Irish Plays and Playwrights/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PLAYS, THEIR AUDIENCE AND THEIR ART
The drama of the Celtic Renaissance is of an ancestry as mixed as is that of the people of Ireland themselves. There is less in it perhaps of the Gael than in them, for Gaelic literature, until to-day, never approached nearer to the drama than the dialogue, the racy give-and-take of two characters, alike of lively imagination, whether gentle or simple. But even had the colloquies of St. Patrick and Oisin, of Dean Swift and his man Jack, of the Lout and his Mother, been developed, by 1890, to a drama as finished as that of Congreve or Goldsmith, Sheridan or Wilde, those who would have their plays abreast of our time would have gone, just as, with the conditions as they are, the dramatists of the Renaissance did go, to Ibsen and M. Maeterlinck, like all the rest of the world. It is a matter of reproach, in the estimation of many patriotic Irishmen, that Mr. Martyn learned his art of Ibsen, and Mr. Yeats a part of his of M. Maeterlinck, but that attitude is as unreasonable as that which would reproach the Irish Industries Organization Society for studying Danish dairy farms or Belgian chickeries. It is only the technique of the foreigners, modern or ancient, Scandinavian or Greek, that the Abbey dramatists have acquired or have adapted to Irish usage. Stories are world-wide, of course, the folk-tale told by the Derry hearthside being told also in the tent in Turkestan—Cuchulain kills his son as Rustum does, and the Queen of Fairy lures Bran oversea as Venus lures Tannhäuser to the Hörselberg. It is in character, in ideals, in atmosphere, in color, that drama must be native, and in color and in atmosphere, in ideals and in character the Abbey Theatre drama is Irish. Reading of life and style are personal qualities, qualities of the artist himself, though they, too, may take tone and color from national life, and in the drama of many of the Abbey dramatists they do. These dramatists have been more resolutely native, in fact, many of them, than the national dramatists of other countries have been, of France and Germany to-day, of the Spain or the England of the Renaissance. It would seem idle to be saying this were not the contention being raised all the time by certain patriotic groups of Irishmen in America as well as in Ireland that the new drama is not a native drama. It is, as a matter of fact, no less natively Irish than the Elizabethan drama is natively English; it is really more native, for no part of it of moment veils its nationality under even so slight a disguise as "the Italian convention" of that drama. The new Irish drama is more native in its stories than is the Elizabethan drama, as these stories, even when they are stories found in variant forms in other countries, are given the tones of Irish life. The structural forms and the symbolic presentation of ideas of which the Abbey dramatists have availed themselves have no more denationalized their plays than has the Church, a Church from oversea, to which most of them belong, denationalized the Irish people.
Synge, the master dramatist of the new movement, while he does not reproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in his extravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady Gregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot of West-Country imagination; and Mr. Yeats, if further removed from the Irishmen of to-day, is very like, in many of his moods, to the riddling bards of long ago. The later men, many of them, are altogether Irish, representative of the folk of one or another section of the country, Mr. Murray and Mr. Robinson of Cork, Mr. Mayne and Mr. Ervine of Down, Mr. Colum and Mr. Boyle of the Midlands.
One need not say that the Irishman is a born actor; all the Celts are famed for "the beautiful speaking"; for eloquence; for powers of impersonation; for quick changes of mood; for ease in running the gamut of the emotions. Of these things come art of the stage, and these things are the Irishman's in fullest measure. The Abbey Players have, however, gone abroad for some elements of their art, perhaps for their repose of manner, a quietude that is not the quietude of moodiness, a condition not unusual in the Irishman; and in addition to this repose of manner, which is fundamental and common to their presentation of realistic modern plays and of poetic plays of legendary times, for a slowness and dignity of gesture in the plays of legend, which is perhaps a borrowing from the classic stage. Their repose of manner may come from modern France; at least so held Mr. Yeats, pointing to such a source in "Samhain" of 1902.
The other day [he writes] I saw Sara Bernhardt and DeMax in "Phèdre," and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the National Theatrical Company, had gone for his model. For long periods the performers would merely stand and pose, and I once counted twenty-seven quite slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved, as it seemed, so much as an eyelash. The periods of stillness were generally shorter, but I frequently counted seventeen, eighteen, or twenty before there was a movement. I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic progression. Sara Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us say, her right breast for some time, and then move them to the other side, perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then, after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one out, and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the gestures of uplifted hands. Through one long scene DeMax, who was quite as fine, never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was only when the emotion came to its climax that he raised it to his breast. Beyond them stood a crowd of white-robed men who never moved at all, and the whole scene had the nobility of Greek sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and intensity. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the stage, and made me understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's which is understood everywhere but in England, "Art is art because it is not nature." Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside those great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed them as well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for the most part, to admire them for doing it.
With these words of Mr. Yeats, written ten years ago, in my memory, it was arresting to hear ten years later a somewhat similar comparison of the acting of the Irish Players to the acting of yesterday on the French stage. A man who in the late eighties and early nineties had spent seven years as an art student in Paris saw the Abbey Players in Boston. In Paris he had gone frequently to the Théâtre Français, and only there, he said, before he saw the Irish Players, had he seen acting so full of dignity, but never at all before acting so natural.
There is possible, too, however, a native origin for this repose of manner, or perhaps it would be truest to say that it is a blending, like the dramas themselves, of native and foreign elements. Speaking of "Cathleen ni Houlihan" in the notes to his "Collected Works" of 1908, Mr. Yeats says, "I cannot imagine this play, or any folk-play of our school, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of the awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow, or too lacking in humility to copy these things without convention or caricature." Here, too, he refers to the "quiet movement and careful speech which has given our players some little fame" as "arising partly out of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of the players."
Undoubtedly Mr. Fay knew the still ways of the peasant, and I do not doubt that he was influenced by such knowledge and did in some degree train his actors to bring their movements on the stage in accord with the "awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow." But since there are ways of the peasant that are far from still, it is likely, too, that he was led to select such movements, instead of the vehement gesture and lively facial expression that are just as characteristic of the peasant, by a memory of the restrained acting of the French stage. It is likely, too, that the very inexperience and lack of knowledge of artifice to which Mr. Yeats refers was an element in making the art of the company what it became. But it is not altogether impossible that certain traditions of the English stage—of the statuesque acting of the Kembles, for instance—had come down into the time of Mr. Fay's stage experience, to those days before he became stage manager of the performances of "The Daughters of Erin" in 1900, and that these traditions influenced his training of the company that was to attain to a new art of the stage.
Before this there had been two series of performances in Dublin, each of a week's duration, by "The Irish Literary Theatre," one in 1899, and the other in 1900, with English actors gathered together in London by Mr. George Moore; and another week's series followed in 1901 by the Benson Company and some amateurs of the Gaelic League under the leadership of Dr. Douglas Hyde. It was the performances of "The Countess Cathleen" of Mr. Yeats and of "The Heather Field" of Mr. Martyn at the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, respectively May 8 and 9, 1899, by "The Irish Literary Theatre," that inaugurated the drama of the Celtic Renaissance, fully a year before there came into being the group of amateurs that were to bring that drama home to Ireland as no players who inherited the standards and conventions of the English stage could possibly have brought it home.
It is Mr. Fay's distinction to have been, as I have intimated, the leader who started these players on the long way to their new art. Such leadership his record hardly augered. It was in the very lowest forms of vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy, that Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had made him well enough known in burlesque rôles to make it difficult for him to assume with success serious rôles in the early years of the National Dramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiences insisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen ni Houlihan." For all this past, however, Mr. Fay was intent on serious drama, and, with the precept and example of Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats always present to him in the early days of the National Theatre Company, and with what he had gathered from the experimental performance of Irish plays by "The Irish Literary Theatre," he advanced surely in his art until his withdrawal from the company in January, 1908. His loss was compensated for only by the results of his training of other actors, such as Miss Sara Allgood and Mr. Arthur Sinclair, who on certain roads have outrun their master. When I saw Mr. Fay in 1902, in the little hall in Camden Street, Dublin, with no knowledge of what his stage experience had been, I accepted him at once for what he was, a finished "character" actor of poise and confidence, a dignified figure for all his stature and his predilection for comedy, and the possessor of a speaking voice whose natural pleasantness he had made into something higher than pleasantness by his art in the use of it, if it never attained the resonance and nobility of phrasing of that of his brother, Mr. Frank J. Fay. It was a memorable experience to me, that of that August evening in 1902 on which I was taken to Camden Street to a rehearsal of the Irish National Dramatic Company. Our guide was Mr. James H. Cousins, whose "Racing Lug" and "Connla" were among the plays produced in the following autumn and which that night were in rehearsal. He piloted us to an entranceway by the side of a produce shop. We knocked on the door and waited, and waited. We knocked again, and at last heard steps coming nearer and nearer. The door opened and revealed a young man in work-a-day black suit and derby, with a candle in one hand and a property spear in the other. He conducted us down a narrow, drafty hallway, into a hall in which were wooden benches as rude as those in the bandstand of a backwoods country fair in the States, and a slightly raised platform at the farther end. We were soon in eager conversation with young store clerks and typists and artisans who were about to set to work at that in which their hearts lay, the interpreting of plays out of Ireland's heart. It was good talk we listened to from those young men and women, boys and girls all of them in their fervor and zest and high aim. Their enthusiasm carried through "Connla," "The Racing Lug," and "Deirdre" with real impressiveness. Of Mr. Cousins's two plays one was realistic of the north of Ireland shore life of to-day, and the other, "Connla," like Mr. Russell's "Deirdre," made out of Ireland's heroic age.
Of the actors we met that night, but Miss Walker (Maire ni Shiubhlaigh) was with the Irish Players on their American tour of 1911-12, and even she has not been continuously with them since 1902. The amateurs had then but begun, under the direction of Mr. Fay, on the slow fashioning of themselves into the finished folk-actors they proved themselves in America. But even this acting, so little removed from that of amateurs at these rehearsals, had distinction, the distinction of fidelity to life in "The Racing Lug," the distinction of possession by dream in "Deirdre"; and let it be remembered, too, that it was a rehearsal without costume, and that one had to be carried away from the conventional dress of the Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel that the characters in "The Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and the people of "Connla" and "Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric age.
Miss Maire T. Quinn, Mr. T. Dudley Digges, Mr. P.J. Kelly, with Miss Walker and the brothers Fay,—Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay,—were then the leading actors of the company. The playwrights, too, took part in their own or their fellows' plays in the lesser rôles, Mr. Russell sometimes playing the druid in his "Deirdre" and Mr. Colum carrying a spear or wearing a pea-jacket as need was. One circumstance or another, politics or need, gradually lost the company every one of these actors that took part in its first performances in 1902. There were comparatively few changes, though, until 1904, the year in which Miss Horniman, "a generous English friend," took for them the old Mechanic Institute Theatre and, rebuilding it in part, turned it over to the Irish National Dramatic Company for six years. Up to this time the actors had received no pay, giving their services for love of country and of art, but with the more frequent performances and their attendant rehearsals it became necessary to take a large part of the time of the leading men and women, and then, of course, they had to be paid. Before the opening of the Abbey Theatre, three of the chief actors, Miss Quinn and Mr. Digges and Mr. Kelly, came to this country to appear in Irish plays in the Irish Section of the St. Louis Fair. The public that gathered in St. Louis was not prepared for the new drama, being more used to the musical play of the type Mr. Olcott has made familiar in America, or to the Bowery Irishman of the Harrigan plays, or to the gross caricatures, Galwayed and ape-accoutred, of the before-curtain interlude of the variety show. As a result the former National Players protested against the policy of the Irish Section and returned to New York. Miss Walker was the principal actress of the company after Miss Quinn's departure to America, and upon Miss Walker's withdrawal in 1905 the burden of the chief women's rôles fell upon Miss Allgood.
Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay were still the leading men of the company, creating the principal characters of all the plays of Synge and of those of Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory that were produced before 1908. Early in this year, as I have said, Mr. and Mrs. W.G. Fay and Mr. F.J. Fay left the company, and, coming to America in the spring, played "The Rising of the Moon" and "A Pot of Broth" in New York. They made, unfortunately, no great success in their appearances, as their plays were not presented in bills devoted solely to Irish plays, but as curtain-raisers to the usual conventional farce. Almost all the actors whom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually found their way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them made successes there comparable in any degree to their successes in folk-drama or in plays out of old Irish legend. Nor can it be said that actors trained in the dominant forms of present-day English drama, even when so skilled as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, were wholly satisfying in their assumption of rôles in the plays of the Renaissance. It was Miss Allgood, chief musician in the London performances of Mr. Yeats's "Deirdre" in 1908, who won the greatest approval from the London critics, and not Mrs. Campbell as Deirdre herself.
Miss Allgood had played principal parts with the Abbey Company from 1904 on. In 1906, her sister, who plays under the name of Miss Maire O'Neill, came into the company, assuming the more romantic rôles with a success as great as that of Miss Allgood in character parts and comedy. From 1906 they have shared the principal women's rôles, but, owing to Miss O'Neill's inability to come to America in the fall of 1911, Miss McGee fell heir to many of her rôles. After the departure of the Messrs. Fay, Mr. Sinclair, Mr. O'Donovan, and Mr. Kerrigan became the leading men. It is not altogether accurate, however, to speak of any actor or actress of the company as leading man or leading woman, for not only is one "a leading lady" one night, as was Miss McGee as Pegeen Mike in "The Playboy of the Western World" on the American tour, and one of the village girls in "The Well of the Saints" the next night, but the men and women alternate in the same parts on different nights, as, for instance, on the American tour Cathleen ni Houlihan was played now by Miss Allgood and now by Miss Walker.
The fact that few of the actors who have learned their art with the Irish National Dramatic Society have achieved greatly in other drama is perhaps a proof that their powers are limited to the folk-drama and the legendary drama that comprises almost the entire repertoire of the company. Miss Allgood was, it is true, lent to Mr. Poel for the performances of "Measure for Measure" in the spring of 1908, and won an unquestioned success as Isabella, but actors so skilled as the Messrs. Fay have attained no notable success in other than Irish plays. During the American tour of 1911-12 both Mr. Sinclair and Miss Allgood were much importuned by the managers to accept American engagements, and it is hardly to be doubted but that both could win success in conventional comedy. And yet one feels it was the part of wisdom as well as of loyalty for them to withstand the lure.
The distinguishing characteristic of the art of the Abbey Players is naturalness. It is not that their personalities happen to coincide with certain types of Irish character, but that they know so well the types of the folk-plays, and even the characters who are not types that appear in the folk-plays, that they are able to portray them to the life. The Abbey Players have discarded most of the tricks of the stage, or perhaps it would be truer to say they do not inherit the tricks of the stage or any traditional characterizations of parts. They are taught to allow their demeanor and gesture and expression to rise
SARA ALLGOOD out of the situation, to "get up" their parts from their own ideas; and these ideas are interfered with only if they run definitely counter to the ideas of stage-manager or author. The smallness of the Abbey Theatre has saved them from the necessity of heightening effects that they may carry to the farthest corners of a large house, a necessity that leads so often to over-emphasis by our own actors. There are less than six hundred seats in the Abbey theatre (five hundred and sixty-two by actual count), and it is so arranged that the words uttered on the stage carry easily without emphasis all over the house.
It is an old saying that the English of Dublin is the most beautiful English in the world. However that may be, there can be no doubt whatsoever but that the English that is spoken in Dublin falls on the ear with a mellowness of sound that is a joy to all who cherish proper speech. In the earlier years of the company Mr. Yeats was very desirous of having his dramatic verse spoken with "the half chant men spoke it [poetry] with in old times." It was in some such way that Mr. Yeats had tried to have his lines in "The Land of Heart's Desire" spoken when it was put on at the Avenue Theatre, London, in 1894; and thirteen years later Miss Florence Farr, whom he believes to speak English more beautifully than anybody in the world, spoke his dramatic verses in a "half chant," and his lyrical verses, many of them, to a definite musical notation, on her American tour of 1907. It was noticeable, however, when she played one of the musicians in his "Deirdre" on its later presentations, that he method of intoning the verses differed a great deal from their delivery by the regular members of the company. If Mr. Yeats has not changed his views somewhat in regard to the speaking of dramatic verse, he no longer insists on the half chant as it was practiced by Miss Farr, but is content if the actors reproduce its rhythm in "the beautiful speaking" that is characteristic of their art. The most beautiful English that I have ever listened to is the English of Synge as spoken by Mr. O'Donovan in Christy's "romancin'" to Pegeen Mike in the third act of "The Playboy of the Western World." His voice, full and mellow by nature, and in perfect control, responds to all the many changes of emotion that the part demands, the unmatched rhythm of the prose rendered as he renders it carrying one clean out of one's self as one listens. It is only when one comes to one's self on the curtain-fall that one finds one's self wondering, Can this be prose? Surely, never before was prose, English prose, as beautiful to the ear as English verse.
As Miss O'Neill did not come with the Abbey Players to America, we did not have a chance to hear Pegeen Mike's lines spoken with a beauty comparable to Christy's. The part is not one to which Miss Allgood is physically adapted, and Miss McGee is as yet too new to the stage to speak with the confident abandon the lines demand. We did, however, have a chance to hear Miss Allgood's very beautiful musical utterance of the verses given to Cathleen ni Houlihan in this first of the movement's folk-plays, and her equally beautiful speaking of the prose lines of the play. This part of Cathleen ni Houlihan is sufficiently removed from the other parts of the play, folk-parts, and from the parts of the other folk-plays, to give us an insight into the versatility of Miss Allgood; and we saw enough of Mr. Sinclair and Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan to realize that they, too, could worthily bear parts in heroic romance.
The rendering of the songs in the plays—it is chiefly in the plays of Mr. Yeats that they appear—is a distinguishing characteristic of their production. Mr. Yeats will not have them rendered by what, in the ordinary sense, is singing. Writing in the notes to volume III of his "Collected Works"[1] he says:—
No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, no word of mine must ever change into a mere musical note, no singer of my words must ever cease to be a man and become an instrument.
The degree of approach to ordinary singing depends on the context, for one desires a greater or lesser amount of contrast between the lyrics and the dialogue according to situation and emotion and the qualities of players. The words of Cathleen ni Houlihan about the "white-scarfed riders" must be little more than regulated declamation; the little song of Leagerie when he seizes the "Golden Helmet" should in its opening words be indistinguishable from the dialogue itself. Upon the other hand Cathleen's verses by the fire, and those of the pupils in "The Hour-Glass," and those of the beggars in "The Unicorn," are sung as the country people understand song. Modern singing would spoil them for dramatic purposes by taking the keenness and the salt out of the words. The songs in "Deirdre," in Miss Fair's and in Miss Allgood's setting, need fine speakers of verse more than good singers: and in these, and still more in the song of the Three Women in "Baile's Strand," the singers must remember the natural speed of words. If the lyric in "Baile's Strand" is sung slowly it is like church-singing, but if sung quickly and with the right expression it becomes an incantation so old that nobody can quite understand it. That it may give this sense of something half-forgotten, it must be sung with a certain lack of minute feeling for the meaning of the words, which, however, must always remain words. The songs in "Deirdre," especially the last dirge, which is supposed to be the creation of the moment, must upon the other hand, at any rate when Miss Farr's or Miss Allgood's music is used, be sung or spoken with minute passionate understanding. I have rehearsed the part of the Angel in "The Hour-Glass" with recorded notes throughout, and believe this is the right way; but in practice, owing to the difficulty of finding a player who did not sing too much the moment the notes were written down, have left it to the player's own unrecorded inspiration, except at the "exit," where it is well for the player to go nearer to ordinary song.
At times Irish actresses who have not come to the stage through the Abbey Company, as has every one of its regular actresses, and every one of its men save Mr. W.G. Fay, have lent it their assistance, as in the instance of Mrs. Patrick Campbell referred to above, and as Miss Darragh did in productions of "The Shadowy Waters" and of "Deirdre" in 1906. It was four years earlier than this, however, that an Irishwoman, better known in her country than either Miss Darragh or Mrs. Patrick Campbell, lent her art to the performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan. "Miss Maud Gonne played very finely," writes Mr. Yeats in recording the incident, "and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity." With these three exceptions, so far as I have been able to find out, no actors or actresses outside of the company have, since 1902, essayed any other than a subordinate part. Yet such is the versatility of the company, men and women both, within the range of plays the company feels called upon to present,—folk-drama of to-day and of yesterday in Ireland, folk-history plays, morality plays, and plays in verse out of old legends,—that though there have never been as many as twenty actors in the company there has very seldom been much difficulty in casting a part. Molly Byrne in "The Well of the Saints" and the Wandering Friar of the same play have given the most trouble to the stage directors.
From the very beginning of the Irish National Dramatic Company, Mr. Yeats has been an advocate of scenery that is background chiefly, and in no way divertive of attention from the play itself, its thought, its words, its acting. He would have it, in a way, decorative, but subdued and in harmony with the subject of the play. A very few simple sets suffice for the plays of peasant life, a cottage interior, a village street, a crossroads in a gap of the hills, all to serve the action and the words as background, and to be no more obtrusive than the background of a portrait. It may be that this attitude of Mr. Yeats is in a measure due to his talks with Mr. Gordon Craig, but it is equally true, I think, that some of Mr. Gordon Craig's ideas are due in part to his talks with Mr. Yeats. Equally simple, though of another sort of simplicity, would Mr. Yeats have the scenery for plays out of old legend. "I would like to see," writes Mr. Yeats in "Samhain" of 1902, "poetic drama, which tries to keep at a distance from daily life, that it may keep its emotion untroubled, staged with but two or three colors." Old reds, misty blues, imperial purples, greens that have about them the dimness of haunted woods, and dulled golds have been among the colors used in the legendary plays of Mr. Yeats and in the folk-histories of Lady Gregory, the color schemes being generally either those of Mr. Yeats or of Mr. Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory's son. Scenery and costumes alike are simple. No audience at the Abbey has ever marveled at cycloramic landscape, and no audience and no actress has ever been able to take the joy of the dressmaker and the dressed, of the milliner and the millinered, in gown or hat.
The National Theatre Society, Limited, which is the legal name of the organization that controls the Abbey Theatre Company, may not play what plays it will at the Abbey; the two leading theatres of commerce in Dublin, the Gaiety and the Theatre Royal, having, as Mr. Yeats records, "vigorously opposed" the Abbey being given "a patent as little restricted" as their own. "The Solicitor-General," Mr. Yeats continues, "to meet them halfway, has restricted our patent to plays written by Irishmen or on Irish subjects or to foreign masterpieces, provided these masterpieces are not English." This restriction has not interfered with any feature of the work of the Abbey Theatre, Mr. Yeats believes, save in the building-up of an audience, some people remaining away, perhaps, who might have been attracted had "such bodies as the Elizabethan Stage Society, which brought 'Everyman' to Dublin some years ago, been able to hire the theatre."
No phase of the dramatic movement has been more interesting and none has been more important than this building-up of an audience to appreciate the plays. Whether with the poetic plays of Mr. Yeats and the ironic extravaganzas of Synge alone, such an audience as has been built up—an audience estimated by Mr. Yeats in 1906 to consist of four thousand young men and women—could have been won is problematical; that is, it may be doubted that the very best the movement has produced would have attracted a sufficient audience to enable the company to keep together after the expiration in 1910 of Miss Horniman's guarantee. Certain it is, however, that Lady Gregory's farces were a great help, both in building up and in holding the Abbey audience. It was for the purpose of affording comic relief to the plays of Mr. Yeats and to the first plays of Synge that Lady Gregory started to create them. They attracted all who loved laughter and merriness and a loving caricature of country-folk,—and who do not?—and one of them, "The Rising of the Moon" (1907), had a distinct patriotic appeal, as had Mr. Yeats's "Cathleen ni Houlihan," which brought some who would not otherwise have come to the Abbey Theatre. The third most definitely "national" play of the movement, "The Piper" (1908) of Mr. O'Riordan, may have also drawn some who would not otherwise have come to the theatre, but if it did so it brought them there, as did "The Playboy of the Western World" (1907), to object.
The first appeal of the Irish Players, in April, 1902, was trough the "Deirdre" of "A.E.," a play out of old legend, national legend, and "Cathleen ni Houlihan," a symbolic national play of '98. Then followed Mr. Cousins's two little plays above referred to; "The Laying of the Foundations," by Mr. Frederick Ryan,—a realistic satire of Dublin life; and Mr. Yeats's incursion into farce, "A Pot of Broth." The appeal of the repertoire was widened in 1903 by the inclusion of plays by Lady Gregory, Mr. Colum, and Synge. "Twenty-five" could give offense to none in its story of self-sacrificing love, and Mr. Colum's "Broken Soil," coming as it did after "In the Shadow of the Glen," would have escaped hostile criticism in such a situation even had it been much more severe in its portrayal of peasant life in the Midlands than it was.
From the time of "The Countess Cathleen" (1899) to the time of "In the Shadow of the Glen" (1903), no one of the plays in the movement had seriously offended any large section of the public, and the younger generation of all classes was contributing largely of its intellectual members to the audience of the National Dramatic Company. The West Britons, the Dublin Castle set, the Trinity College group, were not much interested, and, indeed, that portion of the theatrical audience that fills the stalls in the average theatre the English-speaking world over has never taken very much interest in the plays of the movement, save to protest against "The Rising of the Moon" as disloyal to England, and to approve, misunderstanding its purpose, "The Playboy of the Western World" as a savage satire of the Irish Irishman. The audience that the movement has built up is an audience of free intelligences, largely from the poorer elements of the public, an audience that fills the cheaper places in the house. "The Pit" of the Abbey Theatre is the envy of all the theatrical managers of Dublin. It is a pit of people young in years or young in heart and mind, who are interested in intellectual things, a group of people largely self-taught, or taught by the Celtic Renaissance, to appreciate fine things. With these has come that element of the intellectuals among the Trinity College set that is interested above all things in Ireland, but this element is not large.
This play and that have attracted, either for purposes of approval or for purposes of disapproval, groups of people outside of the faithful pit that is interested in every sincere portrayal of Irish life. Such a group, from the patriotic societies, prevented the rest of the house from hearing "The Playboy of the Western World," after its first performance on January 26, 1907, for four performances more; and such a group similarly protested against "The Piper," a little more than a year later, because it seemed to the members of the group to be an unpatriotic revelation of the lack of cohesion among Irish political and patriotic factions.
Despite opposition, however, and with new dramatists one by one gaining a place in the repertoire of the company, Mr. Boyle in 1905 and Mr. Robinson in 1908, Mr. Murray in 1910 and Mr. Ervine in 1911, more and more people continued to become interested in the new drama, and by the time Miss Horniman's support, promised in 1904 for six years, was withdrawn at the expiration of that period, the Abbey Theatre was apparently a fixture in the artistic life of Ireland.
It has been the custom, of recent years, for the Abbey Theatre to begin its Dublin season In October and to continue it on until May, when the company goes to London for a month. In the earlier years, before the company had a home at the Abbey, and even for a year or two after that, performances were not so continuous. Nor are they now given every week or always on every night of a week, the theatre being turned over to the Theatre of Ireland or some other dramatic organization occasionally, and being let, now and then, for lectures or concerts or the like. The London season in May is followed, or preceded sometimes, by visits to other English cities, Manchester and Leeds, Oxford and Cambridge among them; and at home in Ireland, in the intervals between weeks at the Abbey, the company goes to Cork or Belfast for a few performances.
In this country the audiences that attended the performances of the plays of the Abbey Theatre Players were of a very different composition. At their average they included a certain proportion of the younger intellectuals among the Irish-Americans, but very many of these were kept away from the performances, as many, indeed, in Ireland and in England, too, are kept away from the performances, by the opposition in the patriotic societies. In America, as in London and in Manchester, and in the English university towns, it has been largely from among those who are seriously interested in a literary drama that the audiences have been drawn. It was such people as do not habitually go to the theatre, but that are to be found at revivals of old English comedy and Ibsen plays and symphony concerts, that made up the audiences of the Irish Players in America, whether in Boston or in Philadelphia or Chicago. These audiences approximated to the Dublin audiences only in the fact that they were constant in attendance at all the plays of the repertoire. There were, of course, some who came out of curiosity and the love of ruction, but these after all were few. The plays appealed on their merits and won the success that they did win because of their art and their reading of life, and not because of the sensational incidents that had occurred at some of the productions of the company.
The Abbey Theatre has been able to maintain itself successfully in the years that have elapsed since the arrangement between Miss Horniman and the National Theatre Society came to an end. It has begotten many other companies, the Ulster Literary Theatre, best of them all; the Theatre of Ireland; the National Players; the Cork Dramatic Society. It has brought into being a kind of folk-drama that, despite its avowed and evident Scandinavian origin, is a new folk-drama, and it has brought into being, too, a school of dramatists. It has done much more than Mr. Yeats claimed it had done in 1908 when he wrote, "We know that we have already created a taste for sincere and original drama and for sincere, quiet, simple acting. Ireland possesses something which has come out of its own life, and the many failures of dramatic societies which have imitated our work, without our discipline and our independence, show that it could not have been made in any other way." But even were this all it had done, it had done much. What it has done I have attempted to put down in some detail, and to put values upon, in the following pages. Here I wish further to say but this: that I think the dramatic movement the most significant part of the Celtic Renaissance, a movement to me the most original movement in letters the world has known since that movement in Norway which so definitely stimulated it, a movement that gave Björnson and Ibsen to the world.
- ↑ Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-Avon, 1908.