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.
[Illustration]
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 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-Avon, 1908.