatre. As it turned out, the Irish Literary Theatre was more supportive of the Irish language than Pearse anticipated. Lady Gregory, an Irish language scholar of some note, and George Moore, a vocal supporter of the language, were keen to feature plays in Irish as part of the theatre’s programme. As a result the theatre mounted the first ever professional production of a drama in the Irish language during its 1901 season. Casadh an tSugáin (The Twisting of the Rope) written by Douglas Hyde was performed by Irish-speaking actors, with Hyde himself taking the lead role. Although the play was enthusiastically received by audiences and reviewers, Irish language drama would remain marginal for most of the Revival period. In truth, the Gaelic League was hugely successful in revising attitudes and generating goodwill towards the Irish language but it did not generate the critical mass of Irish speakers necessary to sustain a vigorous theatre in the native language. 178

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It is conceivable, however, that Synge could have improved the fortunes of Irish language theatre had he chosen to write in that medium.7 He was a highly competent Irish speaker with an extensive knowledge of Gaelic literature and folklore, and a highly skilled dramatist in the making. Yet he was also one of the first commentators to highlight the contradiction between the Gaelic Leaguers’ deep enthusiasm for Irish and their lack of proficiency in it. Synge was very aware of the huge symbolic importance of reclaiming and celebrating the ancient tongue, and was hugely supportive of moves to retain the language in areas where it was still spoken. He was, however, sceptical of coercive attempts to restore Irish to pre-colonial levels of fluency among a population that had become largely English-speaking. This may explain why he chose to write his plays in English and to infuse them with the idioms and syntax of the Irish language. This pivotal decision to base his dramatic art on the vitality of Hiberno-English dialect was due in no short measure to his realisation early in his writing career that ‘the linguistic atmosphere of Ireland has become definitely English enough, for the first time, to allow work to be done in English that is perfectly Irish in its essence, yet has sureness and purity of form’.8 As we have seen, much of the debate surrounding the drama of the Irish Revival sought to redefine the Irish claim for national distinctiveness variously in terms of a Celtic imaginary, the Catholic religion and the Irish language. However, the influence of a fourth strand – political ideology – should not be underestimated. In a decolonising context such as that which pertained in Ireland at the start of the twentieth century, all cultural production was infused with political resonance. In this cauldron of contest and agitation, however, there was considerable pressure on the national theatre to stage plays with overtly political intentions. Not surprisingly the weight of the Irish republican tradition would be brought to bear on a number of formative productions during this time. In this regard the work of Lady Gregory is crucially important. In a collaboration with W.B. Yeats she produced the most influential republican allegory of the period, Cathleen Ni Houlihan. This play recalls the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 and blends notions of Fenian revolution and self-sacrifice with Celtic otherworldliness. The play was hugely successful when first staged in 1902 and did much to win favour for the new theatre initiative among supporters of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Lady Gregory’s short plays have long been under-appreciated by critics, who have often regarded them as slight, supporting pieces for the weightier drama of Yeats and Synge. However, such offhand appraisals miss out on the radical politics at work in plays such as 179

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Spreading the News (1904), The Gaol Gate (1906) and The Rising of the Moon (1907), which were hugely popular throughout the Revival period. All of these plays draw on the then recent cultural experience of nationalist political agitation, and tap into the rebel consciousness of Fenian Ireland. Repeatedly they focus attention on the coercive nature of colonial policing and the arbitrary application of British justice in Ireland. Fenian themes also informed plays such as The Saxon Shillin’ by Padraic Colum, which carried a strong anti-recruitment message. For the most part, however, Yeats was discouraging of plays written for what he regarded as propagandistic ends. Nonetheless, the high-minded aestheticism of Yeats did not go unchallenged and was loudly critiqued by the more politically engaged activists and commentators. Writing in 1898, the socialist leader James Connolly drew attention to the harsh realities of working-class life, which often militated against mass engagement in cultural affairs. ‘To the majority of our workers,’ wrote Connolly, ‘the most priceless manuscript of ancient Celtic lore would hold but a secondary place in their esteem beside a rasher of bacon.’9 Yet socialists knew very well the potent force that theatre could exercise on public opinion. Although he attended the Abbey Theatre, Connolly did not contribute to the enterprise as a playwright. Instead he was more likely to involve himself in ‘street theatre’ in the form of orchestrated protests to advance his class-based analysis of the Irish question. In 1897, for example, he staged a demonstration against Queen Victoria’s Royal Jubilee celebrations in Dublin by pushing a coffin emblazoned with the words ‘British Empire’ into the River Liffey. In so doing he highlighted the disproportionate burden of military casualties borne by the working classes in the name of British imperialism. Connolly did contribute a play set during the Fenian Rebellion of 1867, Under Which Flag, to the Irish Workers’ Dramatic Company; it was performed in Liberty Hall on 26 March 1916, a mere three weeks before the Easter Rising. However, it was his fellow socialist, Fred Ryan, who made a more significant contribution to the experimental years of the early Abbey Theatre movement. Ryan’s play The Laying of the Foundations (1902) carried the heavy imprint of his socialist ideas in its concern to unmask the corruption of municipal politics. As one of the first Irish plays to shift the action from a rural to an urban locale it remains of historical importance. It is notable, too, for performing an important stylistic turn away from the poetic drama of Yeats to embrace the logical argumentation of the ‘problem play’ beloved of Ibsen and Shaw. Although its overt didacticism detracts considerably from its artistic merit it does endure as an important forerunner to the drama of Sean O’Casey. 180

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It is important to recall that, despite the intensity of external critique that was levelled at the new theatre movement, a significant degree of internal conflict was also in evidence. One of the major sources of tension was the recurring question of whether the movement should embrace the contemplative modes of poetic drama or the more materialist ideas of an Ibsen-inspired realism. In many ways these anxieties would be resolved in the revolutionary dramatic methods of J.M. Synge. He was intensely aware of the limitations of the cold logic of realist drama. ‘We should not go to the theatre,’ wrote Synge, ‘as we go to a chemist’s, or a dram-shop, but as we go to a dinner, where the food we need is taken with pleasure and excitement.’10 Yet he was also conscious of the pitfalls of creating drama that was utterly divorced from the realities and lived experiences of his audience. Synge’s genius resides in his ability to accommodate both of these elements – realism and poetry – in his ground-breaking dramatic method. He memorably summed up his thinking on these matters in his famous remark in the preface to the Playboy of the Western World that ‘on stage one must have reality, and one must have joy’.11 Likewise, Synge managed to reconcile his own revolutionary thinking with a deep distrust of propaganda in art. Significantly, the radical impulses dramatised in his plays are rarely expressed in conventional political terms. Indeed, major historical events and political figures are surprisingly, if deliberately, absent from his work.12 Instead he is much more concerned to explore power relations at individual and local level by concentrating on the details of the material and cultural poverty of life among the most marginalised of people in remote rural Ireland. Yet the real power of Synge’s drama lies in the ability of his central characters to diagnose the causes of their own impoverished states and to exuberantly overcome them. Undoubtedly his work performed a vital role in Ireland’s decolonisation by undermining the colonial forces working to empty Irish culture of any intrinsic value. However, he also dared to question the outlandishly utopian claims promoted by conservative elements within Irish cultural nationalism. Reflecting on the tendency in Dublin cultural circles to idealise rural Ireland as the home of a robust and virtuous peasantry, Synge sought to offer a more balanced assessment: Even among the old people whose singular charm I have tried to interpret, . . . it is possible to find many individuals who are far from admirable either in body or mind. One would hardly stop to assert a fact so obvious if it had not become the fashion in Dublin, quite 181

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recently, to reject a fundamental doctrine of theology, and to exalt the Irish peasant into a type of almost absolute virtue, frugal, selfsacrificing, valiant, and I know not what. There is some truth in this estimate, yet it is safer to hold with the theologians that, even west of the Shannon, the heart of man is not spotless, for though the Irish peasant has many beautiful virtues, it is idle to assert that he is totally unacquainted with the deadly sins, and many minor rogueries.13 Just like his greatest character, Christy Mahon, Synge believed that it was a great mistake to believe the appraisals of one’s flatterers as well as one’s oppressors. For this reason and because of the deeply hostile reaction it engendered, the Playboy of the Western World endures as one of the greatest works of Irish iconoclasm.

Interview: Ghosts and the Uncanny in Irish Drama Playwright Conor McPherson, in conversation with Anthony Roche Anthony Roche: Shakespeare’s Hamlet has a ghost, who kicks off the opening scene and makes two appearances in the play. And there’s not much more in English drama after that. You get a bit in the Renaissance period; a ghost will pop up in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, for instance. But once you get to the Restoration comedies, which are very bourgeoisified, it’s kind of gone. Yet it seems to me, at any rate, that ghosts and the uncanny have a persistence in Irish theatre. Clearly, they weren’t a feature of the kitchen comedies that featured regularly at the Abbey. Nevertheless, in works we value, ghosts and the uncanny do seem to persist as a serious concern whereas, in a modern English play like Coward’s Blithe Spirit, it seems to me more comic. So could you respond to that? Conor McPherson: The English and Irish thing? AR: Yes. CMcP: It’s very obvious. I’ve noticed it over the years, and in all of my time writing plays, and working in London a lot, seeing the work there and seeing my work there. I’ve always said that the difference between English drama and Irish drama, in my lifetime anyway, is what I call the vertical and the horizontal. I think that English drama is horizontal, in that it’s a person on the flat of the earth, looking around that plane, asking: how do I deal with the other people on that plane, and how do 182

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we organise ourselves to deal with each other? And I think Irish drama is vertical, in that it’s a person standing on the earth. But the concern is all going way up into the sky, and way down into the earth. There’s very little concern, usually, with the organisation of people on the same plane. The difference is the axis. And that’s the reason, I think, for the soulfulness that comes into Irish drama, and the connectedness to the dead, and to God. Then, in British drama, you will get a play by David Hare, for instance, and maybe a lifetime of plays by David Hare, for instance, which are all about the horizontal and never really about the vertical. There’s very little concern with the human soul but definitely a huge concern with human society. Then you look at someone like Tom Murphy. What are his plays about, even? It’s often very difficult to say, but that’s what’s amazing about them, because – what’s life about? You can’t answer that one! So you have the glorious mess of Tom Murphy’s wonderful explosion of artistry, say, compared to someone of similar vintage, like David Hare, where there’s such a quest for organisation, the question of how do we organise. And Murphy’s going in the other direction, he’s going down into the earth. The funny thing is, we’re so close to each other geographically: that’s the interesting part. And yet the psyches are hugely different. Even then, if you look at the North of Ireland and the conflict over the years, I mean why has it sustained so much? You’d have to say that the fundamental cultural difference is so deep between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celtic that, when you force them together, they’re like oil and water. But when there’s enough difference we can celebrate each other, make fun of each other, get on with each other. My career definitely is owed completely to their acceptance of my work. As is Billy Roche’s career. And they love Brian Friel, they love Sebastian Barry, they love all that stuff. But then the question is: what creates that difference? I’ve a stupid little theory which is purely to do with geography. In Ireland, for as long as we’ve been here and wherever Irish people came from – some people say we came from Spain – but on this island, looking west, was the great beyond. In England, they looked west, there was Ireland; they looked east, there was Europe; North was the Vikings: South was the Spaniards. They were surrounded by people. We had people that were coming and going and kicking our ass; but out in the great beyond of the west was just this infinite nothing. I think there’s something very sophisticated in the Irish psyche which is longing to get into the 183

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beyond and understand our situation in a more cosmic context, which I think is different in the Anglo-Saxon mind. I think they’re in the here and now and that enables them to conquer people; it enables them to go and do what they need to do and get what they need to get, whereas I think the dreamier culture is going to get its ass kicked. But hopefully something longer endures. Anyway, that’s my tuppence worth on the ghosts. AR: That leads nicely to Synge. I want to start with his book about the Aran Islands. You and I are living on the east coast, looking at the sea, and it’s very important for me to live by the sea. But if you go west in Ireland like Synge – he wasn’t the only one to go but he hit pay dirt, he hit gold like nobody’s hit gold before or since when he went to the Aran Islands and wrote that book. I think it’s an extraordinary book. At one level it’s prose; it’s a kind of autobiography; it’s a kind of anthropology. People say it’s the source of his plays; and it is. But what interests me is not only did he find a lot of the stories that he used in his subsequent plays but he actually found the form. Because I think that, when he went there, the people he sought out more than any were the storytellers; and what he records mainly is not personal but the stories. He focuses on the people who come into the cottage, storytellers like old Mourteen, and telling a story. You get the story in around two pages, finishing with the words ‘that is my story’. A lot of those stories have to do with the return of the dead; but you also get the audience, you get them responding. It struck me in thinking about this, and in thinking about your play The Weir, for example, that what you have in your play is a very similar structure. Because you have these people telling their stories – the only female character Valerie is the outsider in that play, if you like. It’s not unlike the situation in Synge’s Aran Islands. Irish drama is not necessarily metropolitan. I think it comes from a very primal storytelling source; and that was what Synge found more than anything. CMcP: I think it’s a very common experience, one I know and understand. I share that experience a little bit. I think with him it was that he was a more elemental outsider because he was a Protestant, as was Yeats and as was Oscar Wilde. There’s something about that slight otherness that will propel them further into the question: what am I? If I’m Irish, and I want to be Irish, I feel marginalised. What is it? What is it to be Irish? They need to touch that stone more perhaps than a Catholic in Dublin needs to. So I think that’s interesting. I know it 184

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from my own experience of just going down the country, visiting my grandfather when I was a kid in Leitrim. He had retired to there, to a house which his wife grew up in. She had died and he had worked as a prison officer. He was from Portlaoise originally. But the house he lived in in Dublin was owned by the prison. When he retired he had to go somewhere. She died and he ended up in this house in the middle of nowhere. And I would go and visit him there when I was a teenager. But he was from the country; he understood and liked living there. He would tell me those stories. The funny thing about folklore, just what I’ve come to realise about it is fascinating, is that people like that don’t see the folklore as stories. They see it as real. They’re passing on something that somebody just told them. That’s what it is. They’re not trying to entertain you, to fabricate or invent something. They’re actually just passing something on; it’s a conversation that they had with somebody. There’s a story in The Weir, the first ghost story in the play, that was told to me by my grandfather. That happened to his mother, about hearing knocking on their door and the fairy road and all this kind of stuff and the priest coming and blessing the house. But it was just like a guy telling you there was a fire in our house. It was just real ordinary stuff. Obviously, over time, the darkness has receded and we have electric light and we’re all modern people. It’s a pity, in a sense. I don’t know. I don’t think it goes away. We’re superstitious animals today. AR: It’s very interesting, in Synge’s Riders to the Sea, because the old woman Maurya totally believes in all of that, that she has seen her dead son. And the daughters are much more sceptical, and they say: ‘Well, mother, you haven’t, we have the physical remains, he was drowned,’ and so on. But when Maurya comes back and says she has seen her dead son, the old belief system is still there and it’s kicking in. One of the things in the play I’m interested in, and again I would relate it to your plays, is whether you show the dead person or not. In other words, Synge could have had somebody walk in and be the dead son. There’s a lot of doubling going on there, anyway. And he finally decides that Maurya’s going to go outside, she’s going to have this vision, and she’s going to come back in and talk about it. Is that an issue for you, when you’re dealing with ghosts in your plays, as to whether you’re going to keep it verbal? In a monologue play, you have to. CMcP: I suppose it’s essentially what is the most effective way of getting a response in the audience. Sometimes it’s better not to show it to them 185

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and sometimes you just want to do it. It’s what feels right, I suppose. A lot of the process of writing a play is unconscious. What feels right one day may not feel right if you wrote that play a year later. You may, a year later, decide you shouldn’t see anything, you know. So it’s a difficult question to answer, really. I probably have no problem with trying to get away with as much as I can. But the only way to do that is to do as little as possible, that’s the funny thing. It’s just a glimpse of something. AR: Yeah, just leave it as a glimpse. I mean, in Shining City, there’s a great discussion about ghosts between the two main characters John and Ian towards the end of the play. Ian says ‘No ghosts,’ we’re not having ghosts, ‘it’s how it makes you feel,’ that’s the reality. And then Ian goes on to admit that ‘there was a time I would have given anything to see one. Just to know there was something else . . . besides all the . . . you know . . . the pain and the confusion. Just something that gave everything . . . some meaning, you know? I’m talking about God, really, you know? To which John replies, in my favorite line in the play, ‘I know, where [is] he?’1 So there’s that discussion, and then there’s what happens at the end. Could you talk a little bit about that? CMcP: Well, I mean, that’s the whole question right there. What is all this, what is it? It’s that simple and that complicated. It’s lovely to get to a point in a play where you can almost have someone, just in a very simple and inarticulate way, just kind of say it, which is great. Perhaps even it passes over the audience’s head and it just seems like a bit of small talk. But that’s the way to do it, just to throw it, to toss it away. And then to make everything seem like it’s all okay. And then to slam the audience with that final image: ‘In the darkening gloom of the afternoon, we see that Mari’s ghost has appeared behind the door. She is looking at Ian, just as John described her; she wears her red coat, which is filthy, her hair is wet. She looks beaten up. She looks terrifying . . . [Ian] seems to sense something and turns. Lights down.’2 I think the great thing about the theatre is that it’s such a liminal space. You can trick the audience into that very, very childlike place and play with them. And if you can get it to that place where, with Shining City, the gasps that always erupted at the very end of the play, when people literally saw a ghost, it’s probably the first and only time they actually really felt that. Because with say a horror film it’s part of the deal that you’re going to go in and see something really creepy and scary, that’s fine. But I think in a play, it’s real people on the stage, and then suddenly you see something that is actually beyond and before 186

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language; it just scares you as an animal, not even as a human being – just freaks you as a creature. If you get into the reptilian part of the human brain and freak people out on that level, then you’re dealing with the part that actually is still connected with God and still connected with the beyond and the unknown. Because it’s the part that is the id, the life force. It’s just the little spark that comes for a while and is gone. If you’re connecting with that place, that’s the theatrical experience I try to go after. Because I don’t really have anything to say about politics; I’ve nothing to add to what’s in the newspapers, what’s on Prime Time [Irish current affairs programme]. Everybody’s an expert on that, every taxi driver’s an expert on that. You cannot tell an audience anything they haven’t either already discussed or thought about on that. I think that’s the horizontal axis. But where you can plunge them is to stick their head into the darkness and connect them to that place. To me that’s where theatre is at its most thrilling. And that’s why as well it’s when it’s at its most religious. And if the way to do that is just by creepily letting that happen, then that is great. We see the ghost at the end of Shining City for just four or five seconds, but you can’t give people time to even process it. If there’s a couple of little proud moments, that would be one of them. I’ve seen over the years it’s always very intellectual, heady people who have trouble with that stuff in my plays and go: ‘That’s just childish.’ To me, it’s not, it’s utterly serious. It’s entirely the opposite of that, it’s entirely responsible, it’s as adventurous intellectually as I can be. Because you’re doing something which, for a few moments, the audience think is real. You’re actually plunging them into the illusion before they can even have time to process it. Some people think the ending is gratuitous. Absolutely not. In fact, the end of that play is the first idea I had; everything else was: how do I get there? How do I get to that point where you can just do that? So that’s how serious I would be about that. AR: That’s great. I’d like to move on to Yeats now. I was reminded in what we’ve just discussed about the end of Yeats’s The Words Upon the Window-Pane, when everything’s gone back to normal and everyone’s gone out the door, the medium Mrs Henderson is making her cup of tea. And we’re still not one hundred per cent sure about this woman: is she a charlatan? She brought up the ghosts of Swift and Vanessa in the séance, and then at that exact moment, the voice of Swift once more erupts from her. 187

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CMcP: Yes, it’s interesting, that, isn’t it? I think Yeats would always come down on the side of saying that this stuff is all real. He isn’t going to leave any ambiguity; you know, he would totally want that to be real. So it’s a good moment. Or is she just nuts? That’s the other thing you could just get away with too, you know, that she’s just nuts. AR: Speaking in voices? CMcP: Yeah, and that could be the case too. So in a way there is room for ambiguity too, which is good. But I’d say, done properly, that could freak people out in a way, if it’s done right with the right actor. But it strikes me, just becoming reacquainted with those plays for our interview today, they’re never done. Nobody does them. And I was thinking, wouldn’t it be great if the Abbey Theatre did an evening which was Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Words Upon the Window-Pane and Purgatory, one-two-three, in the order they were written? They’re all very different from each other. You’ve got your Irish cottage play, with its supernatural strangeness; than you’ve got almost a George Bernard Shaw play in the middle with Words Upon the Window-Pane; then you go into the lovely experimental Noh play, almost Beckettian, Purgatory. AR: Beckett was there, at the opening of Purgatory in the Abbey in August 1938. I’d thought for years he must have been, because the influence on Waiting for Godot and Endgame is so strong. CMcP: You can see it; it’s right there. And he absolutely loved Synge. But the other big one that Beckett loved was Strindberg, which you can see too is right there. But I was thinking it would be kind of great to reappraise Yeats, especially on the Abbey stage, if you could do really, really good productions. AR: On the main stage? CMcP: Yeah, do it properly, and do it really, really well and take it really seriously. I think that the oddness of Cathleen ni Houlihan obviously is the revolutionary spirit, set in 1798, which I think is kind of alien to us now. But I wonder is it alien enough that we could actually get something out of it now? If you did that play in 1973, people would say ‘Oh Jesus, this is all Provo propaganda’. But maybe in 2014 you could look at that play and just assess it as a piece of theatre. What’s it like, what’s it doing? Is it anti-war? It’s very difficult to say, as the young man goes into his trance and leaves. He’s like a zombie. AR: And she’s like a vampire. CMcP: She’s like a vampire. So is it a kind of stupid enchantment which leads people to their doom? Or is it something more? You could get to 188

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that place where it’s up for debate, which is what plays should do. They should always ask a question rather than give an answer. And then to follow that with The Words Upon the Window-Pane, which is a totally different kind of play. And then to follow that with Purgatory. That could be a really powerful evening. I think it would help to reassess him, because he was such a tremendous, original writer. But I think nobody knows the plays. AR: I know. There was a reading of Words Upon the Window-Pane, directed by Gavin Quinn, at the Peacock in December 2011; they did it around the table; and it was halfway there. I wish it had gone ahead to a full production. I think of Words as a séance play and while there is a whole lot more going on in your 2011 play The Veil it does contain a séance. Is that an inherently theatrical set-up? CMcP: Totally. It’s a great little ritual. It’s totally theatrical. You know, one day I may return to that and do it again. AR: To The Veil? CMcP: To The Veil, but also to the séance. It’s so theatrical that I’d like to try and do it in a more modern setting. It is the ritual of theatre, where you commune with the beyond, which I think is what theatre can lead to. Theatre is a kind of séance. AR: Yes, everyone we see on stage is ghostly; they don’t exist. CMcP: And we all create the illusion, if it is an illusion, together. We all create the sense of belief or the suspension of disbelief. So it’s really close. It really distils it on stage. AR: I really love The Veil. I have taught it and it is one of the most fecund of plays for a seminar. I think you were breaking new ground and doing really extraordinary things in the play. When you’re breaking new ground as a playwright, not everybody’s able or willing to go with it. [I was responding here to just having read McPherson’s remark in his Foreword to Plays: Three: ‘I recognise that, in some quarters, a certain incomprehension greeted The Veil.’]3 CMcP: It was greeted with incomprehension. But in a funny way – I mean I do really value it. I’m really proud of that play. And I think it’s good to do a play which was entirely for yourself. That’s where a good play comes from, when in a sense you don’t care if anybody gets it or not. Because you feel this is the only way to express what you’re trying to express. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing but I was writing that play in that place where Ireland was in its terrible financial problem. Part of me has always prided myself on never— 189

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AR: Directly commenting? CMcP: Yeah, that I always feel the artist should by definition be outside, should never be accepted, and should never understand society and society should never understand them. That’s the relationship. You can get commentary anywhere; but to get provoked, to get prodded is a different kind of thing. Some people think political plays do it but often they don’t; often it’s just a cosy relationship. That’s I think a slight problem with political work; it’s voicing a side, which is fine. But where’s the voice coming from, fucking nowhere that anybody understands. So with The Veil I slightly resent that I was coming from that place; but at the same time it really taught me that I am Irish and that I can’t not be. I was the same as everybody else in the country, wondering: ‘Oh Jesus Christ, what’s happening?’ So a play that I wanted to write about God became a play about God and economics. But maybe that’s really good – who knows? Only time will tell. I think when it’s done again, in years to come, that’s when I’ll be able to see it properly. AR: I want to finish by looking at O’Casey, another great figure, whose plays are more often produced. These are in a way more political plays because they’re very carefully responding to key events in Irish history. But really I think they’re about the lives of those people trying to survive in those tenements. The politics are offstage; it’s not set at the GPO. They read out the Proclamation and it’s greeted with incomprehension or indifference by the characters: what has this got to do with us? They’re trying to survive and they’re living kind of indigent lives. And I was very struck in reading The Night Alive (2013), there’s something similar there with your people. Things are not good for the characters in The Night Alive in terms of just getting from day to day. CMcP: I think what makes O’Casey live, why he’ll always be done, is not the politics. That’s the suit which the plays come in and that’s what makes them respectable, in that they seem to be commenting on all this stuff. But really what are they saying? What’s important about Juno and the Paycock is the central relationships between the Captain, Joxer and Juno. That’s really what people love about that play. Nobody loves it because it’s saying something about the Civil War; nobody cares. They love those characters because that’s real; and that’s maybe in spite of everything O’Casey wanted to express. What he really expressed was those very real characters, who we still see today. The Captain and 190

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Joxer – Jesus Christ! You see that in any pub today. The Captain is a quintessential Irish archetype and so is Joxer and so is Juno. That’s what’s important about that work. I think when you’ve got those characters like the Covey in The Plough and the Stars who come in and start talking about the emancipation of the proletariat, it’s comic. I don’t know that O’Casey meant that. I think he was trying on the national stage to give a Marxist message; and I’m sure he was on some level. But really the best way that people enjoy that is when the Covey is a kind of fucking eejit; because nobody talks like that, and, if they do, they have no friends, they’re very lonely. AR: He’s spouting. CMcP: Yeah, because he’s talking to people like Fluther, like the Captain, like Maisie Madigan. They’re the real people; they’re the proletariat. They don’t give a fuck about any of this. They just want – I would love for today and tomorrow to be drunk, I would love at the weekend to be able to do what I want to do. That’s all they care about; they don’t want to be emancipated. So it’s odd, you’re never sure about O’Casey – I think he’s serious about that stuff. But I think the great dramatist in him won’t let him be too serious about it, because the great dramatist knows that the life that’s flowing through the play is the great drama, the universal stuff, the eternal stuff. Even if the proletariat were emancipated, for the Captain, Juno and Joxer, their lives would be exactly the same and their conflicts would be exactly the same. That’s what’s going to live. AR: One last observation. It seemed to me that with writers like Yeats and Synge and O’Casey they’re all Protestant. But theirs is a waning faith. They were in a situation where Yeats’s grandfather was a rector in Drumcliff and Synge’s uncle was the Reverend Alexander Synge proselytising on the Aran Islands and O’Casey’s father was an evangelical who worked as a clerk for the Irish Church Missions. Yeats’s father had done the rebellion by throwing it all over; so where does Yeats go only straight into the occult? My pet theory is that great drama is most likely to happen in a society where you’re moving from the sacred to the secular. In Greece, at the start of it, it’s the Chorus, it’s the gods, and then it breaks off into Oedipus. Then, in Elizabethan England, the great faith of the medieval period, when the drama was happening in the churches and churchyards, is going, and with the Reformation there’s a residue of it in Hamlet. It is becoming secularised; it is finally the Globe and then moving inside to a candlelit theatre. 191

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And then in Ireland at the turn of the last century you had the postProtestants turning to the occult or Celtic pagan beliefs or whatever. And now we have playwrights like yourself and Brian Friel where there is a waning Catholicism. Whereas the religion was enough for my grandparents and parents. My parents had their religion; however, they loved the theatre as well. I think for them one fed the other; they would go to the theatre and go to mass. And I think now it’s not enough. I think in Ireland there was always a proximity between the church and theatre. But there was a freedom in the theatre to take these transcendental issues, like where is God?, and treat of them. It’s more difficult now because people don’t believe much; the old belief is going. But I do think a collapsing Catholicism breaks it open in some way for drama. CMcP: Maybe. AR: My little theory. CMcP: No, I think you’re right. But I think it’s always there. I think that Greek plays, and plays as we understand them, that was their mass; that was how they spoke to God. The altar was the stage. And it’s evolved out of that. And I think it sort of forked in the road. Religion took their version of it and theatre took its version of it; but it’s the same thing, I think, in a funny way. A story’s played out on the altar; it follows a certain pattern or sometimes people play with that and mess with the pattern; but usually it’s kind of the same thing. And probably what makes people – as you say, maybe there’s times of great drama – is that there’s a hunger, a spiritual hunger, for the work and they need it. People talk about Shakespeare and the instability of Elizabeth and then of James I and all that kind of stuff was happening, and it sort of comes into it. There’s an occult in Shakespeare’s plays; you look at Macbeth. And that changed. And they’d go into that very spiritual place in plays about damnation, plays like Hamlet. As you say, they’re on that cusp. As for Ireland, I see our recent economic collapse as simply part of our first hundred years. That’s the way it should be seen. We kind of got our country and then there was corruption. Of course there was. By 2016 people will be kind of getting a grip. It was the lurching of the ship, going off for the first time on its own. I imagine historians will see it like that. But I think there’s a certain journalistic thing that wants the instant art. You always hear that shite about: ‘Where is the great play about the Celtic Tiger?’ I would say, who gives a fuck? The Celtic Tiger 192

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was enough of a theatrical, crazy spectacle. Maybe, when it’s internalised enough, it will come out, but in a different way. It will be a play that doesn’t look like it’s about the Celtic Tiger; it will be a play that looks like it’s about something else. But underneath it will be what people lived through, which was this crazy illusion, or whatever it is. That’s when it will emerge.

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In ‘A People’s Theatre’, as we have seen, W.B. Yeats in 1919 regarded the success of the Abbey Theatre as a personal failure, since the kind of theatre in which it excelled was not the kind of theatre he and Lady Gregory had set out to create. As he went on to outline, the theatre he valued (and practised in his own work) was subjective rather than objective, ‘a mysterious art, . . . doing its work by suggestion, not by direct statement’.1 He numbered Synge and Gregory among the subjective playwrights, but with a predilection for writing comedy that earned them some kind of attention from a wider audience. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and in his speech prophesied the imminent arrival of Sean O’Casey: ‘[i]t is too soon yet to say what will come to us from the melodrama and tragedy of the last four years, but if we can pay our players and keep our theatre open something will come’.2 Yeats’s use of theatrical terms to describe the recent political conflict is fascinating, especially melodrama and tragedy, the precise combination employed by O’Casey to write of those events. The contrast in ‘A People’s Theatre’ and Yeats’s Nobel Prize speech is with Abbey playwrights like Lennox Robinson, T.C. Murray and George Shiels where (as John P. Harrington puts it) ‘[t]he style of production was realistic, often in carefully recreated kitchen settings’.3 Harrington goes on to deploy the term ‘counter-tradition’ in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett: ‘the current recognition of Samuel Beckett as an Irish writer admits this tension between traditions and counter-traditions to the story of the national literature’.4 I wish to replace Yeats’s terms of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ with Harrington’s of ‘tradition’ and ‘counter-tradition’ to write of the legacy of the Abbey Theatre in the seventy-five years since the death of Yeats. But I do not think it fair to relegate a dramatist like Lennox Robinson to the category of ‘tradition’. This book has amply shown how Robinson was in the forefront of keeping theatrical experiment alive via the Dublin Drama League and other developments in the Abbey in the 1920s and 1930s; and when the theatre itself did not prove as receptive to his plays in the latter decade, he took them to the Gate. T.C. Murray wrote tragedies, not comedies, plays of murderous passion that were to have a considerable influence on the nascent playwright 195

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Eugene O’Neill when he saw them on the first Abbey tour of the US in 1911/ 1912. Murray’s Autumn Fire (1924), with its tale of a widowed older man marrying a beautiful new bride to whom the young son is drawn, offers a considerable parallel to O’Neill’s simultaneous production of Desire Under the Elms. And Paul Murphy has written persuasively of the theatrical claims of George Shiels, hitherto seen as an unambitious writer of kitchen comedies (the Abbey produced a Shiels play annually from 1924 on for twenty years). Murphy views Shiels as ‘the great chronicler of the 1922 Partition’5 and as someone who in his early comedies as much as his later tragedies provides a rare theatrical investigation of class politics. The ‘tradition’ of the Abbey Theatre might more profitably be seen not in the plays of Robinson, Murray and Shiels, all of which are still being studied, but in work which, while hugely popular in its day, has not only completely vanished from the repertoire but has attracted no critical interest or commentary since. I will briefly cite two such examples, one from the National Theatre’s earliest years, the other from the 1950s. The first is William Boyle whose comedies The Building Fund (1905) and The Eloquent Dempsy (1906) were packing out the Abbey (and driving Yeats to distraction) in the years that his plays and Synge’s masterpiece The Well of the Saints were playing to half-empty houses. The second is John McCann, whose chief claim to fame in recent years would be as the father of the renowned Irish actor Donal McCann (Gabriel in John Huston’s film of Joyce’s The Dead). When the Abbey Theatre burned down in 1951 and had to move for a fifteen-year exile to the larger Queen’s Theatre, the increased demand for more commercial fare led to the virtually annual production of what theatre historian Christopher Fitz-Simon has described as ‘[e]ight entertaining but eminently forgettable comedies by John McCann’.6 This, surely, is the ‘tradition’ of the Abbey Theatre, of kitchen comedies which were enjoyed at the time but have left no trace beyond that. The ‘counter-tradition’ of Yeats fully embraces the work of Synge and Gregory (especially once the factitious argument about comedy has been removed). O’Casey is an interesting case, even an exception, since his two greatest plays, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, proved popular at the time, were regularly revived during the dark period at the Queen’s, and remain prominent and frequently produced highlights of the Abbey repertoire to this day. The conventional view would see these two plays and his Abbey debut The Shadow of the Gunman as exercises in social realism and hold that his plays ceased to be popular or acceptable at the Abbey when he veered into the overt expressionism of The Silver Tassie. But, as James Moran has pointed out, ‘right from the start, O’Casey proved himself an 196

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avowed experimenter’,7 something which this study has emphasised in relation to all of the playwrights examined. It is that ‘counter-tradition’ of the period covered in this book that has now become the ‘tradition’, as can best be seen in the legacy of the Abbey to the theatre makers who have followed, both in Ireland and globally. The most immediate, and the greatest, as the previous chapter argued, was Samuel Beckett. Although his work for the theatre, in its abstraction and its spareness, appeared at first to come from nowhere, Beckett has increasingly come to be viewed as a playwright with an Irish dimension. This is in no small part due to the frequent citation of the Irish theatrical genealogy he outlined in his 1956 letter to Cyril Cusack: Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, Synge’s The Well of the Saints and O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, ‘to go no further’, as he himself put it.8 This book has argued for the profound influence of Yeats’s Purgatory on Beckett’s En Attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot but an equally compelling case could be made in relation to Purgatory and Fin de Partie/Endgame, with its emphasis on the terminal decay of a family line. Towards the end of his life, when Samuel Beckett was asked by his biographer James Knowlson whose work had most influenced his, the octogenarian playwright murmured only one name and one syllable in response: ‘Synge’.9 Beckett’s support for O’Casey was manifested in 1958 when he withdrew his own work from that year’s Dublin Theatre Festival when the Catholic archbishop refused to bless a gathering in which a new O’Casey play was to be premiered. As Harrington writes: ‘[i]t is perhaps inevitable that at the start of the twenty-first century Samuel Beckett can epitomize Irish drama as much as W.B. Yeats did at the beginning of the century’.10 The influence of Yeats, however, continues beyond Beckett’s dramatic breakthrough in the 1950s right up to the present. The Irish Dramatic Revival and Yeats as co-founder, poet and playwright have proved inspiration and example for other countries worldwide emerging from colonisation into an exploration and development of their own cultural identity. The senior Caribbean writer, Derek Walcott, is like Yeats a poet, a dramatist and a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has written that he has always felt some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one felt that they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean . . . To have those outstanding achievements of genius whether by Joyce or Beckett or Yeats illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, depraved, oppressed situation and be defiant and creative at the same time.11 197

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Co-founding the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, Walcott in plays like Ti Jean and his Brothers worked on developing a Caribbean dialect and moved away from realism towards a drama that increasingly resembled a fable. In Ireland, the most significant development in terms of Yeats’s drama was the five-year project of staging a wide range of his plays in the Peacock Theatre in an annual festival. Theatre director James Flannery, author of a seminal book on Yeats and the Abbey Theatre on which my study has drawn, gathered a constellation of Irish artists to create a contemporary staging of this theatrically neglected work. It opened in 1989 with an ambitious staging of the full Cuchulain cycle, in which actor Ciarán Hinds drew on his Belfast accent to portray the Ulster warrior. The actress who was central to realising the five-year project was Olwen Fouéré. Skilled in dancing and nonrepresentational acting, she developed her role as the Scottish warrior-queen Aoife in the Cuchulain cycle both through voice and movement into the ‘anima figure who tried and tested him’, thus creating ‘a unifying female counterpoint to Cuchulain throughout the five plays’.12 In 2014, Olwen Fouéré brought riverrun, the one-woman show she had devised from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, to London’s National Theatre for an acclaimed run. It sprang directly from her work with James Flannery on the Cuchulain cycle and was co-directed by Kellie Hughes, who had directed a number of Yeats plays for the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company in Sligo. A photograph from Kellie Hughes’s luminous production of Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well from 2010 adorns the cover of this book. Finally, the five-year Yeats cycle at the Peacock also forged a major and far-reaching collaboration between director Flannery and the musician composer, Bill Whelan. The combination of traditional and contemporary Irish music that Whelan developed in the course of the five years, coming to its most memorable and haunting expression with the Three Musicians’ choruses of the dance plays, laid the foundation for Riverdance. Starting life three years after the final Yeats production as an interval piece in the Eurovision Song Contest, Riverdance then developed as a full-length show with the dancers Michael Flatley and Jean Butler and a host of Irish musicians, going global to become (in Patrick Lonergan’s words) ‘the most successful piece of Irish theatre ever’.13 Synge was the first of the Abbey Theatre playwrights to be translated into a European language. In 1906, a German translation of The Well of the Saints was staged by director Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Synge’s influence in Germany can best be assessed by Bertolt Brecht’s lifelong engagement with the Irish playwright. A diary entry in 1920 indicates that the twenty-twoyear-old Brecht was reading Synge to help him to develop his theatrical 198

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language, especially the verbs which he thought were his ‘weak point’.14 A play of Brecht’s from 1937, Senora Carrar’s Rifles/Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar, has the epigraph ‘Partly based on an idea of J.M. Synge.’15 A version of Riders to the Sea, it is set in ‘[a] fisherman’s cottage’,16 brings a drowning man onstage but ends with the mother giving out arms for the revolution rather than stoically enduring her loss. It was in his very next play, Mother Courage and Her Children/Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder in 1938, that Brecht arguably produced a more faithful version of Synge’s play with both mothers struggling to prevent their two sons being swept away by the Atlantic Ocean or the sea of economic necessity. In 1956, Brecht died suddenly while working on a version of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, with his daughter playing the Pegeen character, because he wanted the actors in the Berliner Ensemble to develop ‘sensuousness and humour’.17 Synge’s Playboy has always proved amenable to translation into a variety of cultural contexts. The most outstanding example is Mustapha Matura’s Playboy of the West Indies (1984), a ‘translation’ of Synge’s language into a West Indian patois and to the east coast of Trinidad. The first line by Peggy (Pegeen) as she writes her letter outlining some of the goods required for her imminent wedding gives the flavour: ‘And a pair of good sapats, wit strong rubber, no bicycle type ting but motor car, a hear dem is de bess.’18 Matura’s version is even sexier than the original. Peggy warns off Mama Benin (the Widow Quin) later in the night by pointing out: ‘Yer en see he half dead wit sleep, he couldn’t even fine de button much less undo a blouse.’19 When Ken (Christy) reenters having won all the races in the hot Trinidad sun, he comes in ‘with shirt tied around [his] waist’ and Peggy comes forward to ‘wipe Ken’s shoulders, chest with cloth’.20 This scene in production is more physically sensuous than much of what is found in Irish interpretations of Synge. In the Abbey Theatre’s centenary production of Synge’s Playboy in 2007, a contemporary version written by Nigerian playwright Bisi Adigun and Irish novelist Roddy Doyle, the action was moved from a rural to an urban setting and the stranger who enters the Dublin pub was now an immigrant from Nigeria. What was fascinating about the production was to see the thronged audiences drawn by Doyle’s reputation. Many of them were young, unused to theatre and certainly new to The Playboy of the Western World: they responded to the play with a lack of familiarity which did much to restore its originality and power. The contemporary playwright with the most developed and complex relationship to Synge is Martin McDonagh, London-born son of Irish emigrant parents, a father from Sligo and a mother from Galway. The title of 199

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McDonagh’s play considered earlier in relation to Lady Gregory, The Lonesome West, is a direct quotation from Synge’s Playboy, when Pegeen’s father holds up Shaun Reilly’s coat and proclaims: ‘Oh, there’s sainted glory this day in the lonesome west.’21 One of the two brothers in McDonagh’s play has already dispatched the father; and in A Skull in Connemara a key moment is provided by a young gravedigger crawling back on stage after he has apparently been killed with a spade driven into his skull. As discussed earlier, the speech in The Lonesome West where Coleman finally owns up to killing his brother’s dog – ‘the deed was done and he dropped down dead with not a fecking peep’22 – deliberately mirrors and parodies Christy Mahon’s first account of the father-slaying: ‘I just riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull, and he went down at my feet like an empty sack, and never let a grunt or groan from him at all.’23 Some critics, hostile to what they perceive as McDonagh’s postmodern pastiche, have insisted on making an absolute distinction between the cultural projects of the two playwrights. For Vic Merriman, Synge’s plays ‘vigorously assert the dignity and spirit’ of the people they represent whereas McDonagh ‘parades the emptied shell of peasant life for smug dismissal by a metropolitan audience’.24 But others assert their similarity and equivalence. As Shaun Richards writes, it is ‘difficult to determine some absolute difference between the staged worlds of the two playwrights: violence, deprivation and longing are the lot of all the characters. But while Synge is accorded a social seriousness beyond the comedy of his plot and extravagance of his language this is denied to McDonagh’.25 The name of Lady Gregory is not one that is namedropped when it comes to extolling the great writers of the Irish Revival: the roll-call has to remain exclusively male. But there is no doubt that by regularly writing and having her plays produced on the Abbey Stage she created a powerful precedent and paved the way for other Irish women playwrights to follow. The first example, Teresa Deevy in the 1930s, has already been looked at in Chapter 7. The most recent example would be Marina Carr, whose plays have regularly been staged at both the Abbey and the Peacock over several decades and are still continuing. Her formidable body of work has established Carr as ‘one of the most powerful, haunting voices on the contemporary Irish stage’.26 While critics tend to stress the influence of classic Greek theatre on the mother slaying her child in the tragic close of By the Bog of Cats (1998), there is equally a clear parallel with the plays of the Revival in, for example, her overt use of dialect in Portia Coughlan (1996). Frank McGuinness rightly describes Carr’s language as a ‘physical attack on the conventions of syntax, spelling 200

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and sounds of Standard English’.27 The play, in its initial version (it was softened later), foregrounded the heavy accent of the Irish midlands and a dialect which bends the vowels and either strikes out the final ‘t’ in words or turns them into an ‘h’. The following is a representative exchange: Portia Raphael Portia Raphael Portia Raphael Portia Raphael

Busy ah tha factory? Aye. Ud’s me birtha taday. Thah a fac? Imagine, ah’m thirty . . . Jay, half me life’s over. Me heart goes ouh ta ya. Have wan [drink] wud me an me birtha. Ah this hour, ya mus’ be ouha yar mine.28

The language also contains recognisable features of Hiberno-English pronunciation and usage: ‘me’ for ‘my’, ‘seen’ and ‘done’ for ‘saw’ and ‘did’. Marina Carr rarely writes an overtly feminist play. An exception would be By the Bog of Cats where, as in Lady Gregory’s Grania, the heroine Hester Swane, unmarried mother and a ‘tinker’/traveller, is caught between the patriarchal power plays of two men: the long-term partner who will not enter a socially demeaning marriage with Hester and the brutal father of the woman he chooses to marry instead. But throughout all of her plays, Marina Carr is as sensitive to the gender and class constraints within which her female protagonists must operate as Gregory was in her drama. Although Gregory’s plays are no longer staged at the Abbey or Peacock, they were for many decades a feature of the amateur drama companies around Ireland, in particular the Amateur Drama One-Act Plays Festival. This would certainly have been the case when Harold Pinter, in the years when he was still a jobbing actor rather than an acclaimed dramatist, played for several seasons (1951–3) in Ireland with Anew McMaster’s touring ‘fit-up’ theatre company. It was during this period that he made his celebrated discovery of Samuel Beckett (neither had yet become a playwright) when Pinter came upon a prose extract from Beckett’s as-yet-unpublished novel, Watt, in the journal Irish Writing;29 but this may well have been when he first encountered the work of Lady Gregory. It is out of the uncanny similarities between one of Harold Pinter’s later, more explicitly political plays, 1988’s Mountain Language, and Lady Gregory’s 1906 The Gaol Gate that these speculations arise. Both plays share the same central situation and characters: two women, one elderly, one young, who come to a prison to visit a husband and/or son imprisoned within. 201

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The chief brunt of the encounter is between the women and the prison authorities, or at least the functionaries who control access. The lack of communication between the two sides is starkly stated in the Pinter: ‘Now hear this. You are mountain people. You hear me? Your language is dead. It is forbidden.’30 These are precisely the terms of Lady Gregory’s play. The women in The Gaol Gate have come from a mountainy region, as the comments about the claustrophobia their imprisoned man will be suffering makes clear: ‘He that was used to the mountain to be closed up inside of that! . . . It is no wonder a man to grow faint-hearted and her shut away from the light.’31 When the elderly woman in Pinter’s play speaks, it is in ‘a strong rural accent’32 and in a language that the guard cannot understand and opposes violently. When the lighting changes and we tune into the exchanges between mother and son in the mountain language, it speaks in precisely the terms of The Gaol Gate, of a community which waits to welcome him home: The baby is waiting for you . . . When you come home there will be such a welcome for you. (Pinter)33 The child he left in the house that is shook, it is great will be his boast in his father! All Ireland will have a welcome before him. (Gregory)34 What the alignment of these two plays suggests, as does the pairing of the McDonagh and the Gregory earlier, is a rereading of Lady Gregory as a more political writer than has heretofore been recognised. The global influence of Sean O’Casey’s Dublin plays was registered most immediately in 1930s New York theatre, specifically in the work of Clifford Odets. As Stephen Watt has shown, the tenements in their plays enact similar scenarios, especially in relation to Juno and the Paycock. The young women in the plays of Odets and also of Elmer Rice who become pregnant outside wedlock endure more universal obloquy than O’Casey’s Mary Boyle, who though condemned by three male figures in succession (her father, her brother and her former suitor) still has the unwavering support of her mother Juno. In Odets’ Awake and Sing! (1935), by contrast, the mother contrives to marry her pregnant daughter to Sam Feinschreiber, described by Stephen Watt as ‘an unsuspecting gull’.35 Though they may share socialist convictions and a tenement setting, O’Casey resists the urge to conclude with a call to arms to remedy the social injustices depicted in his play, as Odets memorably did in Awake and Sing!; that direct political address only emerges in O’Casey’s later plays.

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In the Irish context, O’Casey’s Dublin plays likewise wielded considerable influence from the off. But this mounted to a crescendo after the eruption of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in 1968. In his chapter on ‘Playing the North’, Christopher Murray demonstrates in detail how ‘the O’Casey model constantly bore fruit in’ ‘Troubles’ plays like John Boyd’s The Flats (1971) with its work-shy, drink-fond father.36 Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1987) is a play about Bloody Sunday, the traumatic occasion in January 1972 when thirteen protesting Civil Rights Catholic civilians on a proscribed march were shot dead by members of the British army; the play itself is set over a decade later. In order to exorcise any O’Casey influence, McGuinness included an uproarious play-within-a-play, The Burning Balaclava, which relentlessly satirises Juno and the Paycock. Partly not to leave the gender characteristics of O’Casey’s feckless men and resolute women undisturbed, all of the cast is involved in cross-gender casting. Hark, the hard man of paramilitary violence, gets to play the O’Casey mother figure who, when confronted with a bullet-riddled statue of the Sacred Heart, berates her activist son who stood idly by in the following terms: ‘Son, son, where were you when my Sacred Heart was riddled with bullets? Where were you?’37 McGuinness has described to me how nervous he was when O’Casey’s daughter Shivaun came to see Carthaginians; but she roared with laughter at The Burning Balaclava and said to the nervous playwright later: ‘Sean would have loved it.’38 McGuinness is a huge admirer of O’Casey, as is evident from his landmark play, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching to the Somme (1985). The parallels between McGuinness’s play about the Ulster regiments fighting in World War I and O’Casey’s Silver Tassie were underscored by Patrick Mason, who directed the McGuinness premiere. When he came to revive the Tassie at the Abbey, Mason cast some of the most recognisable actors from the Sons of Ulster production. Where O’Casey moved the scene to the Somme in the second act, McGuinness looked at the traumatised return of the soldiers to their home place in Act Two, saving the Somme for the final act, when the ensemble of Northern Irish soldiers goes over the top to their deaths. The play is framed by the one survivor in the present, David Pyper, who activates the flashbacks and is no less traumatised by the experience of war than Harry Heegan and Teddy Foran in the O’Casey. In the centenary commemorations of World War I, Ireland’s National Theatre has opted to stage a new production of McGuinness’s Sons of Ulster, England’s of O’Casey’s Silver Tassie. I have not included here an equivalent account of the one other Irish playwright considered at length in this study, George Bernard Shaw. Though 203

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he contributed to the Abbey Theatre, as I have sought to show, his career in the main and his greatest achievements were in the English theatre. Christopher Innes, in his magisterial study of twentieth-century British theatre, makes Bernard Shaw’s revolutionary plays the cornerstone of the critical enterprise, a huge and discernible influence on all that followed.39 But his impact on Irish theatre was considerable. Even within the period covered in this volume, the influence of Shaw’s dramaturgy in general and of his 1922 play Saint Joan in particular on O’Casey’s Silver Tassie and Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ played no small part in their being rejected by the Abbey. In 2011, Ireland’s National Theatre director Fiach Mac Conghail initiated a sustained commitment to a great and still-relevant Irish playwright by staging the first production at the Abbey Theatre of Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914). This was followed two years later by another Abbey first with a production of Major Barbara (1906). The summer of 2014 saw the first staging in a long time of Heartbreak House. Even if belatedly, Shaw has become the house dramatist at Ireland’s National Theatre. If Shaw has been brought home to the city he left in the late nineteenth century, the achievements and example of the Irish Dramatic Revival have gone out to the world.

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CHRONOLOGY

1894 1896 1897 1899

1900 1901 1902

1903

1904

1905 1906

Joint production of Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire, the Avenue Theatre, London. Yeats and Synge first meet in Paris. Yeats and Lady Gregory meet in west of Ireland to plan an Irish Theatre. First season of Irish Literary Theatre, productions of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (which attracts protests) and Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field, Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin. Death of Oscar Wilde. Second season of Irish Literary Theatre, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Third season of Irish Literary Theatre, includes Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Irish National Theatre Society established. Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, produced by W.G. Fay with Maud Gonne in the lead, St Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street, Dublin. Synge’s Riders to the Sea published. Lady Gregory’s Twenty-Five, first play solely authored by her, produced at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin. Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen produced at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, with W.G. Fay as the Tramp. Synge’s Riders to the Sea produced at the Molesworth Hall, with Sara Allgood as Cathleen, directed by Synge. June 16 – day on which Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is set. Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island rejected by the Abbey. Opening of custom-built Abbey Theatre, designed by Joseph Holloway, funded by A.E.F. Horniman, with programme of Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand and Gregory’s Spreading the News. Synge’s The Well of the Saints produced, with W.G. and F.J. Fay and Sara Allgood in the cast. German translation of Synge’s The Well of the Saints performed at Deutsches Theatre in Berlin. Yeats’s Deirdre and Gregory’s The Gaol Gate produced. 205

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1907

1908 1909

1910

1914 1916

1918 1919

1921 1923

1924 1925 1926 1927 1928

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Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World produced, with Molly Allgood as Pegeen Mike, W.G. Fay as Christy Mahon, directed by the latter; provokes riots. Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon produced. Withdrawal of W.G. and F.J. Fay from the Abbey Theatre. Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward produced. Death of J.M. Synge at thirty-seven. Controversial production of Shaw’s The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, banned in England, acclaimed at the Abbey. Posthumous production of Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows with Molly Allgood in the leading role. Death of Edward VII; Horniman withdraws subsidy at failure of theatre to close. World War I declared. Easter Rising, Dublin; executions of leaders followed. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well, staged in London in Lady Cunard’s drawing-room. Major Shaw season at the Abbey, including their first production of John Bull’s Other Island. End of World War I. Beginning of Anglo-Irish War (through 1921). Founding of Dublin Drama League by Yeats and Lennox Robinson. ‘An Open Letter’ from Yeats to Gregory. Civil War (through 1923) between those who accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those who want full independence from England. O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman produced. Yeats awarded Nobel Prize for Literature; delivers lecture on ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’ in Stockholm. O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock produced, with Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald and F.J. McCormick, to great acclaim. Abbey awarded annual subsidy by the Free State government. Shaw awarded Nobel Prize for Literature. O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars produced; provokes riots. Opening of smaller, more experimental space of the Peacock. Gate Theatre founded by Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards. O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie rejected by the Abbey. Abbey’s first production of a Shakespeare play, King Lear.

Chronology

1929

1930

1932 1935 1936 1938 1939

Production of Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, directed by Edwards and starring MacLiammóir by the Gate (at the Peacock). Production of Yeats’s Fighting the Waves, with dancer Ninette de Valois and music by George Antheil, at the Abbey. First production of O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, with Barry Fitzgerald, at the Apollo Theatre in London. Opening of the Gate Theatre in its own dedicated space. Production of Shaw’s five-play cycle, Back to Methuselah, at the Gate. Teresa Deevy’s Reapers produced at the Abbey. Death of Lady Gregory. Abbey’s first production of O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie. Production of Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche at the Abbey. Production of Yeats’s Purgatory at the Abbey. Death of Yeats. Outbreak of World War II, known in Ireland as ‘the Emergency’.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. J.M. Synge, ‘Preface’, The Playboy of the Western World, Collected Works, Volume Four: Plays Book II, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 53. 2. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Bounty of Sweden’, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 559. 3. W.B. Yeats, ‘An Introduction for My Plays’, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 527. 4. George Moore has left a memorable and witty account of the early years in his three volumes of prose memoir, Hail and Farewell, edited by Richard Allen Cave (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976). 5. Cited in all the accounts of the uproar occasioned by Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. See, for example, Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Abbey Theatre: The Years of Synge 1905–1909, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History III (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1978), p. 125ff. 6. Cited in R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life II, The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 305–6. 7. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life II, p. 306. 8. Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916 (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 235. 9. See Eugene McNulty, Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010). 10. Mary Trotter foregrounds the contribution of women theatre makers to the Revival in her study, Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 73–99. Alice Milligan contributed two plays to the Irish Literary Theatre programme and is the subject of Catherine Morris’s groundbreaking study, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012). 11. From the founding statement of the Irish Literary Theatre, jointly composed by Yeats and Lady Gregory, cited in Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), p. 20. 12. Yeats outlines these views in two essays in particular, ‘An Irish National Theatre’ (1903) and ‘First Principles’ (1904). See The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats,

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 Volume 8, The Irish Dramatic Movement, edited by Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York and London: Scribner, 2003), pp. 32–5, 52–67. 13. On the first, see Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1990). On the second, see Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 86–111. 14. See J.M. Synge, ‘Various Notes’, Collected Works, Volume 2, Prose, edited by Alan Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1966; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), pp. 347–8. 15. Letter from W.B. Yeats to J.M. Synge, 6 December 1906. Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 169. 16. Letter from J.M. Synge to Yeats and Lady Gregory, 13 December, 1906. Saddlemyer, Theatre Business, p. 177. 17. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface for Politicians’ (1906), The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 2, edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1971), p. 808. 18. Lady Gregory, ‘Play-Writing’, Our Irish Theatre, p. 56. 19. Letter from J.M. Synge to Molly Allgood, 27 January 1907. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Volume 1, 1871–1907, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 285.

Chapter 1 1. Hyde was Professor of Irish at University College Dublin and was elected first president of Ireland in 1938. 2. Douglas Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1968), pp. 22–3. 3. Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 129–39. 4. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1969), p. 232. 5. Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland (1899; London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1967), p. 511. 6. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, Collected Works, Volume 2: Prose, edited by Alan Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1966; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 70. 7. Synge, The Aran Islands, Collected Works, Volume 2.

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Notes 8. Synge, The Aran Islands, Collected Works, Volume 2, p. 184. 9. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 6. 10. Cited in Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), p. 20. 11. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre & Ireland (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 3. 12. Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault, edited by Andrew Parkin (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), p. 19. 13. Dion Boucicault, The Shaughraun, Selected Plays, p. 261. 14. See Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 1–19. 15. J.M. Synge, ‘A Note on Boucicault and Irish Drama’, Prose, p. 398. 16. J.M. Synge, The Shadow of the Glen, Collected Works, Volume 3: Plays Book 1, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 43. 17. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), pp. 563–4. 18. Bernard Shaw, The Matter With Ireland, edited by David H. Greene and Dan H. Laurence, p. ix. 19. See Jarlath Killeen, ‘Wilde, the Fairy Tales and the Oral Tradition’, in Oscar Wilde in Context, edited by Kerry Powell and Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 186–94. 20. Cited in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), pp. 273–4. 21. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), p. 13. 22. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 35. 23. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, pp. 134–5. 24. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p. 36. 25. Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface: Fragments of Autobiography’, The Matter With Ireland, p. 10. 26. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p. 283. 27. Holland and Hart-Davis, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, pp. 563–4. 28. Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 64. 29. Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Plays, p. 69. 30. Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 1, edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: The Bodley Head/Max Reinhardt, 1970), p. 355.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 31. Bernard Shaw, ‘Henry James and Oscar Wilde’, The Portable Shaw, edited by Stanley Weintraub (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 86. 32. Bernard Shaw, ‘Pinero and Wilde’, The Portable Shaw, p. 98. 33. On this, see Anthony Roche, ‘Bernard Shaw and “Hibernian Drama”’, in Powell and Raby, Oscar Wilde in Context, pp. 180–3. 34. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Plays, p. 258. 35. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 40. 36. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Plays, p. 286. 37. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Plays, p. 312. 38. D.E.S. Maxwell, A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 49. 39. Thomas Kilroy, ‘The Anglo-Irish Theatrical Imagination’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal III(2) (Winter 1997/Spring 1998), p. 7. 40. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 1010. 41. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 176. 42. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Selected Non-Dramatic Writings of Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 255. 43. For the details, see Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, Laying the Foundations 1902–1904, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History II (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1976), pp. 78–82. 44. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 279. 45. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 279. 46. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Stone and the Elixir’ (Review of Ibsen’s Brand), Uncollected Prose Volume 1, edited by John P. Frayne (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 346. 47. Irina Ruppo Malone, Ibsen and the Irish Revival (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 2. 48. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, pp. 279–80. 49. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 280. 50. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 120. 51. W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 206. 52. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 280. 53. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 18. 54. J.M. Synge, Collected Works, Volume 4: Plays Book 2, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 53.

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Notes 55. J.M. Synge, Collected Works, Volume 4: Plays Book 2, p. 54. 56. See W.J. McCormack, Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), pp. 114–20. 57. J.M. Synge, Plays Book 2, p. 53. 58. Frank McGuinness, ‘John Millington Synge and the King of Norway’, in Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000, edited by Nicholas Grene (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2000), p. 64. 59. See Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 1–12. 60. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, p. 20. 61. Edward Martyn, The Heather Field, Selected Plays of George Moore and Edward Martyn, edited by David B. Eakin and Michael Case (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), p. 223. 62. Martyn, The Heather Field, p. 268. 63. J.M. Synge, ‘Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais’, Prose, pp. 380–1. The translation from the French is mine. A ‘dangerous impractical person’ is quoted by Synge in English and placed in italics. 64. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 417. The founders have all written fascinating accounts of the Irish Literary Theatre: Yeats, in ‘Dramatis Personae 1896–1902’; Lady Gregory, in Our Irish Theatre; George Moore, most amusingly and at greatest length, in his three-volume prose account, Hail and Farewell, made up of Ave (1911), Salve (1914) and Vale (1925). 65. James Joyce, ‘Programme Notes for the English Players’, Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, pp. 210–11. They also presented plays by Wilde, Shaw and Synge. 66. Joyce, ‘Programme Notes’, p. 52. 67. W.B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen, The Variorum Edition of the Plays, p. 167. 68. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 226. 69. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 225. 70. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 430. For Lady Gregory’s full account, see ‘The Theatre in the Making’, Our Irish Theatre, pp. 28–9. 71. J.M. Synge, ‘The Dramatic Movement in Ireland’, in The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections, edited by E.H. Mikhail (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 54–5. 72. Douglas Hyde, Casadh an tSúgáin/The Twisting of the Rope, Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, edited by Gareth W. Dunleavy and Janet Egleson Dunleavy (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of Washington Press, 1991), p. 35. The English translation of Hyde’s Irish text is by Lady Gregory. The phrase for ‘wandering’ in the original is ‘atá ar seachrán’, as in the title of Boucicault’s play.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 73. Hyde, Casadh an tSúgáin, Selected Plays, p. 39. 74. Hyde, Casadh an tSúgáin, Selected Plays, pp. 51–3. 75. See Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, pp. 51–76. 76. Grene, Politics of Irish Drama, pp. 52–3. 77. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 439. 78. Yeats, Autobiographies, pp. 416–17.

Chapter 2 1. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 248. 2. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II, p. 250. 3. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II, p. 248. 4. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 1. 5. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1955), p. 552. 6. Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London: The Athlone Press, 1978), p. 3. 7. Worth, Irish Drama of Europe, p. 3. 8. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, p. 131. 9. James W. Flannery, W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 170. 10. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1969), p. 415. 11. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 560. 12. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), p. 20. 13. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 205. 14. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 571. All future references to ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’ are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 15. W.B. Yeats, ‘Preliminaries’, Explorations, edited by Mrs W.B. Yeats (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1962), p. 416. 16. W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1961), p. 527. 17. James W. Flannery, W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, p. 190.

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Notes 18. Padraic Colum, ‘Early Days of the Irish Theatre’, in The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections, edited by E.H. Mikhail (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 67, 70. 19. Cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, Laying the Foundations 1902–1904, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History II (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1976), p. 11. 20. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 233. 21. See James Pethica, ‘ “Our Kathleen”: Yeats’s Collaboration with Lady Gregory in the Writing of Cathleen ni Houlihan’, in Yeats and Women, edited by Deirdre Toomey (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), p. 210. 22. James Pethica, ‘ “Our Kathleen”: Yeats’s Collaboration with Lady Gregory’, pp. 212–13. 23. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 632. 24. See Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Years of Synge 1905–1909, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History III (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1978). 25. Cited by James Pethica, ‘ “Our Kathleen” ’, p. 222. 26. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 231. All future references to Cathleen ni Houlihan are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 27. Cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, Laying the Foundations, p. 14. 28. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 233. 29. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 194. 30. Cited in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, Laying the Foundations, p. 14. See Antoinette Quinn, ‘Staging the Irish Peasant Woman’, in Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000, edited by Nicholas Grene (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2000), pp. 125–6. 31. On Inghinidhe na hEireann, see Antoinette Quinn, ‘Staging the Irish Peasant Woman’, pp. 121–123, and Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 73–99. 32. W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, pp. 96–7. 33. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, p. 65. 34. W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, pp. 103–4. 35. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 105. 36. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 104. 37. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 269. 38. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, pp. 477–9. 39. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 215.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 40. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 215. 41. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 216. 42. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, p. 68. 43. Chris Morash and Shaun Richards, Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2013), p. 66. 44. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, pp. 75–6. 45. According to Foster, Yeats and Arthur Symons ‘attended the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre’s first production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, an anti-realist satire which none the less parodied Symbolist techniques as well’, in Paris in December 1896, the same month he met Synge there. See R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, I, p. 175. 46. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 378. All future references to Deirdre are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 47. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, p. 50. 48. James W. Flannery, Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, p. 220. 49. Letter to John Butler Yeats, 21 July 1906. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 4, 1905–1907, edited by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 451. 50. W.B. Yeats, Memoirs, edited by Denis Donoghue (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972), p. 240. 51. Yeats, Memoirs, p. 240. 52. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, p. 51. 53. James W. Flannery, W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, p. 225. 54. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, p. 81. 55. W.B. Yeats, Explorations, p. 249. 56. Yeats, Explorations, p. 250. 57. Yeats, Explorations, p. 250. 58. Yeats, Explorations, p. 254. 59. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II, p. 34. 60. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, p. 65. 61. W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 224. 62. Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (New York: New Directions, 1959), p. 4. 63. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 399. All future references to At the Hawk’s Well are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 64. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II, p. 37. 65. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, pp. 415–16. 66. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 246.

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Notes 67. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II, p. 41. 68. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 232. 69. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 227. 70. Cited in Richard Allan Cave, Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats (Alton: Dance Books, 2011), p. 81. 71. Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1989), pp. 68–9. 72. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, p. 392. 73. Yeats, Variorum Poems, p. 392. 74. Letter to Lady Gregory, 12 August 1917. The Letters of W.B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955), pp. 628–9. 75. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 762. All future references to The Dreaming of the Bones are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 76. The Letters of W.B. Yeats, p. 629. 77. See Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), passim. 78. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, p. 777. 79. W.B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 226. 80. I am grateful to Conor O’Rourke and Katie O’Byrne for a discussion of the play. University College Dublin students, they performed the roles of the two ghosts in a production of The Dreaming of the Bones by the Ad Astra Performing Arts Scholars, directed by Kellie Hughes, at St Bartholomew’s Church, Ballsbridge, Dublin, on 27 February 2014. 81. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, p. 135.

Chapter 3 1. Patrick Lonergan, ‘The Aran Islands Plays’, The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh (London: Methuen Drama, 2012), p. 57. 2. W.B. Yeats, ‘Preface to the First Edition of The Well of the Saints’, Essays and Introductions (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1961), p. 298. 3. W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 299. 4. See Harry White’s chapter, ‘Why Synge Abandoned Music’, in his Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 110–32. 5. See W.J. McCormack’s chapter, ‘Escaping Home Rule in Germany (1893–4)’, in his Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), pp. 103–20.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 6. Frank McGuinness, Opening Address, Synge Summer School, Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow, June 2005. 7. Ironically, Synge’s prose volume, despite Yeats’s best efforts on its behalf, was not to be published until 1907, and only as a result of the success of his plays. 8. J.M. Synge, ‘Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais’, published in L’Européen, 31 May 1902: ‘à chaque séance, on voyait des ivrognes scandalisés qui débitaient du haut des galleries, des observations morales à l’adressse de M. Yeats et deses confrères’. The translation is mine. J.M. Synge, Collected Works, Volume 2: Prose, edited by Alan Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1966; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 380. 9. J.M. Synge, When the Moon Has Set, Collected Works, Volume 3: Plays Book I, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 157. 10. J.M. Synge, ‘The Dramatic Movement in Ireland’, in The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections, edited by E.H. Mikhail (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988), p. 54. 11. See Nicholas Grene’s chapter, ‘Strangers in the House’, in his The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 51–76. 12. W.B. Yeats, Memorandum to Synge’s executors, 1909, cited in J.M. Synge, Plays I, p. 155. 13. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Volume 1: 1871–1907, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 333. 14. J.M. Synge, ‘Preface’. The Playboy of the Western World, Collected Works, Volume 4: Plays Book II, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), pp. 53–4. 15. J.M. Synge, ‘Various Notes’, Prose, p. 347. 16. J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea, Plays Book I, p. 17. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 17. This elaborate phrase appears more than once in Synge’s plays. For example, in The Well of the Saints, Martin Doul complains to Timmy the smith: ‘Would you have me getting my death sitting out in the black wintery air with no coat on me at all?’ J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints, Plays Book I, p. 103. 18. Fiona Macintosh, Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), p. 21. 19. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, Prose, p. 75. 20. For more on the folk tale and its relation to Synge, see Eilís Ní Dhuibhne, ‘The Best Field Worker: Synge and Irish Folklore’, in Synge and His Influences: Centenary Essays from the Synge Summer School, edited by Patrick Lonergan (Dublin: Caryesfort Press, 2011), pp. 93–110. 21. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, Prose, p. 70.

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Notes 22. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 603. 23. J.M. Synge, ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’, Prose, p. 202. 24. J.M. Synge, The Shadow of the Glen, Plays Book I, p. 33. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 25. Cited by Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, Laying the Foundations 1902–1904: The Second Volume of the Modern Irish Drama (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1976), p. 79. 26. The five-page one act play, In a Real Wicklow Glen, is reprinted in full by Robert Hogan and James Kilroy in their notes to Laying the Foundations 1902–1904, pp. 148–52. 27. See David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, nationalism and culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 78. 28. See Hugh Hunt, The Abbey: Ireland’s National Theatre 1904–1978 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979), p. 61. 29. J.M. Synge, Collected Letters Volume 1, p. 94. 30. William G. Fay, ‘The Well of the Saints’, in J.M. Synge: Interviews and Recollections, edited by E.H. Mikhail (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), p. 31. 31. William G. Fay, ‘The Well of the Saints’, p. 31. 32. W.B. Yeats, ‘An Introduction for my Plays’, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 528. 33. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 56–7. 34. J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints, Plays Book I, p. 69. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 35. See Toni O’Brien Johnson, Synge: The Medieval and the Grotesque (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1982), pp. 29–45. 36. Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland (London: Unwin, 1899), p. 511. 37. Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland, p. 511. 38. David Krause, ‘ “The Rageous Ossian”: Patron-Hero of Synge and O’Casey’, Modern Drama 4:3 (1961), p. 275. 39. Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland, p. 511. 40. See W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 343. This section of Yeats’s autobiography. ‘The Trembling of the Veil’, was first published in 1922. 41. J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands, Prose, p. 95.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 42. J.M. Synge, Plays Book II, Appendix B, The Playboy of the Western World: Worksheets and Commentary, p. 295. 43. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, Plays: Book II, p. 73. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 44. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2, lines 22–3, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Arden, 1998), p. 311. 45. Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997). 46. James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 6. 47. C.L. Innes, The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990). See also C.L. Innes, ‘Postcolonial Synge’, in The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Synge, edited by P.J. Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 117–31. 48. Declan Kiberd, ‘The riotous history of The Playboy of the Western World’, The Guardian, 23 September 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/sep/23/ playboy-western-world-old-vic. 49. See Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism and European Theatre at the Turn of the Century (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 113–14. 50. See the detailed account of the first night of The Playboy of the Western World in Christopher Morash, ‘A night at the theatre 4’, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 131. 51. Randolph Parker, ‘ “Gaming in the Gap”: Language and Liminality in The Playboy of the Western World’, Theatre Journal 37(1) (March 1985), p. 84. 52. Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama, p. 119. 53. Paige Reynolds, ‘Audience allegory: the premiere of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World’, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 72. 54. The phrase ‘unmanageable revolutionaries’ was Eamon de Valera’s, used by him to describe the women involved in the Irish republican movement. See Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries (London: Pluto Press, 1983). 55. W.B. Yeats, Memoirs, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 199. 56. J.M. Synge, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Plays Book II, p. 267. 57. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge Volume 2: 1907–1909, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 93. 58. Letters Volume 2, pp. 121–2. 59. J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea, Plays Book I, p. 5. 60. See Anthony Roche, ‘Synge and contemporary Irish drama’, in Mathews, The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Synge, pp. 173–84. 220

Notes

Chapter 4 1. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), pp. 428–37; Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London; Granta Books, 2000), pp. 325–39. 2. D.E.S. Maxwell, A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up To Nation (Manchester and New York: 1997); Robert Welch, The Abbey Theatre 1899–1999 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 3. The Arrow: 25 August 1909 – ‘The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet: Statement by the Directors,’ in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume 8: The Irish Dramatic Movement, edited by Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York and London: Scribner, 2003), pp. 207–8. 4. Samuel Beckett, letter to Cyril Cusack, 4 June 1956. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 623. 5. Brian Friel, ‘Plays Peasant and Unpeasant’ (1972), in Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999, edited by Christopher Murray (London and New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 51. 6. Brian Friel co-founded the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 with the actor Stephen Rea, intending its annual productions of Irish plays to make a cultural intervention in the politics of Northern Ireland. See Marilynn J. Richtarik, Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980–1984 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 7. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1955), p. 283. 8. Ibid., pp. 221–2. 9. Ibid., p. 222. 10. Ibid., p. 281. 11. See Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly and Socialist Provocation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), pp. 17–51. 12. Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface for Politicians’, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 2, edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1971), p. 808. 13. W.B. Yeats, letter to George Bernard Shaw, 5 October 1904. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 3: 1901–1904, edited by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 661. 14. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats,Volume 3, p. 660. 15. Shaw, ‘Preface for Politicians’, p. 808.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 16. Cited in The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 3, p. 661. 17. W.G. Fay, letter to W.B. Yeats, 4 October, 1904. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 3, p. 663. 18. Cited by Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p. 306. 19. R.F. Foster, W.B.Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 325–6. 20. See Dennis Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), passim. 21. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p. 306. 22. W.B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1969), p. 477, p. 479. 23. W.B. Yeats, ‘An Introduction for my Plays,’ Essays and Introductions (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1961), p. 528. 24. J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints, Collected Works, Volume 3: Plays, Book I, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 143. 25. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel examines the Shavian aspects of Synge’s play in Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation, pp. 55–6. 26. Synge, The Well of the Saints, p. 149. 27. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, Collected Plays Volume 2, p. 909. 28. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, p. 910. 29. Shaw, ‘Preface for Politicians’, p. 808. 30. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, p. 899. 31. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, p. 906. 32. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p. 304. 33. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, p. 912. 34. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, p. 963. 35. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, p. 1016. 36. M.J. Sidnell, ‘Hic and Ille: Shaw and Yeats,’ Theatre and nationalism in twentiethcentury Ireland, edited by Robert O’Driscoll (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 168. 37. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, p. 1021. 38. Cited by Stanley Weintraub in ‘Uneasy Friendship: Shaw and Yeats’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies Volume 1, edited by Richard J. Finneran (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 152. 39. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, p. 968. 40. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p. 378.

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Notes 41. Bernard Shaw, The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 3, edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: The Bodley Head, 1972), p. 774. 42. Shaw, The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, p. 784. 43. See Lady Gregory, ‘The Fight with the Castle,’ Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), pp. 84–96. 44. W.B. Yeats, letter to J.B. Yeats, 10 October 1909. The Letters of W.B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955), p. 535. 45. Bernard Shaw, letter to Lady Gregory, 7 August 1909. Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas Grene (eds), Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), p. 11. 46. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, Collected Works, Volume 4: Plays, Book II, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 167. 47. Shaw, The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, p. 782. For further parallels between Synge’s Playboy and Shaw’s Blanco Posnet, see Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation, pp. 80–3. 48. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 171. 49. The original script of Blanco Posnet, with these lines, is reproduced in Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, between pages 25 and 26. 50. Shaw, The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, p. 797. 51. Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, p. 23. 52. Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from his Unpublished Journal, edited by Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 130. 53. This information is drawn from Nicholas Grene and Deirdre McFeely’s invaluable ‘Shaw Productions in Ireland, 1900–2009,’ Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition, edited by Peter Gahan; Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 30 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 236–59. 54. Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p. 381. 55. Bernard Shaw, letter to Lady Gregory, 14 September 1915. Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, p. 94. 56. Bernard Shaw, letter to W.B. Yeats, 12 October 1915. Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, p. 104. 57. Bernard Shaw, O’Flaherty, V.C.: A Recruiting Pamphlet, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 4, edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1973), p. 988. 58. Bernard Shaw, letter to Lady Gregory, 14 September 1915. Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, p. 94.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 59. Lady Gregory, letter to Bernard Shaw, 24 August 1909. Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, p. 46. 60. W.F. Bailey, letter to W.B. Yeats, 14 November 1915, Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, p. 109. 61. W.B. Yeats, letter to Lady Gregory, cited in Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, p. 106. 62. When O’Flaherty, V.C. finally received two performances in London under the auspices of the Stage Society in December 1920, Arthur Sinclair played Private O’Flaherty and Sara Allgood his mother, as originally intended. 63. Shaw, O’Flaherty, V.C., p. 991. 64. W.B. Yeats, ‘On being asked for a War Poem’, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 359. 65. W.B. Yeats, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. xxxiv. 66. W.B. Yeats, letter to Sean O’Casey, 20 April 1928, The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–41, Volume 1, edited by David Krause (London: Cassell, 1975), p. 268. 67. Sean O’Casey, letter to W.B. Yeats, no date given. The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–41, p. 271. 68. Shaw, O’Flaherty, V.C., p. 1008. 69. Shaw, O’Flaherty, V.C., p. 987. 70. Sean O’Casey, The Silver Tassie (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), p. 15. 71. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland (London: Profile Books, 2005), p. 136. 72. Shaw, O’Flaherty, V.C., p. 1010. 73. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 136. 74. Shaw, O’Flaherty, V.C., p. 1011. 75. Shaw, O’Flaherty, V.C., p. 996. 76. Shaw, O’Flaherty, V.C., p. 1009. 77. Bernard Shaw, letter to Sean O’Casey, 19 June 1928. The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–41, p. 284. 78. Ibid., p. 285. 79. Lady Gregory, Journals, 7 October 1929. Cited Laurence and Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, p. 187. 80. Bernard Shaw, letter to Sean O’Casey, 19 June 1928. The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–41, p. 285. 81. As Stanley Weintraub points out, Yeats wrote ‘in his diary that the admiration for [The Silver Tassie] shown by Shaw . . . “suggests that it was at least better than we thought it” ’. Weintraub, ‘Uneasy Friendship: Shaw and Yeats’, p. 149.

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Notes 82. For details of the Shaw plays produced annually at the Abbey throughout the 1930s, see Nicholas Grene and Deirdre McFeely, ‘Shaw Productions in Ireland, 1900–2009’, in Gahan (ed.), The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 30, pp. 236–59. 83. For details of their collaboration on the Irish Academy of Letters, see Stanley Weintraub, ‘Uneasy Friendship: Shaw and Yeats’, pp. 146–7. 84. W.B. Yeats, ‘Journal – Entry 34’, Memoirs, p. 151.

Chapter 5 1. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 328. 2. Biographical details on Lady Gregory are drawn from Colm Tóibín, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (London: Picador, 2003) and from ‘Introduction’, Lady Gregory: Selected Writings, edited by Lucy McDiarmid and Maureen Waters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). 3. Cited in Christopher Murray, ‘Lady Gregory: Coming to Terms’, TwentiethCentury Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 37. 4. Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, p. 48. 5. Letter of Annie Horniman to W.B. Yeats, 26 November 1906. Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the first Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 162. 6. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, edited by Mary FitzGerald (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1983), p. 351. The next two quotations are from the same page and source. 7. Cited in Colm Tóibín, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, p, 108. 8. Lady Gregory, ‘Interviews with Lady Gregory 1911–1912’, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), p. 164. 9. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 351. 10. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 351. 11. See Eric Weitz, ‘Lady Gregory’s “Humour of Character”: A Commedia Approach to Spreading the News’, Special Issue: Lady Gregory, edited by Anne Fogarty, Irish University Review 34(1) (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 144–56. 12. Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, p. 49. 13. Lady Gregory, Spreading the News, Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 31. All future references to Spreading the News are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 14. Seamus Deane, ‘The Drama: Farquhar to Shaw’, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986), pp. 129–30. 15. Cited in Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, p. 48. 16. Letter from Lady Gregory to Padraic Colum, 9 January 1906. Theatre Business, p. 105. 17. Letter from Lady Gregory to J.M. Synge, 26 December 1907. Theatre Business, p. 261. 18. The best account is James W. Flannery, ‘The Departure of the Fays’, W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 225–38. 19. Letter of Lady Gregory to W.B. Yeats, 26 December 1907. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 4: 1905–1907, edited by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 827. 20. Lady Gregory, The Gaol Gate, Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 137. All future references to The Gaol Gate are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 21. The Chambers Dictionary (Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap, 1998), p. 1047. 22. Cathy Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939: Gender and Violence On Stage (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 27. 23. Lady Gregory, ‘The Felons of Our Land’, Selected Writings, p. 255. 24. Letter from J.M. Synge to Molly Allgood, 9 January 1908. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Volume 2: 1907–1909, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 127. 25. Letter from Lady Gregory to W.B. Yeats, 8 January 1908. This, and the other letters cited in this paragraph, have not been printed yet. I am grateful to the general editor John Kelly for supplying me with copies. 26. John Kelly thinks that Lady Gregory ‘means her class by “the classes” – the landed gentry, etc. She uses it in this context in some of her other letters. There were intermittent problems with the grass farmers at this time, so they were particularly sensitive to any plays with a political dimension’. Personal correspondence, 22 September 2004. 27. Letter from J.M. Synge to Molly Allgood, 11 January 1908. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Volume 2: 1907–1909, p. 129. 28. W.G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre: An Autobiographical Record (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935), p. 231. 29. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, p. 112. 30. Colm Tóibín, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, p. 33. 31. Lady Gregory, The Rising of the Moon, Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 143. All future references to The Rising of the Moon are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text.

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Notes 32. Lady Gregory, ‘Lady Gregory on Play-Writing and her Plays’ , Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 359. 33. Ford’s film was made up of three episodes: one short story, ‘The Majesty of the Law’ by Frank O’Connor, and two plays, the Gregory and Michael J. McHugh’s A Minute’s Wait. The Gregory play was updated from 1907 to the War of Independence and the title ‘1921’ given to the episode, with The Rising of the Moon reserved for the film’s title. I am grateful to Charles Barr for pointing this out. 34. Bertolt Brecht, ‘On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, translated by John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang; London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 84–5. 35. This is part of a longer extract from Tony Huston’s script quoted by Kevin Barry in ‘The Dead’: Ireland into Film (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), p. 60. 36. Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, p. 51. 37. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, pp. 57. 38. Lady Gregory, The Workhouse Ward, Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 178. All future references to The Workhouse Ward are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 39. Martin McDonagh, The Lonesome West (London: Methuen, 1997), pp. 54–5. 40. Lady Gregory, ‘Play-writing’, Our Irish Theatre, p. 56. 41. Martin McDonagh, The Lonesome West, p. 61. 42. Another major male double-act, Captain Boyle and Joxer Daly in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, will be discussed in the next chapter. 43. Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 197. 44. Ecclesiastes, Chapter 4, verses 9–10, The King James Bible. 45. See Richard Allen Cave, ‘The Dangers and Difficulties of Dramatizing the Lives of Deirdre and Grania’, in Perspectives of Irish Drama and Theatre, edited by Jacqueline Genet and Richard Allen Cave (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991), pp. 11–13. 46. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, pp. 362–3. 47. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 362. 48. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 362. 49. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 362. 50. Lady Gregory, Grania, Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, p. 181. All future references to Grania are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 51. Cathy Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights, p. 49. 52. For a discussion of same-sex desire in the play, see Cathy Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939, pp. 49–56. 53. On the first Abbey tour of the U.S. in 1911–12, Gregory, in defending Synge and the Abbey in the absence of Yeats, said she ‘found that I could speak.’ Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, p. 106. 227

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Chapter 6 1. Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 235. 2. Hugh Hunt, Sean O’Casey (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980), p. 39. 3. Gabriel Fallon, Sean O’Casey: The Man I Knew (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 125. 4. Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, A Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004), p. 31. Unless otherwise noted, all biographical details on O’Casey are drawn from this source. 5. Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 112. 6. W.B. Yeats, ‘An Open Letter to Lady Gregory’, Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 249. 7. Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 17. 8. On this, see Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Scenes in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 110–25. 9. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 68. 10. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, Three Dublin Plays, p. 46. 11. Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman, pp. 17–18. All future references to The Shadow of a Gunman are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 12. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, Collected Works, Volume 4: Plays Book II, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 81. 13. Fiona Macintosh, Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), p. 62. 14. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 126. 15. Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 2, edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1971), p. 1021. Murray describes Shaw as O’Casey’s ‘mentor and role model’. Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 49. 16. See Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 120. 17. Cited in Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 152. 18. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books, 2004), p. 265. 19. Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, pp. 265. 20. Cited by Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 148.

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Notes 21. On Hitchcock’s film of Juno and the Paycock, see Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Moffat: Cameron & Hollis, 1999), pp. 99–104. 22. Fiona Macintosh, Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Drama, p. 88. 23. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 90. 24. James Moran, The Theatre of Sean O’Casey (London: Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2013), p. 39. 25. Stephen Watt, Joyce, O’Casey and the Irish Popular Theater (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 169. 26. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 131. 27. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, Three Dublin Plays, p. 182. All future references to The Plough and the Stars are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 28. See Susan Cannon Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 206; Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 164. 29. Quotations from P.H. Pearse, compiled by Prionsias Mac Aonghusa (Cork: The Mercier Press, 1979), p. 32. 30. Quotations from P.H. Pearse, p. 27. 31. Cited by Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 150. 32. Susan Cannon Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, pp. 208–9. 33. Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 168. 34. Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 168. 35. Brian Singleton, ‘The Revival revised’, The Cambridge Companion to TwentiethCentury Drama, edited by Shaun Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 261. 36. Lady Gregory, Journals, 7 October 1929. Cited in Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record, edited by Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas Grene (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), p. 186. 37. Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 201. 38. Sean O’Casey, The Silver Tassie (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), p. 34. All future references to The Silver Tassie are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 39. J.L. Styan, ‘Expressionism in Ireland: the later O’Casey’, Modern drama in theory and practice 3: Expressionism and epic theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 122. 40. Ibid., p. 53. 41. W.B. Yeats, letter to Sean O’Casey, 20 April 1928. The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–41, Volume One, edited by David Krause (London: Cassell, 1975), p. 268. 229

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 42. J.L. Styan, Expressionism and epic theatre, pp. 123–4. 43. Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, p. 202. 44. J.L. Styan, Expressionism and epic theatre, p. 54. 45. Styan, Expressionism and epic theatre, p. 123. 46. See Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, pp. 48–60. 47. J.L. Styan, Expressionism and epic theatre, p. 123. 48. See Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–41, Volume One, pp. 268–71.

Chapter 7 1. Denis Johnston, ‘A Note on What Happened’, The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, edited with an introduction and notes by Christine St Peter (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), p. 125. 2. Cited by Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, A Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004), p. 150. 3. See Hugh Hunt, The Abbey: Ireland’s National Theatre 1904–1978 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979), p. 143. 4. Details of the plays staged by the League are given in Brenna Katz Clarke and Harold Ferrar, The Dublin Drama League 1919–1941 (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1979), pp. 22–40. 5. See Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994), pp. 22–37. 6. Micheál MacLiammóir, All For Hecuba: A Theatrical Biography (Dublin: Progress House, 1961), p. 78. 7. Denis Johnston, The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, edited by Christine St. Peter, p. 58. All future references to The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 8. For more on the staging of The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, see Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 181–2. 9. Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, p. 187. 10. Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 203. 11. Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition, p. 204. 12. Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 122. 13. See Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys, pp. 73–5, 154–68.

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Notes 14. Cathy Leeney, ‘Teresa Deevy: Exile and Silence’, Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939: Gender and Violence on Stage (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 163. 15. Cathy Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939, p. 172. 16. See Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland: 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books, 2004), pp. 358–70. 17. Teresa Deevy, Three Plays: Katie Roche, The King of Spain’s Daughter, The Wild Goose (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 7. All future references to Katie Roche are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 18. See Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber & Faber, 1990). 19. Cathy Leeney, Irish Women Playwrights, p. 164. 20. For more on the Teresa Deevy Project at the Mint Theater in New York, see Teresa Deevy Reclaimed Volume One, edited by Jonathan Bank, John P. Harrington and Christopher Morash (New York: The Mint Theater Company, 2011). This volume contains the texts of Temporal Powers, Katie Roche and Wife to James Whelan. 21. See Hugh Hunt, The Abbey, p. 115. 22. For de Valois’s account of her collaboration with Yeats and her time at the Abbey Theatre, see Ninette de Valois, Come Dance With Me: A Memoir (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957). 23. Richard Allen Cave, Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats (Alton, Hampshire: Dance Books, 2011), p. 59 24. Cave, Collaborations, p. 69. 25. Personal interview, Abbey actor Pat Laffan, who worked with Hunt in the 1970s. The Peacock Theatre, December 2010. 26. Cited R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 628. 27. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume One: 1929–1940, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 217. 28. Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 24. 29. The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume One: 1929–1940, p. 640. 30. Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot, The Complete Dramatic Works (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 11. All future references to Waiting For Godot are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 31. W.B. Yeats, Purgatory, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alpsach (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1969), p. 1041. All future references to Purgatory are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 32. Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot/En Attendant Godot (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), p. 104.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 33. Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 191. 34. W.B. Yeats, ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alpsach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 634.

Chapter 8 Performance and Spectacle 1. Studies specifically addressing the range of performance available during the Revival and not cited elsewhere in the text include Joan FitzPatrick Dean, ‘Pageants, Parades, and Performance Culture’, in Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn, edited by John P. Harrington (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 613–22; P.J. Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a useful prehistory to the Revival, see Alan J. Fletcher, Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 2. See Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh, eds, Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) for a valuable collection on performances in Irish culture. 3. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 4. David Lloyd, ‘After History: Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies’, in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 199, n. 21. 5. Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’(1892), Language, Lore, and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures, edited by Breandán O Conaire (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986), p. 153. 6. Edward Martyn, ‘The Gaelic League and Irish Music’, The Irish Review 1(9) (November 1911), p. 449. 7. Martyn, ‘The Gaelic League and Irish Music’, p. 451, p. 450. 8. Cited in Helen Brennan, The Story of Irish Dance (Dingle: Brandon, 1999), p. 36. 9. Frank Whelan, The Complete Guide to Irish Dance (Belfast: Apple Tree Press, 2000), p. 27. 232

Notes 10. Cited in Diarmuid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books, 2005), p. 101. 11. Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 48–9. 12. Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 73–99. 13. See Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward, eds, Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), and Joanne Mooney Eichacker, Irish Republican Women in America: Lecture Tours, 1916–1925 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003). 14. Lady Gregory, Lady Gregory’s Journals, Books 30–44, 21 February 1925–1929, May 1932, edited by Daniel Joseph Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 62. 15. Nicholas Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 42–65. 16. Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, p. 442. 17. For accounts of the Tailteann Games, see Mike Cronin, ‘Projecting the Nation through Sport and Culture: Ireland, Aonach Tailteann and the Irish Free State, 1924–32’, Journal of Contemporary History 38(3) (July 2003), pp. 395–411; Reynolds, Modernism, Drama and the Audience for Irish Spectacle, pp. 156–98. 18. ’Attendance of 100,000: Approximate Numbers at Tailteann Events’, Freeman’s Journal, 18 August 1924, p. 5. 19. Joan FitzPatrick Dean, ‘Rewriting the Past: Historical Pageantry in the Dublin Civic Weeks of 1927 and 1929’, New Hibernia Review 13(1) (Spring 2009), pp. 20–41. 20. See Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 21. Rory O’Dwyer, The Eucharistic Congress, Dublin 1932: An Illustrated History (Dublin: Nonsuch, 2009), p. 116. 22. ‘The Eucharistic Congress’, Irish Times, 20 June 1932, p. 6. 23. O’Dwyer, The Eucharistic Congress, p. 18. 24. G.K. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932), p. 15. 25. O’Dwyer, The Eucharistic Congress, p. 99. 26. Very Rev. P. Canon Boylan, ed., Dublin: The Book of the Congress, Volume 1 (Wexford: John English & Co, 1934), p. 19. 27. Chesterton, Christendom in Dublin, p. 44. 28. Cardinal William O’Connell, The Dublin Eucharistic Congress: An Address Delivered in the Catholic Hour (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1932), p. 5.

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The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 29. Christie Fox, Breaking Forms: The Shift to Performance in Late TwentiethCentury Irish Drama (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), p. 5. 30. Fox, Breaking Forms, p. 5. See Anna McMullan, ‘Reclaiming Performance: The Contemporary Irish Independent Theatre Sector’, in The State of the Play: Irish Theatre in the ‘Nineties, edited by Eberhard Bort (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1996), pp. 29–38, and Bernadette Sweeney, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

The Years of Synge 1. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 276. 2. Cited in David Dwan, The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), p. 160. 3. Frank H. O’Donnell, Souls for Gold! Pseudo-Celtic Drama in Dublin (London: Nassau Press, 1899), p. 7. 4. D.P. Moran, ‘The Future of the Irish Nation’, The New Ireland Review, February 1899, p. 353. 5. John Eglinton, ‘What Should be the Subjects of National Drama?’, Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume 3, edited by Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991), p. 957. 6. P.H. Pearse, ‘The “Irish” Literary Theatre’, An Claidheamh Soluis, 20 May 1899, p. 157. 7. See Alan Titley, ‘Synge and the Irish Language’, in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge, edited by P.J. Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 92–103. 8. J. M. Synge, ‘The Old and the New in Ireland’, Collected Works Vol. 2, Prose, edited by Alan Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1966; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 385. 9. James Connolly, Worker’s Republic, 1 October 1898. 10. J.M. Synge, ‘Preface to The Tinker’s Wedding’, Collected Works Vol. 4, Plays: Book II, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 3. 11. J. M. Synge, Preface to The Playboy of the Western World, Collected Works Vol. 4, Plays: Book II, pp. 53–4. 12. This may explain Yeats’s later remark that Synge ‘seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought’. W. B. Yeats, ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 319 13. J.M Synge, ‘The People of the Glens’, Collected Works Vol. 2, Prose, edited by Alan Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1966; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 224n.

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Notes

Interview 1. Conor McPherson, Shining City, Plays: Three (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013), p. 54. 2. McPherson, Shining City, p. 56. 3. Conor McPherson, Foreword, Plays: Three, p. ix.

Conclusion 1. W.B. Yeats, ‘A People’s Theatre: An Open Letter to Lady Gregory’, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 255. 2. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London and Basingstoke, 1955), p. 571. 3. John P. Harrington, ‘Samuel Beckett and the countertradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, edited by Shaun Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 165. 4. Harrington, ‘Samuel Beckett and the countertradition’. 5. Paul Murphy, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macillan, 2008), p. 80. 6. Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Abbey Theatre: Ireland’s National Theatre: The First Hundred Years (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), p. 102. The book’s endpapers show a full house laughing uproariously at John McCann’s popular comedy, A Jew Called Sammy, in the 1950s. 7. James Moran, The Theatre of Sean O’Casey (London and New York: Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2013), p. 241. 8. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: 1941–1956, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 263. 9. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 56–7. 10. John P. Harrington, ‘Beckett and the countertradition’, p. 175. 11. Cited in C.L. Innes, ‘Postcolonial Synge’, in The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Synge, edited by P.J. Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 126. 12. Olwen Fouéré, ‘Yeats and the Art of Play’, in Yeats and the Theater: Yeats International Theater Festival, guest edited by James W. Flannery, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, edited by Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 203. 13. Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 3.

235

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 14. Bertolt Brecht, Diaries 1920–1922, edited by Herta Rumthun, translated by John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), pp. 49–50. 15. Bertolt Brecht, Senora Carrar’s Rifles, translated by Wolfgang Sauerlander, in Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays 4, edited by Tom Kuhn and John Willett (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 207. 16. Brecht, Senora Carrar’s Rifles, p. 209. 17. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, edited by John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang; London: Methuen, 1964), p. 204. 18. Mustapha Matura, Playboy of the West Indies (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1988), p. 1. 19. Matura, Playboy of the West Indies, p. 21. 20. Matura, Playboy of the West Indies, p. 57. 21. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, Collected Plays, Volume 4: Plays Book II, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 65. 22. Martin McDonagh, The Lonesome West (London: Methuen, 1997), p. 186. 23. J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, p. 73. 24. Vic Merriman, ‘Decolonisation Postponed: The Theatre of Tiger Trash’, Irish University Review 29(2) (Autumn/Winter 1999), p. 316. 25. Shaun Richards, ‘Lost Playboys of the Western World’: Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy,’ paper delivered at ESSE 5 Conference, Helsinki, August 2000, p. 3. 26. Introduction, The Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘before rules was made’, edited by Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), p. xv. 27. Introduction, The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays, edited by Frank McGuinness (London and Boston: Faber & Faber 1996), p. ix. 28. Marina Carr, Portia Coughlan, The Dazzling Dark, p. 240. The version of the play in Marina Carr, Plays One (London: Faber & Faber, 1999) drops most of the dialect. 29. See Anthony Roche, ‘Pinter and Ireland’, The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, edited by Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 2nd edn 2009), pp. 195–215. 30. Harold Pinter, Mountain Language, Plays Four (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 403. 31. Lady Gregory, The Gaol Gate, Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, edited by Mary FitzGerald (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), p. 137. 32. Harold Pinter, Mountain Language, p. 405. 33. Pinter, Mountain Language, p. 408. 34. Lady Gregory, The Gaol Gate, p. 142.

236

Notes 35. Stephen Watt, The Irish-Jewish Unconscious and the Circum-North Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 242. 36. Christopher Murray, ‘Playing the North’, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 189–90. 37. Frank McGuinness, Carthaginians, Plays One (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 342. 38. Frank McGuinness, personal interview, March 2014. 39. Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

237

238

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Irish Theatre History Ellis-Fermor, Una, The Irish Dramatic Movement. London: Methuen, 1939; London: Routledge, 2012. Hogan, Robert and James Kilroy, The Irish Literary Theatre 1899–1901: The Modern Irish Drama, a documentary history I. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1975. Hogan, Robert and James Kilroy, Laying the Foundations 1902–1904: The Modern Irish Drama, a documentary history II. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1976. Hogan, Robert and James Kilroy, The Years of Synge 1905–1909: The Modern Irish Drama, a documentary history III. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1978. Hogan, Robert, Richard Burnham and Daniel P. Poteet, The Rise of the Realists 1910–1915: The Modern Irish Drama IV. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1979. Hogan, Robert and Richard Burnham, The Art of the Amateur 1916–1920: The Modern Irish Drama, a documentary history V. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1984. Hogan, Robert and Richard Burnham, The Years of O’Casey 1921–1926: The Modern Irish Drama VI. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992. Katz Clarke, Brenna and Harold Ferrar, The Dublin Drama League 1919–1941. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1979. Levitas, Ben, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Maxwell, D.E.S., A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Welch, Robert, The Abbey Theatre 1899–1999. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Irish Theatre Cannon Harris, Susan, Gender and Modern Irish Drama. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002. Fitz-Simon, Christopher, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards. London: Nick Hern Books, 1994. Fox, Christie, Breaking Forms: The Shift to Performance in Late Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Grene, Nicholas, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 239

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 Harrington, John P., ‘Samuel Beckett and the countertradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, edited by Shaun Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Leeney, Cathy, Irish Women Playwrights 1900–1939: Gender and Violence On Stage. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Lonergan, Patrick, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Macintosh, Fiona, Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama. Cork: Cork University Press, 1994. MacLiammóir, Micheál, All for Hecuba: A Theatrical Autobiography. Dublin: Progress House, 1961. Malone, Irina Ruppo, Ibsen and the Irish Revival. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. McMullan, Anna, ‘Reclaiming Performance: The Contemporary Irish Independent Theatre Sector,’ in The State of the Play: Irish Theatre in The Nineties, edited by Eberhardt Bort. Trier: Verlag Trier, 1996. McNulty, Eugene, Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival. Cork: Cork University Press, 2010. Moran, James, Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre. Cork: Cork University Press, 2005. Morash, Christopher and Shaun Richards, Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Murphy, Paul, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Murray, Christopher, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Pilkington, Lionel, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pilkington, Lionel, Theatre and Ireland. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Reynolds, Paige, Modernism, Drama and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Singleton, Brian, ‘The Revival Revised’, in The Cambridge Companion to TwentiethCentury Irish Drama, edited by Shaun Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sweeney, Bernadette, Performing the Body in Irish Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Trotter, Mary, Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Worth, Katharine, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett. London: The Athlone Press, 1978.

The Abbey Theatre Cave, Richard Allen, ‘The Dangers and Difficulties of Dramatizing the Lives of Deirdre and Grania’, in Perspectives of Irish Drama and Theatre, 240

Select Bibliography edited by Jacqueline Genet and Richard Allen Cave. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991. Fay, Frank, Towards a National Theatre: The Dramatic Criticism of Frank J. Fay, edited by Robert Hogan. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1970. Fay, W.G. and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre: An Autobiographical Record. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935. Fitz-Simon, Christopher, The Abbey Theatre: Ireland’s National Theatre: The First Hundred Years. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003. Frazier, Adrian, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1990. Hogan, Robert and Michael J. O’Neill (eds) Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from his Unpublished Journal ‘Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer’. Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Hunt, Hugh, The Abbey: Ireland’s National Theatre 1904–1978. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979. Krause, David, ‘ “The Rageous Ossian”: Patron-Hero of Synge and O’Casey’, Modern Drama 4(3), 1961. Laurence, Dan H. and Nicholas Grene (eds), Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983. Mathews, P.J., Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement. Cork: Cork University Press; South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Mikhail, E.H. (ed.), The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988. Pethica, James, ‘ “Our Kathleen”: Yeats’s Collaboration with Lady Gregory in the Writing of Cathleen ni Houlihan’, in Yeats and Women, edited by Deirdre Toomey. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997. Quinn, Antoinette, ‘Staging the Irish Peasant Woman’, in Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000, edited by Nicholas Grene. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2000. Saddlemyer, Ann (editor), Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982.

By W.B. Yeats Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1955. Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan, 1961. Explorations, edited by Mrs W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1962. Memoirs, edited by Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan, 1972. Uncollected Prose, Volume 1, edited by John P. Frayne. London: Macmillan, 1970. A Vision. London: Macmillan, 1937. (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1893–1935. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.

241

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. London: Macmillan, 1957. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach. London: Macmillan, 1969. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume 8: The Irish Dramatic Movement, edited by Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran. New York and London: Scribner, 2003. The Letters of W.B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade. New York: Macmillan, 1955. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 3: 1901–1904, edited by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 4: 1905–1907, edited by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

About W.B. Yeats Cave, Richard Allen, Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats. Alton: Dance Books, 2011. Flannery, James W., Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976. Flannery, James W. (editor), Yeats and the Theater, in Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992. Foster, R.F., W.B. Yeats: A Life I, The Apprentice Mage. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Foster, R.F., W.B. Yeats: A Life II, The Arch-Poet. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. McAteer Michael, Yeats and European Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

By J.M. Synge Collected Works, Volume 1, Poems, edited by Robin Skelton. London: Oxford University Press, 1962; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982. Collected Works, Volume 2, Prose, edited by Alan Price. London: Oxford University Press, 1966; Colin Smythe: Gerrards Cross; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982. Collected Works, Volume 3, Plays: Book I, edited by Ann Saddlemyer. London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982. Collected Works, Volume 4, Plays: Book II, edited by Ann Saddlemyer. London: Oxford University Press, 1968; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smyhe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press, 1982.

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Select Bibliography The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Volume 1: 1871–1907, edited by Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Volume II: 1907–1909, edited by Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

About J.M. Synge Fogarty, Anne, ‘Ghostly Intertexts: James Joyce and the Legacy of Synge’, in Synge and Edwardian Ireland, edited by Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Kiberd, Declan, Synge and the Irish Language. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979. Mathews, P.J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Synge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. McCormack, W.J., Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000. McGuinness, Frank, ‘John Millington Synge and the King of Norway’, in Nicholas Grene (ed.), Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2000. Mikhail, E.H. (ed.), J.M. Synge: Interviews and Recollections. London; Macmillan, 1977. Ní Dhuibhne, Eilís, ‘The Best Field Worker: Synge and Irish Folklore’, in Synge and his Influences: Centenary Essays from the Synge Summer School, edited by Patrick Lonergan. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2011. O’Brien Johnson, Toni, Synge: The Medieval and the Grotesque. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1982. Parker, Randolph, ‘ “Gaming in the Gap”: Language and Liminality in The Playboy of the Western World’, Theatre Journal 37(1), March 1985.

By George Bernard Shaw Selected Non-Dramatic Writings of Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. The Matter with Ireland, edited by David H. Greene and Dan H. Laurence. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 1, edited by Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1970. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 2, edited by Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1971. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 3, edited by Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1972.

243

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Selected Non-Dramatic Writtings of Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 255. The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Volume 4, edited by Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1973. The Portable Shaw, edited by Stanley Weintraub. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

About George Bernard Shaw Gahan, Peter (ed.), Shaw and the Irish Literary Tradition, Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 30. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Holroyd, Michael, Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Nelson, Shaw, Synge, Connolly and the Socialist Provocation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011. Sidnell, Michael J., ‘Hic and Ille: Shaw and Yeats’, in Theatre and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland, edited by Robert O’Driscoll. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Weintraub, Stanley, ‘Uneasy Friendship: Shaw and Yeats’, in Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies Volume 1, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983.

By Augusta, Lady Gregory Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972. Selected Plays of Lady Gregory, edited by Mary Fitzgerald. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1983. Lady Gregory’s Journals, edited by Daniel Joseph Murphy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Lady Gregory, Selected Writings, edited by Lucy McDiarmid and Maureen Waters. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.

About Augusta, Lady Gregory Fogarty, Anne (ed.), Special Issue: Lady Gregory, Irish University Review 34(1) (Spring/Summer 2004). Saddlemyer, Ann, In Defense of Lady Gregory, Playwright. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1977. Tóibín, Colm, Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush. London: Picador, 2003.

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Select Bibliography

By Sean O’Casey Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949), Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1981. The Letters of Sean O’Casey 1910–1941, edited by David Krause. London: Cassell, 1975. The Silver Tassie (London: Faber and Faber, 2014). Three Dublin Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.

About Sean O’Casey Fallon, Gabriel, Sean O’Casey: The Man I Knew. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. Hunt, Hugh, Sean O’Casey. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980. Moran, James, The Theatre of Sean O’Casey. London: Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2013. Murray, Christopher, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work, A Biography. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004. Watt, Stephen, Joyce, O’Casey and the Irish Popular Theater. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991.

Other Allen, Nicholas, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Barr, Charles, English Hitchcock. Moffat: Cameron & Hollis, 1999. Barry, Kevin, ‘The Dead’: Ireland into Film. Cork: Cork University Press, 2001. Beckett, Samuel, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 1983. Beckett, Samuel, The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot/En Attendant Godot. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. Beckett, Samuel, The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume I: 1929–1940, edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Beckett, Samuel, The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II: 1941–1956, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Bhaba, Homi, The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Boucicault, Dion, The Dolmen Boucicault, edited by David Krause. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1964. Boucicault, Dion, Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault, edited by Andrew Parkin. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987. 245

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 Boylan, Very Rev. P. Canon (ed.), Dublin: The Book of the Congress, Volume 1. Wexford: John English and Co., 1934. Brady, Sara and Fintan Walsh (eds), Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, translated by John Willett. New York: Hill & Wang; London: Methuen, 1964. Brecht, Bertolt, Diaries 1920–1922, edited by Herta Rumthun, translated by John Willett. London: Eyre Methuen, 1979. Brecht, Bertolt, Collected Plays 4, edited by Ton Kuhn and John Willett. London: Methuen, 2001. Brennan, Helen, The Story of Irish Dance. Dingle: Brandon, 1999. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cairns, David and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Carr, Marina, Play One. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Chesterton, G.K., Christendom in Dublin. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932. Condon, Janette, ‘The Patriotic Children’s Treat: Irish Nationalism and Children’s Culture at the Twilight of Empire’, Irish Studies Review 8(2), August 2000. Cronin, Mike, ‘Projecting the Nation through Sport and Culture: Ireland, Aonach Tailteann and the Irish Free State, 1924–1932’, Journal of Contemporary History 38(3), July 2003. Dean, Joan FitzPatrick, ‘Pageants, Parades and Performance Culture’, in Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn, edited by John P. Harrington. New York: Norton, 2009. Dean, Joan FitzPatrick, ‘Rewriting the Past: Historical Pageantry in the Dublin Civic Weeks of 1927 and 1929,’ New Hibernia Review 13(1), Spring 2009. Deane, Seamus, A Short History of Irish Literature. London: Hutchinson, 1986. Deevy, Teresa, Three Plays: Katie Roche, The King of Spain’s Daughter, The Wild Goose. London: Macmillan, 1939. Deevy, Teresa, Teresa Deevy Reclaimed, Volume 1, edited by Jonathan Bank, John P. Harrington and Chris Morash. New York: The Mint Theatre Company, 2011. De Valois, Ninette, Come Dance with Me: A Memoir. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957. Dolan, Anne, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dudley Edwards, Ruth, Patrick Pearse: the triumph of failure. Dublin: Ward River Press, 1990. Dwan, David, The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland. Dublin: Field Day, 2008. Eglinton, John, ‘What Should be the Subjects of National Drama?’, Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volume 3, edited by Seamus Deane. Derry: Field Day, 1991. Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987. Ferriter, Diarmaid, The Transformation of Ireland. London: Profile Books, 2005. Finney, Gail, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism and European Theatre at the Turn of the Century. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. 246

Select Bibliography Fletcher, Alan J., Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000; Cork: Cork University Press, 2000. Friel, Brian, Translations. London: Faber & Faber, 1981. Friel, Brian, Dancing at Lughnasa. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. Harrington, John P. (ed.), Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama. A Norton Critical Edition. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991, 2009. Heaney, Seamus, The Place of Writing. Atlanta: Scholars’ Press, 1989. Holland, Merlin and Rupert Hart-Davis (eds), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. London: Fourth Estate, 2000. Hyde, Douglas, A Literary History of Ireland. London: Unwin, 1899; London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1967. Hyde, Douglas, Love Songs of Connacht. Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1968. Hyde, Douglas, Language, Lore and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures, edited by Breandán O’ Conaire. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986. Hyde, Douglas, Selected Plays of Douglas Hyde, edited by Gareth W. Dunleavy and Janet Egleson Dunleavy. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991. Innes, C.L., The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990. Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Johnston, Denis, The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, edited by Christine St Peter. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992. Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Joyce, James, Ulysses. London: Penguin, 1992. Joyce, James, Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, edited by Kevin Barry. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kennedy, Dennis, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Kiberd, Declan, Irish Classics. London: Granta Books, 2000. Kilroy, Thomas, ‘The Anglo-Irish Theatrical Imagination’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal III(2), Winter 1997/Spring 1998. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Leeney, Cathy and Anna McMullan, The Theatre of Marina Carr: ‘before rules was made’. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003. Lloyd, David, ‘After History: Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies’, in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Clare Carroll and Patricia King. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Lonergan, Patrick, The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2012. 247

The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939 Martyn, Edward, ‘The Gaelic League and Irish Music’, The Irish Review 1(9), November 1911. Martyn, Edward, Selected Plays of George Moore and Edward Martyn, edited by David B. Eakin and Michael Case. Gerrards Cross: Colin Symthe; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Matura, Mustapha, The Playboy of the West Indies. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1988. McCormack, W.J., From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History. Cork: Cork University Press, 1994. McDonagh, Martin, The Lonesome West. London: Methuen, 1997. McGuinness, Frank, Plays One. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. McGuinness, Frank (ed.), The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1996. McPherson, Conor, Plays: Three. London: Nick Hern Books, 2013. McPherson, D.A.J., Women and the Irish Nation: Gender, Culture, and Irish Identity, 1890–1940, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Mercier, Vivian, The Irish Comic Tradition. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Merriman, Vic, ‘Decolonisation Postponed: The Theatre of Tiger Trash’, Irish University Review 29(2), Autumn/Winter 1999. Mooney Eichacker, Joanne, Irish Republican Women in America: Lecture Tours, 1916–1925. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003. Moore, George, Hail and Farewell (Ave, Salve, Vale), edited by Richard Cave. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976. Moran, D.P., ‘The Future of the Irish Nation,’ The New Ireland Review, February 1899. Morin, Emilie, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Morris, Catherine, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Murray, Christopher (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews:1964–1999. London and New York: Faber & Faber, 1999. O’Connell, Cardinal William, The Dublin Euchariastic Congress: An Address Delivered in the Catholic Hour. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1932. O’Donnell, Frank H., Souls for Gold! Psuedo-Celtic Drama in Dublin. London: Nassau Press, 1899. O’Dwyer, Rory, The Eucharistic Congress, Dublin 1932: An Illustrated History. Dublin: Nonsuch, 2009. Pearse, P.H., ‘The “Irish” Literary Theatre’, An Claidheamh Soluis, 20 May 1899. Pearse, P.H., Quotations from P.H. Pearse, edited by Prionias Mac Aonghusa. Cork: The Mercier Press, 1979. Pinter, Harold, Plays Four. London: Faber & Faber, 1998. Pound, Ezra and Ernest Fenollosa, The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan. New York: New Directions, 1959. Powell, Kerry and Peter Raby (eds), Oscar Wilde in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

248

Select Bibliography Richtarik, Marilynn J., Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980–1984. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Roche, Anthony, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994; rev. ed. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Roche, Anthony, ‘Pinter and Ireland’, The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, edited by Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Ryan, Louise and Margaret Ward (eds), Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. Shakespeare, William, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan. Walton-on-Thames: Arden, 1998. Sisson, Elaine, Pearse’s Patriots: St. Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood. Cork: Cork University Press, 2004. Styan, J.L., Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 3: Expressionism and epic theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Ward, Margaret, Unmanageable Revolutionaries. London: Pluto Press, 1983. Watt, Stephen, The Irish-Jewish Unconscious and the Circum-North Atlantic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Whelan, Frank, The Complete Guide to Irish Dance. Belfast: Apple Tree Press, 2000. White, Harry, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wilde, Oscar, Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Paige Reynolds is a Professor in the Department of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, USA. The author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (2007), and editor of ‘Irish Things’, a 2011 special issue of Eire-Ireland, she has published on topics related to modernism, modern and contemporary Irish literature, drama and performance, and periodical culture. She co-chairs the Modernism Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center (Harvard) and was the 2013 Neenan Fellow at Boston College – Ireland. P.J. Mathews is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin and has published widely on Irish literature and theatre including a monograph on the Irish Literary Revival (Revival, Field Day, 2003). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Millington Synge (2009) and author of over twenty scholarly articles and book chapters on Irish literary and cultural topics. Currently, he is editing an edition of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan for Bloomsbury/ Methuen Drama. He is director of academic podcasting for UCDscholarcast (www.ucd.ie/scholarcast). Conor McPherson was born in Dublin in 1971. After an MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, he began producing and directing his plays in Dublin’s fringe venues, including Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief. His 1995 play This Lime Tree Bower transferred to the Bush Theatre in London and since then all of his original plays have premiered in London. These include The Weir, The Seafarer, Shining City, Dublin Carol, Port Authority and The Night Alive. He is a recipient of the Laurence Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards and three Tony Award nominations.

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252

INDEX

Abbey School of Dance 156 Achebe, Chinua 71 Things Fall Apart 71 Adigun, Bisi 199 Allgood, Molly (‘Máire O’Neill’) 1, 5, 31–2, 41, 43, 60, 75–6, 107, 172 Allgood, Sarah 1, 31–2, 43, 93, 147, 172 Andreyev, Leonid 147 Antheil, George 156 Antoine, André 63 Aonach Tailteann (Tailteann Games) 166, 169 Archer, William 15, 20 Arcola Theatre 155 Ashe, Thomas 121, 168 Atkinson, Robert 178 Austin, J.L. 162 Avenue Theatre 81 Bacon, Francis 80 Bailey, W.F., the Rt. Hon. 94 Bank, Jonathan 155 Barry, Sebastian 183 Beckett, Samuel 29, 58, 80, 111, 125, 141, 157–60, 188, 195–7, 201 Endgame 125, 188, 196 Murphy (novel) 157 Waiting for Godot 58, 65, 111, 157–60, 188, 196 Watt (novel) 201 Behan, Brendan 149 Berliner Ensemble 199 Bernhardt, Sarah 14 Bhabha, Homi 162 Bible 113–4, 141–2 Book of Ecclesiastes 114 Blue Raincoat Theatre Company 198 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen 106 Blythe, Ernest 155 Book of the [Eucharistic] Congress 169 Boucicault, Dion 9–12, 64, 88, 129, 147 Colleen Bawn, The 10, 11

Corsican Brothers, The 10 London Assurance 10 Shaughraun, The 11, 64 Boyd, John 203 Flats, The 203 Boyle, William 196 Building Fund, The 196 Eloquent Dempsy, The 196 Brecht, Bertolt 110, 113, 133, 138–9, 198–9 Mother Courage and her Children 199 Senora Carrar’s Rifles 199 Butler, Jean 198 Butler, Judith 162 Carr, Marina 200–1 By the Bog of Cats 200 Portia Coughlan 200–1 Carson, Edward, Lord 166 Casey, Michael 121, 191 Cave, Richard Allen 114, 156 Censorship Select Committee 90 Chesterton, G.K. 170 Cogley, Bannard, Madame 166 Colum, Padraic 32, 82, 104, 151, 180 Broken Soil 82 Saxon Shillin’, The 180 Connolly, James 121, 160, 165, 180 Under Which Flag 180 Connolly, Sean 50 Constitution 151 Cousins, James 33 Coward, Noel 182 Blithe Spirit 182 Craig, Gordon 46 Crotty, Derbhle 151 Cummins, Geraldine 165 Cusack, Cyril 80, 197 Dante 147 Darragh, Florence 43 Day, Susanne 165 Dead, The (film)110

253

Index Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick 167 Deevy, Teresa 3, 150–6, 200 Katie Roche 150–6 King of Spain’s Daughter, The 150 Reapers 150 Wife to James Whelan 155 De Valera, Eamon 137, 151, 153–4, 169 De Valois, Ninette 156–7 Donnelly, Donal 109 Douglas, Lord Alfred 14–5 Dowden, Edward 38 Dowling, Joe 132 Doyle, Roddy 199 DruidSynge 76–7 Druid Theatre 76–7, 112, 140, 161 Dublin Drama League 146–50, 156, 167, 195 Dublin Theatre Festival 197 Dulac, Edmund 47 Edward VII, King 51 Edwards, Hilton 147–50, 167–8 Eglinton, John 175 Ervine, St. John 119, 155 Mixed Marriage 119 Eucharistic Congress 168–71 Eurovision Song Contest 198 Fallon, Gabriel 119, 128 Farquhar, George 12, 15, 80 Farr, Florence 20, 31 Fay, Frank 1, 31–3, 35, 40, 43, 63, 65, 83–4, 105, 107, 156–7 Fay, W.G. (‘Willie’) 1, 31–3, 35, 40, 63–4, 71, 83, 105, 107, 157, 172 Fenollosa, Ernest 46 Ferriter, Diarmaid 96, 127 Field Day Theatre Company 80 Finney, Gail 72–3 Field, John 80 Fitzgerald, Barry 147 Fitzmaurice,George 112 Dandy Dolls, The 112 Fitz-Simon, Christopher 196 Flannery, James W. 30, 32, 44, 198 Flatley, Michael 198 Ford, John 109 Rising of the Moon, The (film) 109 Foster, Roy 29–30, 35, 46–7, 84 Fouére, Olwen 198 Fox, Christie 171

254

Friel, Brian 80, 153–4, 183, 192 Dancing at Lughnasa 153–4 Making History 80 ‘Plays Peasant and Unpeasant’ (prose) Translations 80 Friel, Judy 151 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) 163, 166 Gaelic League 120, 123, 162–3, 173, 177–9 Gaiety Theatre 161 Gate Theatre 3, 147–50, 161 George V, King 166 Glaspell, Susan 147 Globe Theatre 191 Goethe, J.W. 54 Gogarty, Oliver St. John 119 Blight 119 Goldsmith, Oliver 12, 15, 80 Gonne, Iseult 50 Gonne, Maud 34–5, 49–50, 62, 127, 164–5 Granville-Barker, Harley 79, 83, 85, 89 Gregory, Augusta, Lady 1–5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 22, 25–7, 30–6, 41, 45–9, 54, 56, 65, 72, 76, 79, 81–2, 84, 87, 90, 92–5, 97, 99–118, 119, 122, 124, 127, 135–8, 146–7, 154–5, 160, 165, 172, 174, 176, 178–9, 195, 200–2 Cathleen ni Houlihan 5, 25–6, 29, 33–6, 44, 50, 63, 87, 90, 94–5, 95, 100, 105, 148, 156, 167, 179, 188–9 Cuchulain of Muirhemne (translations) 37 ‘Donal Óg’ 110 Gaol Gate, The 32, 101, 104–8, 180, 201–2 Grania 84, 114–8, 154, 201 Hanrahan’s Oath 101 Hyacinth Halvey 105 Our Irish Theatre (prose) 90, 107, 112 Pot of Broth, The 81–2 Rising of the Moon, The 105, 108–11, 180 Spreading the News 4, 27, 32, 63, 85, 100, 105, 108, 124, 180 ‘The Felons of Our Land’ (prose) 106 Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (translations) 46 Workhouse Ward, The 90, 93, 111–4 White Cockade, The 84 Gregory, Robert 99 Gregory, William, Sir 99 Grein, J.T. 15 Grene, Nicholas 9, 26, 126, 131

Index Griffin, Gerald 10 Collegians, The 10 Griffith, Arthur 19, 62 ‘In a Real Wicklow Glen’ 63 Hare, David 183 Harrington, John P. 195, 197 Harris, Susan Cannon 134, 136 Heaney, Seamus 49 Henry, Niall 71 Hinds, Ciarán 198 Hitchcock, Alfred 128 Juno and the Paycock (film) 128 Holloway, Joseph 92–3 Holroyd, Michael 13, 15, 85, 88 Horniman, Annie 4, 20, 51, 82 Hughes, Kellie 198 Hugo, Victor 91 Hunt, Hugh 119, 146, 156, 157 Huston, John 110, 196 Dead, The (film) 110, 196 Huston, Tony 110 Hyde, Douglas 7, 8, 11, 25–7, 65–7, 162, 177–8 Casadh an tSugáin (The Twisting of the Rope) 7, 25–7, 35, 55, 178 Literary History of Ireland, A 8, 65–6 Love Songs of Connacht 7 ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ 7, 162 Hynes, Garry 76, 112, 138, 140 Ibsen, Henrik 8, 18–23, 26, 30, 54, 60, 62, 130, 133, 147, 180 Brand 19, 21 Doll’s House, A 18–9, 21, 62, 130, 133 Ghosts 23, 130 Hedda Gabler 21 Peer Gynt 19, 21 Rosmersholm 20 Wild Duck, The 130 Independent Theatre 15 Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) 3, 35, 165 Innes, C.L. 71 The Devil’s Own Mirror: The Irishman and the African in Modern Literature 71 Innes, Christopher 204 Irish Academy of Letters 97

Irish Citizen Army 121, 134–5 Irish Constitution 137 Irish Literary Theatre 2, 9, 22–7, 30, 54–5, 81, 83, 174, 178 Irish National Theatre Society 33, 55. 62, 81, 84, 107 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 125, 127–8 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) 179 Irish Volunteers 135 Irish Workers’ Dramatic Company 180 Irish Writing 201 Ito, Michio 47 Jarry, Alfred 40 Ubu Roi 40 John, Augustus 140 Johnston, Denis 3, 145–50, 204 Moon in the Yellow River, The 149 Old Lady Says ‘No!’,The 3, 85, 145–50, 204 Jonson, Ben 101–2 Bartholomew Fair 102 Joyce, James 18, 23–5, 81, 110, 119, 121, 149, 157, 173–4, 196–8 Finnegans Wake 198 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 18, 23–5, 121, 173–4 ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ 23 ‘The Dead’ 110, 196 Ulysses 119, 149 Jubainville, Professor Henri d’Arbois de 54 Kaiser, Georg 146 From Morn Till Midnight 146 Kavanagh, John 132 Keane, Edmund 10 Kiberd, Declan 7, 17, 38, 71, 79 Inventing Ireland 79 Irish Classics 79 Kickham, Charles J. 167 Knocknagow or The Homes of Tipperary 167 Kilroy, Thomas 18 Knowlson, James 197 Krause, David 66 Kyd, Thomas 182 Spanish Tragedy, The 182 Larkin, Jim 120 Lauri, Lorenzo, Cardinal 169 Laurie, John 128

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Index Lee, George Vandaleur 13 Leeney, Cathy 106, 116, 150, 155 Levitas, Ben 3, 119 Lonergan, Patrick 198 Lord Chamberlain 14, 79, 89–90, 93 Lord Lieutenant 90, 92 MacAnna, Tomás 143 Mac Conghail, Fiach 204 Macintosh, Fiona 124–5, 127–8 MacLiammóir, Micheál 147–50, 167–8 All for Hecuba (prose) 147 Ford of the Hurdles, The (pageant) 167–8 Importance of Being Oscar, The (drama, after Wilde) 149 Macmillan, Harold 145 MacNeill, Eoin 177 MacSwiney, Terence 119, 165, 168 Maeterlinck, Maurice 30 Magdalene Laundries 152, 161 Mahaffy, Professor J.P. 13, 14, 178 Malone, Irina Ruppo 20 Markievicz, Countess 121 Marquess of Queensberry 15 Martyn, Edward 2, 22, 174, 176 Heather Field, The 22 Maeve, 25 Mason, Patrick 203 Matura, Mustapha 199 Playboy of the West Indies 199 Mathews, P.J. 5, 86, 119 Maxwell, D.E.S. 18, 79 A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891–1980 McAteer, Michael 21, 29–30, 37, 40, 43–5, 52, 159 McBride, Major John 50 McCann, Donal 132, 196 McCann, John 196 McClory, Sean 110 McCormick, F.J. 146–7 McDonagh, Thomas 49–50, 165 When the Dawn is Come 50 McDonagh, Martin 76, 112–3, 199–200 Lonesome West, The 112–3, 200 Skull in Connemara, A 200 McGreevy, Thomas 157 McGuinness, Frank 54, 200–1, 203 Carthaginians 203

256

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme 203 McGuinness, Norah 156 McMaster, Anew 201 McMullan, Anna 171 McNamara, Brinsley 97 McPherson, Conor 5, 48, 103–4, 182–93 Night Alive, The 190 Plays: Three 189 Shining City 5, 186–7 Veil, The 189–90 Weir, The 5, 184–5 Mercier, Vivian 148–9 Meyerfeld, Max 66 Mint Theatre 155 Moore, George 2, 22, 25, 80, 178 Diarmuid and Grainne 25 Moran, D.P. 175 Moran, James 130, 196 Morash, Chris 40 Morin, Emilie 157 Morrissey, Eamon 140 Mrs. Patrick Campbell 43 Mullen, Marie 138 Murfi, Mikel 71 Murphy, Paul 196 Murphy, Tom 183 Murray, Christopher 71, 79, 100, 102, 111, 121, 134, 137–8, 140, 142, 149, 203 Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up To Nation 79 Murray, T.C. 151, 195–6 Autumn Fire 196 National Theatre (England) 143, 197, 203 Nic Shiúbhlaigh, Máire 34–5 Nishikigi 51–2 O’Brien, George 137 O’Casey, Sean 3, 4, 8, 79, 83, 119–43, 145–6, 148–9, 155–6, 172, 180, 190–1, 195–7, 202–4 I Knock at the Door (prose) 120 Juno and the Paycock 1, 12, 32, 80, 93, 95–6, 121–3, 125, 127–33, 136, 143, 151, 156, 190, 196–7, 202–3 Plough and the Stars, The 2, 118, 122–3, 132, 133–9, 143, 165, 190, 196 Shadow of a Gunman, The 119–20, 122–7, 129–30, 167, 196

Index Silver Tassie, The 3, 5, 83, 85, 95–7, 122–4, 136, 138–42, 145, 148, 196, 203–4 O’Casey, Shivaun 203 O’Connell, Daniel 164, 176 O’Connell, William, Cardinal 170–1 O’Connor, Joseph 32 Ghost Light 32 O’Dea, Jimmy 167 O’Dempsey, Bridget 107 Odets, Clifford 202 Awake and Sing! 202 O’Donnell, Frank Hugh 175 O’Flaherty, Liam 149 Olohan, John 140 O’Neill, Eugene 147, 196 Desire Under the Elms 196 Parker, Lynne 140 Parker, Randolph 73 Parnell, Charles Stewart 172–3 Peacock Theatre 146–7, 151, 198, 201 Pearse, Mrs. 135 Pearse, Patrick 133–4, 136, 160, 165, 168, 177–8 ‘A Mother’ (poem) 134 An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light) (editor) 163, 177–8 ‘O’Donovan Rossa’ (panegyric) 134, 168 ‘Peace and the Gael’ (prose) 134 ‘The Coming Revolution’ (prose) 134 Pethica, James 33 Pike Theatre 157 Pilkington, Lionel 128, 132 Pinter, Harold 150, 201–2 Mountain Language 201–2 Pirandello, Luigi 147–8, 167 Henry IV 148, 167 Plunkett, Horace 173 Pound, Ezra 46, 48 Prime Time 187 Proclamation of an Irish Republic 133 Queen’s Theatre 167, 196 Quinn, John 75 Racine, Jean 53–4 Radio Éireann 170 Radio Telefís Éireann 170 Reavey, George 157 Reinhardt, Max 198

Reynolds, Paige 5, 35, 74, 161–71 Rice, Elmer 202 Richards, Shaun 40, 200 Richards, Shelah 147 Rising of the Moon, The (film) 109 Ritschel, Nelson O’Ceallaigh 82 Riverdance 198 riverrun (after Joyce) 198 Robinson, Lennox 46, 97, 122, 135, 138, 146, 149–50, 155, 157, 195–6 Roche, Billy 183 Rossa, Jeremiah O’Donovan 134,168 Rough Magic Theatre Company 140 Royal Academy of Sweden 29 Royal Ballet 156 Royal Court Theatre 3, 79, 84–5, 89 Royal Irish Academy of Music 54 Royalty Theatre 56, 81 Russell, George (‘AE’) 33, 40–1 Deirdre 33 Ryan, Fred 119, 180 Laying of the Foundations, The 119, 180 Saint James’s Theatre 15 ‘St. Patrick’s Breastplate’ 66 Saint Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street 33, 56 Savoy Theatre 169 Schiller, J.C.F. von 54 Schnitzler, Arthur 147 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 162 Shakespeare, William 37–40, 86, 182, 191–2 Hamlet 44, 70, 182, 191 Henry IV Part One 39 Henry IV Part Two 37 Henry VI Part Two 37 King John 37 King Lear 38, 146 Macbeth 44, 191 Othello 150 Richard II 37–8 Richard III 37 Shaw, Bessie (Gurly, Lucinda Elizebeth) 13 Shaw, Charlotte (Payne-Townshend) 90 Shaw, George Bernard 1, 3, 4, 12–8, 79–97, 118, 125, 149, 156, 180, 203–4 Arms and the Man, 20, 81–3 Apple Cart, The 80 Back to Methusaleh 149 Devil’s Disciple, The 89 Heartbreak House 204

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Index Immaturity (novel) 15 John Bull’s Other Island 3, 5, 11, 79–80, 82–89, 93–5, 125 Major Barbara 85, 89, 204 Man and Superman 85 Mrs. Warren’s Profession 15–6 O’Flaherty, V.C. 93–6, 141 Press Cuttings 90 Pygmalion 13, 204 Quintessence of Ibsenism, The (prose) 19 Saint Joan 95, 204 Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, The 79, 84, 89–93 Widowers’ Houses 15, 19 Shaw, George Carr 13 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 127 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 12, 15, 102 Rivals, The 102 Shields, Arthur 147 Shiels, George 195 Sidnell, M.J. 88 Sinclair, Arthur 93 Singleton, Brian 138 Sinn Féin 90, 96 Smock Alley Theatre 161 Sophocles 86, 90 Oedipus the King 90, 191 Spiritual Maxims 152 Strindberg, August 146, 188 Styan, J.L. 139–42 Swedish Royal Theatre 29, 34 Sweeney, Bernadette 171 Synge, Reverend Alexander 53, 191 Synge, John Millington 1, 3–5, 8, 11, 19–22, 25–7, 30–2, 36, 48, 53–78, 81, 83–5, 90–1, 94, 104–5, 107, 112, 114, 119, 123–4, 152–7, 172–82, 184, 191, 195–200 Aran Islands, The (prose) 8–9, 54–5, 184 Deirdre of the Sorrows 41, 43, 75–7, 115 ‘The Dramatic Movement in Ireland’ (prose) 25 ‘Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais’ (prose) 23 Playboy of the Western World, The 1, 2, 5, 7, 18, 21, 26, 29, 34, 36, 41, 45, 55, 57, 67–77, 90–1, 102, 113, 118, 120, 124, 155, 173, 177, 181–2, 199 Riders to the Sea 27, 36, 55–9, 105, 167,

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173, 177, 185, 199 Shadow of the Glen, The 8, 12, 19, 21, 27, 55, 59–63, 76–7, 82, 152–3, 173, 177 ‘The Vagrants of Wicklow’ (prose) 61 Tinker’s Wedding, The 64, 76, 84, 86 Well of the Saints, The 31, 63–7, 80, 85, 114, 156, 177, 196–8 When the Moon Has Set 4, 55 Synge, Kathleen [née Traill] 60 Theatre Royal 169 TLS (Times Literary Supplement) 80 Todhunter, John 20 Sicilian Idyll, A 20 Tóibín, Colm 108 Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush 108 Toller, Ernst 147 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, Sir 89 Tristan and Isolde 147 Trinity College, Dublin 53 Tuohy, Patrick 149 United Irishman, The 62 –3 Vedrenne, J.E. 83–4, 89 Victoria, Queen 164, 180 Vigne, Andrieu de la 65 Moralité de l’Aveugle et du Boiteux (Morality of the Blind Man and The Lame Man) 65 Wagner, Richard 40 Walcott, Derek 197–8 Ti Jean and his Brothers 198 Watt, Stephen 130, 202 Welch, Robert 79 The Abbey Theatre 1899–1999 Welles, Orson 149–50 Othello (film) Whelan, Bill 198 Wilde, Oscar 12–8, 79–80, 102, 149, 157, 184 Duchess of Padua, The 14 Ideal Husband, An 15–6 Importance of Being Earnest, The 15–8, 102 Lady Windermere’s Fan 15–6 Salomé 14–5, 18, 43, 157 Vera; or the Nihilists 14 Woman of No Importance, A 15 Wilde, Lady (‘Speranza’) 13–4

Index Wilde, Sir William 13–4 Wilson, Andrew Patrick 119 Worth, Katharine 30 Zola, Emile 21 Yeats, Anne 149 Yeats, George [Georgina Hyde-Lees] 50, 149 Yeats, John Butler 43, 90, 191 Yeats, William Butler 1–4, 7, 11, 19–20, 22–7, 29–52, 53–6, 64, 67, 75–6, 79–93, 95, 97, 100–1, 104–5, 114, 118, 119, 122, 124, 127, 135, 137–9, 142, 145–8, 155–60, 172, 174–6, 178–80l, 184, 187–9, 191, 195–8 Plays At the Hawk’s Well 44–50, 80, 156, 197–8 Cat and the Moon, The 65, 125, 156 Cathleen ni Houlihan 5, 25–6, 29, 33–6, 44, 50, 63, 87, 90, 94, 100, 105, 148, 156, 167, 179, 188–9 Countess Cathleen, The 2, 4, 22–4, 27, 55, 91–2, 157, 175, 178, 188–9 Death of Cuchulain, The 157, 160 Deirdre 40–4, 47, 115,148 Diarmuid and Grainne 25 Dreaming of the Bones, The 50–2, 146 Fighting the Waves 156 Full Moon in March, A 18, 157 Green Helmet, The 44 Herne’s Egg, The 157 King of the Great Clock Tower, The

156–7 King’s Threshold, The 81 Land of Heart’s Desire, The 20, 26, 35, 81–2 On Baile’s Strand 31, 36–40, 44, 46, 49, 63, 85–6, 100–4, 125–6, 175 Only Jealousy of Emer, The 156 Plays for Dancers, 52 Pot of Broth, The 81–2 Purgatory 149, 156–60, 188–9, 197 Resurrection, The 156–7 Words Upon the Window-Pane, The 146, 156, 187–89 Poems ‘Adam’s Curse’ 31 ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ 99 ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ 160 ‘Easter 1916’ 49–50 ‘Man and the Echo, The’ 34 ‘Municipal Gallery Revisited, The’ 60 ‘No Second Troy’ 127 ‘On being asked for a War Poem’ 95 Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, The (editor) 95 Prose ‘An Introduction for my Plays’ 30–1 ‘An Open Letter’ 45, 195 ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ 37 A Vision 51 ‘Certain Noble Plays of Japan’ 46 ‘Emotion of Multitude’ 38 ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’ 30, 32 The Speckled Bird 67

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