[In the following essay, Hunt—the director of the Abbey Theatre from 1935 to 1971—recounts the plays performed in the early years of the Irish Free State, which was formed in 1923 as a result of the Anglo-Irish War.]

‘A NATION ONCE AGAIN’

Ireland in 1923 was not just a nation once again, it was a very different nation from the one about which the founders of the Abbey had written their plays. No longer a romantic anachronism perched on the fringes of western civilisation, the new Ireland was preparing to take its place in a not very ‘brave new world’. It was this reality that the younger dramatists endeavoured, however inadequately, to express: no longer the twilight legends of a heroic past, nor the shebeens of a picturesque peasantry, for Cuchulain had died in the G. P. O. and ‘the springtime of the local life [had] been forgotten, and the harvest [was] a memory only, and the straw [had] been turned to bricks’.

The Civil War ended in the spring of 1923 but the bitterness remained—the bitterness and the disillusion. Reality now lay in a nation divided against itself: antagonism between Orangemen and Catholics in the North, Free Staters and Republicans in the South, between Capital and Labour, conservative priests and progressive schoolmasters; among petty bureaucrats, political nepotists and grasping gombeen men; it lay in hydro-electro works, in the charred ruins of the ‘big houses’, in the diminishing remnants of the Protestant population with their proud traditions of Swift and Burke, Grattan, Emmet and Parnell; it lay in the tragi-comedy of the Dublin slums.

For those who had dreamed of a nation united, free and at peace with itself the new Free State with its puritan outlook, its literary and film censorship, was a bitter awakening. Nor had self-government brought a solution to social problems; in the country agricultural difficulties led to political unrest, emigration was still a serious menace; in the cities there was little sign of a brighter outlook for the labouring classes. For many who had lost husbands, sons and lovers it was not easy to accept that ‘bloodshed is a glorious and a sanctifying thing’.

SEAN O'CASEY

Sean O'Casey was forty-three when On The Run, later renamed The Shadow of a Gunman, was accepted by the Directors of the Abbey. Born and bred in Dublin, he was the youngest of thirteen children, eight of whom died in infancy. His father, a commercial clerk, who worked during his latter years for the Irish Church Mission, a Protestant organisation, was a man with some pretensions to learning. His small library of books included the works of classical authors as well as theological treatises. When Michael Casey died the family under its indomitable mother had to face a severe, and no doubt humiliating, fall in living standards, but at no time was this respectable lower-middle-class family reduced to living in the appallingly overcrowded conditions of Dublin's slum tenements, as eagerly reported by the press, and luridly described by some of his biographers who, as Sean McCann has pointed out, have been misled by an inadequate knowledge of Dublin ‘combined with the wild inaccuracies of O'Casey himself’.¹ However, let it be said that nowhere in his autobiographies—often inaccurate and certainly highly dramatised—does O'Casey state that his family lived in the teeming tenements described in the Medical Press of the time and in government inquiries as worse than those of Moscow and Calcutta.

Sean's early years were plagued with a chronic eye complaint that hampered his education; this, together with the family's religious difference from their almost exclusively Catholic neighbours, kept him somewhat alienated from his young contemporaries, earning him the title of ‘Sean the Proud’. It was indeed his pride that steeled him and his mother to overcome the humiliation of their poverty. It was his pride and his sensitivity to the criticisms of more privileged writers that produced the rebellious, the belligerent Sean O'Casey. ‘Oh, dear Sean, don't be too belligerent,’ wrote Charlotte Shaw,² but Sean could not easily keep ‘the two-edged sword of thought tight in its scabbard’.

There was in his nature an ambivalence, as Gabriel Fallon has pointed out. Sean, the often venomous critic of society—more especially of the Church—the revolutionary Communist, blind to the worst excesses of Stalin, was also a man of great compassion: a hater of all forms of bloodshed and of the bigotry that denies the gaiety and fullness of life.

Largely self-educated, he developed in early life a passion for the theatre. Through his brother, Archie, who organised amateur theatricals in a disused stable, Sean played in excerpts from the plays of Boucicault and Shakespeare, his favourite playwrights; and, on one occasion, he was called upon to play the part of Father Dolan in a professional production of The Shaughraun in the old theatre in the Mechanics' Institute, soon to be transformed into the Abbey Theatre. From his mother he inherited a love for the language of the Bible. At the age of seven he won a Sunday school prize for proficiency in Holy Scripture. As a young man he worked in a variety of tough manual jobs and, like many of his fellow labourers, he fell under the spell of the fiery labour leader, Jim Larkin. For a time he became secretary of the Irish Citizen Army, eventually resigning in protest against its association with the largely middle-class nationalists of the Irish Volunteers.

Sean was never a routine nationalist, though he joined the Gaelic League, attending classes in the Irish language with Ernest Blythe—and was for a time a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. But the national cause was for him secondary to the cause of a workers' republic, and Sean was too much of a humanitarian to condone bloodshed.

THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN

It was in the middle of 1921 that he submitted his first plays to the Abbey. Written in long-hand on poor paper and with worse ink, they made difficult reading. ‘After reading ten pages,’ Lennox Robinson declared, ‘one felt inclined to throw the manuscript aside and reach for a rejection slip, but then suddenly one would come across a character or a scene startling in its truth and originality, a flash of undoubted genius.’³ ‘I believe there is something in you and your strong point is characterisation,’ Lady Gregory told him.⁴ Strangely enough it was Lady Gregory the aristocrat, alone among Dublin's literary hierarchy, with whom O'Casey felt most at home. After her death he wrote to her biographer:

I loved her and I think she was fond of me—why God only knows. Our friendship affinity was an odd one; she an aristocrat, I a proletarian Communist. Yet we understood each other well … It was (and still is) a bitter memory within me that the difference between the Directorate and me over The Silver Tassie separated us for ever.⁵

When The Shadow of a Gunman opened on Thursday, 12 April 1923 for a meagre three evening performances and a matinée, neither the size of the audience, nor the critics, suggested that anything unusual had occurred to change the fortunes of the rapidly declining Abbey. Only the critic of the Evening Herald saw in it the marks of genius.

It was indeed a welcome and wholesome sign to sit in the Abbey last night and listen to an audience squirming with laughter and revelling boisterously in the satire which Mr. Sean O'Casey has put into his two-act play. Not for a very long time has such a good play come our way. It was brilliant truthful, decisive … His characters were as perfect and his photography, for one really felt his men and women were but photographs, was nothing less than the work of genius.

Word of mouth travels quickly in Dublin and on the following night the house was filled to three-quarter capacity. Saturday matinée was sold out and on Saturday night Lady Gregory recorded to her grief that many had to be turned from the door. When the play was revived in the opening week of the new season not a seat was empty.

In October, O'Casey contributed a satire of contemporary political attitudes, Cathleen Listens-In, a one-act play that added little to his reputation; but on 3 January 1924 he handed in the script of his first full-length play that was to win him the Hawthornden Prize and world-wide renown.

JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK

The play opened on 3 March 1924, breaking all records by being continued for a second week to satisfy the crowds turned away from the door. Lady Gregory, inspired no less by the queues outside the theatre than by this ‘wonderful and terrible play of futility, of irony, humour, tragedy,’ wrote in her diary for 8 March, ‘This is one of the evenings at the Abbey that makes me glad to have been born.’⁶

When Juno was revived in August, playing again to full houses, Holloway wrote, ‘Certainly he [O'Casey] has written the two most popular plays ever seen at the Abbey.’ But for Holloway it was above all the acting that drew his greatest praise. ‘The acting … reaches the high water mark of Abbey acting. It looks as if the Abbey is coming into its own at last, and it's about time. In December next it will reach its twentieth year of existence.’⁷ Critical approval, however, was by no means universal. For many, O'Casey's mixture of tragedy and comedy was not only strange and unorthodox, there were those who questioned the play's ‘morality’. When Juno was presented in Cork in June 1924 under Sally Allgood's management for a week's run of twice-nightly performances, the management insisted that references to Mary Boyle's seduction by the schoolmaster, Charlie Bentham, be omitted and her pregnancy changed to tuberculosis.⁸ As this demand was made between the first and second ‘houses’ Sara Allgood who was playing her part of ‘Juno’ was understandably distraught. Gabriel Fallon who was playing the part of Bentham records that ‘somebody told her not to bother until she reached the third act and then to meet the lines as they came’. Predictably this ended in disaster.

Fitzgerald as Boyle was standing still and apprehensive, holding up his moleskin trousers as he asked her what the doctor had to say about Mary. Allgood sat down and tapped the table with nervous fingers saying ‘Oh, Jack, Jack …’ which was rather far off script. Something in Fitzgerald's manner made the house titter. Suddenly to my utter amazement I heard Allgood quickly say: ‘Oh, Jack, Jack; d'ye know what Bentham's after doin' to Mary?’ This was capped by the loudest laugh I have ever heard in a theatre.⁹

In November 1925 the play opened at the Royalty Theatre, London, directed by J. B. Fagan with a cast that included Arthur Sinclair as Captain Boyle, Sydney Morgan as Joxer Daly and Sara Allgood as Juno Boyle.

THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS

In August 1925 O'Casey's next full-length play reached the Directors and was unanimously accepted. But trouble lay ahead when rehearsals began under M. J. Dolan's direction. Dolan disliked both the play and the playwright. ‘At any time I would think twice about having anything to do with it,’ he wrote to Lady Gregory, ‘the language is—to use the Abbey phrase—“beyond the beyonds”. The song at the end of the second act, sung by the “girl-of-the-streets” is impossible.’¹⁰ For Lennox Robinson who now took over the direction troubles multiplied. Eileen Crowe who was to play Mrs. Gogan refused to say the line ‘any kid Jinny Gogan has had since was got between the borders of the Ten Commandments!’ She was replaced by May Craig. F. J. McCormick, now married to Eileen Crowe, refused to use the word ‘snotty’, and Ria Mooney who was cast as the prostitute, Rosie Redmond, recalled that some of the players tried to frighten her out of playing the part ‘because they felt they would be besmirched by the fact of one of them playing such a role’.¹¹

In the little world of Dublin playgoers word quickly spread that the Abbey was about to produce another ‘immoral’ play. Small wonder that there was, as Holloway wrote, ‘electricity in the air before the curtain’ on Monday, 8 February 1926 when the play was first presented.¹² However, to the relief of the players nothing untoward occurred. On Tuesday there was some hissing; on Wednesday ‘a sort of moaning sound’ was heard when the flags of the Volunteers and Citizen Army were carried into the pub. On Thursday night let those present speak for themselves.

RIA Mooney (Rosie Redmond):
On the Thursday night, however, there was a changed response. After the curtain went up on Act 2, I heard voices raised above a whisper in the House. The voices grew louder.
IRISH Times:
There began a pandemonium which continued until after the curtain fell. It was carried on mostly by women, who shouted, booed and sang, occasionally varying their demonstration by a set speech.
HOLLOWAY:
Mrs. Pearse, Mrs. Tom Clarke, Mrs. Sheehy-Skeffington, and others were in the theatre to vindicate the manhood of 1916 …
RIA Mooney:
Then lumps of coal were thrown at me, and pennies fell noisily beside me on the stage. There were shouts from members of the audience, urging me to “get off”, which only made me more determined to stay on.
O'CASEY:
The high, hysterical, distorted voices of women kept squealing that Irish girls were noted over the whole world for their modesty, and that Ireland's name was holy; that the Republican flag had never seen the inside of a public house; that this slander on the Irish race would mean the end of the Abbey Theatre; and that Ireland was Ireland through joy and through tears …
IRISH Times:
At the start of the third Act, notable for Mrs. Clitheroe's description of what she saw of the fighting in the streets, when, half demented she sought her husband, about a dozen women made their way from the pit on either side of the theatre …
SHELAH Richards (Nora Clitheroe):
I then noticed there were several female figures climbing up from the auditorium onto the stage. I watched transfixed as they huddled around the front-of-house curtain. Somebody shouted “Fire!” I screamed and dashed to the curtain followed by the other actors on stage and a hand-to-hand battle took place. We somehow managed to get the ladies off the stage up some steps and out to a little landing that led to the stage door and to the front-of-house. It was a pitched battle—fisticuffs, bums' rush, the lot.
HOLLOWAY:
Some of the players behaved with uncommon roughness to some ladies who got on the stage, and threw two of them into the stalls.
O'CASEY:
Barry Fitzgerald became a genuine Fluther Good and fought as Fluther himself would fight, sending an enemy, who had climbed onto the stage, flying into the stalls with a Flutherian punch on the jaw.
HOLLOWAY:
One young man thrown from the stage got his side hurt by the piano.
RIA Mooney:
The entire cast wandered on to see the excitement: to see Barry Fitzgerald having a boxing match with one of the men from the audience who tried to rush the stage; to hear F. J. McCormick disassociating himself and his wife from the play …
SHELAH Richards:
Some of us felt this was a betrayal: we were involved, the play was a masterpiece, O'Casey our hero and we were prepared to fight, literally, for him and his play. The pro-O'Caseyites summarily manned the curtain and brought it swinging down on that actor. Meanwhile the Directors were being phoned all over Dublin.
GABRIEL Fallon (Captain Brennan):
Yeats, I was told, was already on his way to the theatre. I made up my mind to note everything he said and did.
SHELAH Richards:
I slipped away from the stage to see how the ladies [dedicated members of Cumann na mBann who had been deeply involved in 1916 Easter Week and the Civil War] were and what they were up to. When I reached the top of the stairs and opened the door to the little landing where we had incarcerated them, I found them happy, smiling-faced, listening to somebody, hidden from me, who was talking to them smoothly and wittily; I had to look and see who had turned these furious females of ten minutes ago into sweetly smiling girls—it was Sean O'Casey!
SEAN O'Casey:
There wasn't a comely damsel amongst them.
RIA Mooney:
Then Yeafs came striding on stage …
GABRIEL Fallon:
One would imagine that the senior director of a theatre at which rioting was taking place would have looked somewhat perturbed on arriving there in the middle of a riot. Not so Yeats. He was smiling broadly as he came through the stage door and down the seven wooden steps leading to the stage itself … I said to him: ‘This looks like a rather serious state of affairs, Mr. Yeats; what do you propose should be done about it?’
W. B. Yeats:
Fallon, I am sending for the police, and this time it will be their own police!
GABRIEL Fallon:
Knowing that he (Sean) would be violently opposed to the idea of sending for the police, I managed to get word to him that Yeats had already taken that step. Leaving the women in the midst of their clamour, he made his way back-stage and told Yeats …
SEAN O'Casey:
The police! Sean to agree to send for the police—never! His Irish soul revolted from the idea … No, no, never! But a wild roar heard in the theatre seemed to shake the room where they all stood, told him to make up his mind quick; and swearing he could ne'er consent, consented.
GABRIEL Fallon:
As coolly as if he were pacing his eighteenth-century drawing-room in Merrion Square, Yeats walked up and down the stage still smiling to himself, apparently oblivious to the pandemonium that raged beyond the curtain … The old war-horse was hearing again the trumpets sounding the vindication of Synge …
W. B. Yeats:
Tell O'Malley (the stage electrician) to raise the curtain the very moment I give the signal.
GABRIEL Fallon:
Yeats then placed himself close to the curtain opening and after a moment's pause gave the signal.
SHELAH Richards:
… advancing slowly to the footlights with raised hand, looking like an ancient Roman Senator.
GABRIEL Fallon:
… even the finest of actors would have stood transfixed in admiration of Yeats' performance. Every gesture, every pause, every inflection, was geared to a tolerance calculated to meet an angry mob. From his well-considered opening, with flashing eyes and upraised arm …
W. B. Yeats:
I thought you had got tired of this, which commenced fifteen years ago. But you have disgraced yourselves again. Is this going to be a recurring celebration of Irish genius? Synge first and then O'Casey. The news of the happening of the last few minutes here will flash from country to country. Dublin has again rocked the cradle of a reputation. From such a scene as this theatre went forth the fame of Synge. Equally the fame of O'Casey is born here tonight. This is his apotheosis. [Not one word of this was heard by those in the auditorium but Yeats had taken the precaution of handing the speech he intended to make to the press before he came to the theatre.]
SEAN O'Casey:
… His anger making him like unto an aged Cuchulain in his hero-rage; his long hair waving, he stormed in utter disregard of all around him, confronting all those who cursed and cried out shame and vengeance on the theatre, as he conjured up a vision for them of O'Casey on a cloud, with Fluther on his right hand and Rosie Redmond on his left, rising upwards to Olympus to get from the waiting gods and goddesses a triumphant apotheosis for a work well done in the name of Ireland and of art.
THE Irish Times:
Suddenly and unexpectedly the shrieks and turmoil from the pit and from the invaded stalls died down, almost before Dr. Yeats had finished. The explanation was found with the arrival of half-a-dozen men of the detective branch …
SEAN O'Casey:
Then the constables flooded into the theatre, just in time. Rough and ready, lusty guardians of the peace … mystified, maybe, at anyone kicking up a row at a mere play. They pulled the disturbers out, they pushed them out, and, in one or two instances, carried them out, shedding them like peas from the pod of the theatre, leaving them in the cold street outside to tell their troubles to their neighbours or to the stars.
IRISH Times:
The next unexpected incident was the raising of the curtain and the continuance of the interrupted Act 3. This was hailed with a wild enthusiasm from the general body of the audience, in which the counter-demonstration was entirely drowned.
SEAN O'Casey:
Sean went home feeling no way exalted by his famous apotheosis. He was bewildered and felt sick rather than hilarious. Slandered the people! He had slandered his class no more than Chekhov had slandered his. Did these bawling fools think that their shouting would make him docile? He would leave them to their green hills of holy Ireland. His play (Juno and the Paycock) was doing well in London, and the producer, J. B. Fagan, had written several times asking him to come over. Why didn't he go, and leave the lot of them? The land of Nelson and Clive was beckoning to him more clearly than ever before; and he was ready to leave the land of Patrick and Tone.(13)

For the rest of the week the play, under police guard, drew full houses. No further demonstrations took place, though an abortive attempt was made to kidnap Barry Fitzgerald, presumably in the belief that this would effectively cause the play to be withdrawn. During the following weeks, controversy raged in the press. The Independent called for theatre censorship to protect the morals of the young; to which the Irish Times replied that ‘the morals of the young were more likely to be perverted on the Dublin Streets than in the Abbey Theatre.’ Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington, whose husband was perhaps the most tragic victim of the 1916 Rising, conducted a lively correspondence in the press with Sean O'Casey over the nationalist issue. At a public meeting on 1 March they both aired their views in open debate, accompanied by much irrelevant argument from their supporters on issues that had little to do with the rights or wrongs of O'Casey's treatment of the 1916 Rising.

But it was the criticisms of the literary fraternity, rather than the onslaught of the ardent nationalists, that wounded the sensitive pride of O'Casey. The novelist Liam O'Flaherty, the playwright Brinsley MacNamara, the poets F. R. Higgins and Austin Clarke, and the leading critic and theatre historian Andrew E. Malone, each for different reasons dismissed his plays with ill-concealed contempt. ‘So Sean, at first bewildered by the riot, was now puzzled by the Irish critics, for innocent gawm that he was, he didn't realise then that these fellows didn't know what they were talking about.’¹⁴ He was hurt, too, by the coolness of the Abbey players, for his lack of tact in criticising their work had left him with few friends. Lennox Robinson was aloof, Yeats remote. On 5 March he packed his bag and went to London.

THE SILVER TASSIE

It was two years later, on 1 March 1928 that Lady Gregory received a letter from Sean, informing her that he had just finished typing his new play. ‘I hope it may be suitable and that you will like it. Personally I think it is the best work I have done.’¹⁵ But neither Lady Gregory nor her fellow Directors shared his opinion. Yeats, who had accused the Abbey audience of disgracing itself by failing to appreciate The Plough and the Stars, now disgraced himself and his theatre by rejecting The Silver Tassie.

Let it be said, however, that The Silver Tassie with its mixture of expressionist techniques and naturalism is greatly dependent upon imaginative direction and design. In neither was the Abbey of the twenties capable of doing it justice, let alone appreciating its experimental style. The mistake the Directors made was not so much in rejecting the play, but in the manner of its rejection. Ironically, it was Lady Gregory, who might claim to know Sean's prickly temperament better than Yeats or Robinson, who made the mistake of underestimating his reaction to their criticisms. In her belief that these might give him the chance to amend the play before its publication, she sent him Yeats's and Robinson's criticisms as well as her own. ‘But I had a bad night or early morning thinking of the disappointment and shock he will feel.’¹⁶ Sean was not merely shocked, he was furious. ‘Curse o' God on them! … His anger grew with every line he read … He would send a salvo of words that would shake the doors of the Abbey and rattle the windows.’¹⁷ Point by point he voiced his indignation at Yeats's criticisms. Worst of all was the suggestion that he might avoid the embarrassment of an outright rejection by informing the press he had withdrawn the play for revision.

In reply Sean sent copies of Yeats's letters, together with others by Robinson and Lady Gregory to the Irish Statesman whose editor, George Russell (AE), declined to publish them without the writers' consent. Anticipating Russell's scruples, O'Casey sent copies to St. John Ervine who was only too delighted to press the case for their publication in The Observer. They appeared for the first time in that newspaper on Sunday 3 June 1928. Ervine wrote to O'Casey:

You are perfectly justified in publishing the correspondence. The production of a play by you at the Abbey is a matter of public interest. The Abbey is the nearest thing we have to a national theatre in these islands: it is subsidised by the Government of the Free State; and therefore the rejection of a play by an author who, as Yeats himself asserts, saved the theatre from extinction is a matter of considerable public interest … I do not object to Yeats regarding himself as the Holy Ghost, but I complain that he is sometimes inclined to regard himself as the entire Trinity.

On Monday following the letters appeared in the Irish Times.¹⁸

Now it was Yeats's turn to be furious: the letters were private; they were not written for publication; he would sue for breach of copyright; he would appeal to the Society of Authors. Sean replied that ‘Yeats could take the dispute to the League of Nations for all he cared.’ Yeats now authorised the Irish Statesman to publish the letters with additions. ‘So far as Dublin is concerned I think we will gain out of the controversy, and elsewhere when the play is published,’ he wrote to Lady Gregory.

Far and wide the dispute raged in the English and Irish press; echoes of it resounded in the press of America and Europe. Those who had never heard of Yeats or O'Casey learnt about them for the first time.

But in the quiet groves of Coole Park an ageing Lady Gregory mourned her action. Her Journals record: ‘I am sad about it all,’ (4 May); ‘Very, very, sad,’ (10 June); ‘We were wrong and I fully confess it.’ (Letter to Walter Starkie who, alone among the Directors of the National Theatre Society had written, ‘Sean O'Casey has given so many fine works that we ought to leave the final decision with the audience that has laughed and wept with him.’) Shaw now waded in, adding salt to her wounds: ‘Starkie was right, you should have done the play anyhow … It is certainly a hell of a play … He [W. B. Yeats] has fallen in up to the neck over O'C.’ On 30 June Lady Gregory received the published copy of the play in which Sean had written, ‘with pride and warm affection from Sean O'Casey.’ She wrote, ‘I am glad to have it, though I cannot look at it without pain for that loud quarrel, but I am glad he can think kindly of my part in it, all meant in kindness if he but knew.’ In October 1929 she saw the play at the Apollo Theatre, presented by C. B. Cochran with Charles Laughton in the leading part and Augustus John's superb setting for the war scene. ‘I am convinced we ought to have taken it and done our best to put it on,’ she wrote in her diary.¹⁹

But the last had not been heard of The Silver Tassie as future years were to tell; nor did the tragedy of its rejection end in 1929. To Sean it brought a life-time of self-imposed exile from his native city; but Ireland and her people, whether remembered in love or rancour, remained the fountain of his inspiration until the day he died on 18 September 1964. In a broadcast tribute Micheál Ó hAodha said,

A tale told to life itself! That is what O'Casey has left us in over twenty books and plays. Time may muffle The Drums of Father Ned, The Bishop's Bonfire may become a ring of grey ashes, a few feathers may even be ruffled in the gorgeous Paycock's tail. But the blue and silver of The Plough and the Stars will still float bravely in the breeze.²⁰

For the Abbey, however, the rejection of The Tassie was to rob it of a playwright who might have weaned its audience of the deadly diet of popular comedy and spurious realism.

COMING OF AGE

On Sunday, 27 December 1925 the Abbey celebrated its twenty-first birthday. During those twenty-one years two hundred and sixteen plays, the work of eighty-six authors, had been presented; some had enriched the stages of Europe and America; not a few had been acclaimed as classics of the modern theatre. Two hundred guests filled the stalls; the pit and gallery were crowded with the theatre's devotees. Three plays from the theatre's earliest years were presented, In the Shadow of the Glen, Hyacinth Halvey and The Hour Glass. In the latter play Frank Fay returned to play his old part of the Wise Man. Perhaps some who were present were reminded how far away were the ideals of the founder playwrights from the popular realism that now dominated the theatre's repertoire. For better or worse, the theatre, like the nation, had shed its early idealism to face the harsh facts of its economic existence.

THE NEED FOR SUBSIDY

‘Yet we did not set out to create this sort of a theatre, and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat’²¹ wrote Yeats in an open letter to Lady Gregory. Success, as we have seen, was scarcely an accurate description of the Abbey's financial situation when O'Casey's The Shadow of a Gunman was first presented. In fact the theatre was on the verge of bankruptcy. Since 25 March 1923, it had been under armed guard against threatened reprisals by the Republicans for failing to close its doors as a token of disapproval of the Provisional government's acceptance of the Treaty—a situation that was hardly conducive to theatre-going. Its account was so heavily overdrawn that the bank refused to cash its cheques, and O'Casey was offered the alternative of receiving his royalties—amounting to the lordly sum of four pounds—in cash from the box-office, or waiting until such time as the theatre's bank balance was again in credit. Obviously the theatre could not continue to appeal to the charity of Lady Gregory's wealthy friends, most of whom were English or Anglo-Irish, nor could it survive artistically by a policy of continuous touring. In 1922 the state of the theatre's finances was such that the Directors could only afford to engage three of the players on full-time salaries, the remainder being ‘part-timers’, receiving little more than their bus fares.

The first official approach to the government was made in a statement by the Directors in 1922, setting out the precarious state in which the theatre found itself and the reasons why it should receive help from the Provisional government. At the same time they held out the bait of their wish ‘to engage a Gaelic-speaking producer of plays and to form a company of Gaelic players … If the Government intend to make a great National Theatre the Abbey Theatre might eventually be turned into the Gaelic Theatre.’ On 18 February 1923 Lady Gregory recorded in her diary:

At 5 o'clock I went to the Government buildings to see the Minister of Education, Eoin MacNeill. As to the Abbey, he is anxious we should have the subsidy, it is to come on in the next Budget debate. He is asking for it as an aid to an educational work: our teaching of acting and dramatic writing. He is by no means sure we shall get it but thinks even a discussion on the Abbey will do it good, get more interest aroused in it. I told him of our desire to give it over. He was rather startled and said he didn't want to manage a theatre and was sure the Government didn't, anyhow for some time to come.²²

The offer to hand the theatre over to the government was repeated in a letter to President Cosgrave, dated 27 June 1924, signed by Yeats and Lady Gregory. Ernest Blythe, then Minister of Finance, to whom the letter was forwarded, considered this offer was more tactical than serious, and that in fact it was only an emphatic way of asking for a subvention. Indeed it seems hard to believe that Yeats was so naïve as to believe that the Free State government, faced with the manifold problems of creating the machinery of the new state, not to mention its economic regeneration and the establishment of law and order, would welcome the prospect of running a highly controversial theatre. Lennox Robinson, however, assures us that this was a ‘perfectly serious offer’. In which case it adds weight to the view that after twenty-one years the Directors were increasingly weary of running a theatre whose economic existence depended on a diet of popular comedies. Yeats as we have said, was anxious to shed some of the burden of decision-making and it was in April 1924 that Lennox Robinson was appointed a Director of the National Theatre Society.²³

If government help was to be forthcoming, the Directors realised they would first have to put the theatre's financial affairs in order. The Society's investments were sold to offset the bank overdraft and a mortgage was raised on the premises. On 20 December Blythe was able to tell Lady Gregory that the Executive Council was ‘inclined’ to help the Abbey. ‘I told him our need, our actors underpaid, our actor-manager (M. J. Dolan) getting only £6.7.0. a week, our building so shabby and wanting repair. He asked me how much we wanted to keep going, and I asked for £1,000 a year and £1,000 down for repairs.’²⁴

The theatre was fortunate in that three powerful members of the Executive Council, Ernest Blythe, Eoin MacNeill and Desmond Fitzgerald, Minister for External Affairs, as well as the leader of the Labour Party, Thomas Johnson, were all keen patrons. Moreover, Yeats had been appointed to the Senate in 1922, and in the following year was awarded the Nobel Prize; two events that redounded to the theatre's national and international prestige.

A subsidy of eight hundred and fifty pounds was voted for the financial year 1925-26. From the following year onwards this was raised to one thousand pounds, and Blythe expressed the hope that the actors' salaries would be increased. Thus the Abbey became the first theatre to receive a government subsidy in the English-speaking world.

GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATION

Money from the public purse entailed some form of government representation in the theatre's affairs. There were those who feared that the appointment by the government of Dr George O'Brien, Professor of Economics at University College, Dublin, would entail a loss of that artistic freedom for which Yeats and Lady Gregory had fought since the earliest days of the dramatic movement. Indeed the danger was increased by the fact that the responsibilities of Dr. O'Brien were never clearly stated; a situation that led to trouble when O'Brien, who made no claim to be ‘an author or a dramatic critic’ became highly alarmed by Dolan's refusal to direct The Plough and the Stars, and by his fears that the play ‘might provoke an attack on the theatre of a kind that would endanger the continuancy of the subsidy’.²⁵ To which Lady Gregory replied, ‘If we have to choose between the subsidy and our freedom, it is our freedom we choose.’ O'Brien asked for the second act to be largely re-written and for a general toning down of the vituperative language. At a hastily summoned Directors meeting, Lady Gregory bluntly informed him that ‘Blythe had made no conditions in giving the subsidy, and certainly no hint of appointing a censor.’ Faced with the formidable opposition of Yeats and Lady Gregory, O'Brien gave way, admitting that he had ‘mistaken’ his position. For a time at any rate the danger of government interference in the artistic life of the theatre was averted.

The increase in the subsidy in 1926 enabled the Board of Directors to comply with Blythe's wish that the players' salaries should be increased and placed on a regular scale. Up to now the salaries of the players largely depended on the financial state of the theatre, or on how much the manager and Board thought individual players were worth. The salaries of existing full-time members of the company were now fixed at seven pounds ten shillings when playing; half salaries were paid for non-playing weeks. New full-time members were paid three pounds ten shillings for the first year of their engagement, and increased by one pound annually until their salaries reached the top level. Part-time players were paid according to the size of the part, the minimum being one pound ten shillings a week. M. J. Dolan, as manager, received an extra four pounds a week, and Lennox Robinson as play director received four hundred pounds a year.

Salaries remained more or less static until 1946; ludicrous as they seem today, they were at the time comparable to those of lower grades in the Civil Service.

THE PEACOCK THEATRE

The subsidy was to bring further benefits to the Abbey. In November 1926 the Board was able to plan the transformation of the portion of their premises that was currently let to the College of Modern Irish into a small theatre.

Yeats commissioned Michael Scott, a young architect who occasionally played with the company as a part-time player, to undertake the conversion. The accommodation consisted of a café on the ground floor that also served as a rehearsal room; a small theatre on the first floor with a stage stepped down to the auditorium, and a scene dock. The auditorium held a hundred seats whose blue upholstery matched by the colour of the walls gave the theatre its name of the Peacock Theatre. The third floor housed dressing rooms and an additional rehearsal room. Many years later Michael Scott was to design the new Abbey Theatre.

Yeats hoped this well-equipped little theatre would serve as an experimental theatre for poetic drama. This hope was never fully realised since financial reasons required it to be let as often as possible to outside organisations. The opening performance took place on Sunday, 13 November 1927, when Georg Kaiser's expressionist play, From Morn to Midnight, was presented by the New Players, an amateur organisation stemming from the Dublin Drama League. The play was directed by the future playwright, Denis Johnston, under the pseudonym of ‘E. W. Tocher’.

From 1928 to 1930 the Peacock provided the first home of the Dublin Gate Theatre, founded by Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir. It also provided a permanent home for the Abbey School of Acting, and from 1927 to 1933 the Abbey School of Ballet.

The latter was formed by Ninette de Valois, later to found The Sadlers Wells Ballet, now the Royal Ballet. Yeats had admired her work as a choreographer and dancer at the Cambridge Festival Theatre where he had witnessed Terence Gray's choreographed production of On Baile's Strand. He now sought to obtain her collaboration in the performance of his ‘Plays for Dancers’. Ninette de Valois, herself an Irishwoman from County Wicklow, had trained under Diaghilev; her work for the Abbey provided a series of ballet performances in the Peacock and the main theatre, including the first staging of Yeats's dance drama, Fighting the Waves (13 August 1929).

POPULAR DRAMA

The government subsidy and O'Casey's plays were not the only sources from which the Abbey gained for a time greater financial stability. The decade 1924 to 1934 yielded a valuable harvest of popular drama that could be relied on to produce, if not full houses, at least respectable returns at the box office. George Shiels had already endeared himself to playgoers with Paul Twyning in 1922; he now followed this up with five of the most popular comedies in the theatre's repertoire: Professor Tim (12 September 1925), Cartney and Kevney (29 November 1927), Mountain Dew (5 March 1929), The New Gossoon (19 April 1930) and Grogan and the Ferret (13 November 1933).

Lennox Robinson, no less prolific than Shiels, contributed two often revived comedies, The Far-Off Hills (22 October 1922) and Drama at Inish (6 February 1933), presented outside Ireland as Is Life Worth Living? Less popular were his more serious plays, Portrait (31 March 1925) and The White Blackbird (12 October 1925). The Big House (6 September 1926), in which he treated the decline of an Ascendancy family under the impact of the Anglo-Irish and Civil Wars, proved, together with The Lost Leader, among his most popular serious plays.

Lennox's growing interest in Continental drama was reflected in Ever the Twain (8 October 1929) in which he made use of expressionist techniques, All's Over Then (23 July 1932), a drama owing much to Strindberg in its theme of a battle between the sexes for domination and power, and Church Street (21 May 1934) with its debt to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Brinsley Macnamara, whose first comedy The Glorious Uncertainty had drawn full houses in 1923, contributed a no less popular comedy Look at the Heffernans (13 April 1926). The Master (6 March 1928) dealt with the consequences for his father (a schoolmaster) that ensued from the publication of his much discussed novel The Valley of the Squinting Windows. ‘Not since the production of Mr. O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars has a new play in Dublin created so much interest,’ wrote the critic of the Irish Times; while the New York Times devoted three columns to an appreciation of the play. Margaret Gillan (17 July 1933), a powerful drama of the fury of a woman against the man who spurned her love for the love of her daughter, provided May Craig with an opportunity to show her considerable strength as a tragic actress.

Tragedy was also powerfully represented by T. C. Murray's finest play, Autumn Fire (8 September 1924), which treated the same theme as Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms. The play was later acquired for production in London and New York. The Blind Wolf (29 April 1928) in which Murray departed from Abbey tradition by laying the scene in Hungary, and Michaelmas Eve (27 June 1932) of which the Irish Press somewhat extravagantly claimed ‘Mr. Murray has written a masterpiece for the Irish National Theatre and for the drama of the world’, were for a time amongst the popular plays that could be counted on to draw an audience.

UNPOPULAR THEATRE

‘I want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society where admission is by favour and never to many’ Yeats wrote in his essay, A People's Theatre, a Letter to Lady Gregory.

In the same month as Dubliners flocked to see Juno and the Paycock, an entertainment of a very different kind was provided for a select audience in Yeats's house in Merrion Square. On 3 March 1924 members of the Drama League were invited to witness the first performance in Dublin of At the Hawk's Well, the earliest of Yeats's ‘Plays for Dancers’ based on the techniques of the Noh drama of Japan.

The play was performed by members of the Abbey company with music composed by Edmund Dulac, who also designed the costumes and masks. Dulac's music and designs were originally created for a performance of the play in Lady Cunard's drawing-room on 2 April 1916. For this first performance in London, Henry Ainley appeared as ‘The Young Man’ and the Japanese dancer, Michio Ito as ‘The Guardian of the Well’.

Yeats's interest in Noh drama was stimulated by his contact with Ezra Pound who had published Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa in 1916 for which Yeats had written an introduction. The conventions of the Noh with its masks and stylised stage-craft, its combination of music, dance, chanted speech, and its appeal to a refined and aristocratic audience, provided Yeats with a dramatic form that seemed to be immediately sympathetic to his own ideas of poetic theatre. Sean O'Casey, who witnessed the Dublin performance, was at first bewildered and then frankly amused by ‘the sight of Mr. Robinson doing a musician, and Mick Dolan, the Abbey actor, acting Cuchullain, so serious, so solemn … No, the People's theatre can never be turned into a poetical conventicle,’ he wrote many years later. ‘A play poetical to be worthy of the theatre must be able to withstand the terror of Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Dee-Ay.’²⁶

The contrast between the exclusive audience who gathered in Yeats's drawing-room and the laughter-seeking crowds who flocked to the Abbey to see Juno and the Paycock revealed, as Liam Miller has pointed out, ‘the extent of the gap between the concept of theatre at which Yeats had arrived and the style which the Abbey had developed’.²⁷

The nearest Yeats came to attracting a wider audience to his ‘Plays for Dancers’ was achieved with the collaboration of Ninette de Valois and Hedley Briggs, together with the Abbey on 13 August 1929. The masks for this performance were borrowed from the Dutch sculptor, Hildo Krop, who had designed them for a production in Amsterdam of The Only Jealousy of Emer (Vroue Emer's Groote Stryd) on 2 April 1922. For the Dublin performance the music was composed by the avant-garde American composer George Antheil. ‘The steam whistle of a merry-go-round discourses heavenly music by comparison,’ wrote the ultra-conservative Joseph Holloway.²⁸

In 1931 Yeats made a further attempt to interest a popular audience in this sophisticated and esoteric form of theatre. The Cat and The Moon (21 September) was presented for a week's run in harness with the popular comedy The Lord Mayor. The result was not encouraging. ‘There was’, wrote Holloway, ‘a very thin audience for the first night.’²⁹ The Irish Times, whilst praising the play, added, ‘it is quite impossible to believe that it can ever become a part of the regular repertory of the Abbey or any other theatre.’ Yeats now accepted the fact that the time was still ‘out of joint’ for poetic drama, and in December when his Noh drama, The Dreaming of the Bones, was produced it was restricted to a single performance on a Sunday night (6 December 1931).

In another convention, however, Yeats was more successful in drawing an audience. His translations of Sophocles' King Oedipus (7 December 1926) and Oedipus at Colonus (12 December 1927) commanded general respect, and the former drew full houses. For F. J. McCormick in the name part it was a triumph. ‘His masterly treatment in this play has put him in the forefront of all the great ones,’ wrote the critic of the Evening Herald.

In his only realistic play, The Words upon the Window Pane (17 November 1930) the action of which is centred on a séance held by a female medium through whom Swift, Stella and Vanessa speak, Yeats showed that he could rival any of the realists of the time in commanding the attention of a popular audience.

In W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre Dr. James Flannery maintains that developments in theatre today, as exemplified by the plays of Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter, and by the laboratory work of Grotowski and Brook, indicate that a new interest in Yeats's poetic plays is about to occur.³⁰ Such an interest is, however, unlikely to spread much beyond the limited circle of students of drama; for the major difference between Yeats's plays and contemporary theatrical developments lies in their literary primacy and aristocratic appeal. To the general public Yeats's theatre remains ‘a mysterious art’, ‘a theatre for ourselves and our friends and a few simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought.’³¹ The greatness of Yeats's contribution to a people's theatre lies not in his plays but in his championship of a theatre that bowed the knee neither to popular favour, nor to political and religious pressures; a theatre that expressed the consciousness of the nation without fear or favour; above all a theatre that proved an inspiration and a focus for many generations of young writers who, but for its existence, would never have contemplated writing for the stage.

NEW PLAYWRIGHTS

Amongst these new playwrights of the post-Treaty generation were Denis Johnston, Paul Vincent Carroll and Teresa Deevy.

The title of Johnston's first play (originally called Shadow Dance and later Symphony in Green) was changed to The Old Lady Says No! after its rejection by the Abbey, its new title implying that it was Lady Gregory who turned it down. Whether this was so or not, Johnston's multi-scene, expressionist satire of Irish idealism was far better served by Hilton Edwards in an historic production by the Gate Theatre than it would have been by the unimaginative production methods of the Abbey in the twenties.

Yeats was fully aware of the Abbey's weakness in staging anything other than the eternal repetition of farm kitchen and front parlour scenes; and it was partly to stimulate a more creative approach to play directing that he invited Denis Johnston to direct King Lear, the Abbey's first attempt at a Shakespeare play.

The production, with futurist designs by D. Travers-Smith, opened on 26 November 1928, providing McCormick with the opportunity to prove himself once again in a major tragic role. ‘Lear last night wonderful, McCormick magnificent—there is no other word—all through,’ Lady Gregory wrote.³² Yeats was shrewd enough to recognise Johnston's potential as a playwright and it was no doubt to keep him from becoming too closely attached to the rival theatre that he persuaded his fellow Directors to soften the blow caused by the rejection of his first play by offering a fifty pound guarantee against loss for its production by the Gate. The Abbey reaped its reward when Johnston offered it his second play The Moon in the Yellow River. The play is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of Irish drama, but strangely enough has never received the critical acclaim nor the popularity that are its due. This is partly due to the complexity of its themes, and partly to Johnston's refusal to commit himself to any easy optimistic philosophy in his distinctly cynical view of the contradictions in Irish character and behaviour. In The Moon he mirrors the confused state of Ireland in the birth pangs of its nationhood with its bombs, political murders and relentless self-devouring. ‘Last night's audience was frankly bewildered and so divided in its opinions that prolonged hissing was mingled with dominant applause,’ wrote the critic of the Irish Times on the occasion of its first production (27 April 1931).

In June 1931 the Directors decided to offer a prize of fifty pounds for the best full-length play. the award was shared between Paul Vincent Carroll', a schoolmaster from Dundalk, and Teresa Deevy, a deaf spinster from County Waterford. Carroll's play, Things that are Caesar's (originally called The New Procrustes), was presented on 15 August 1932, gaining a universally appreciative press reception. ‘Vincent Carroll will without doubt rank in the future with the greatest of Irish writers,’ wrote the Daily Express critic. Miss Deevy had already had two plays presented by the Abbey, The Reapers (18 March 1930) and a one-act play A Disciple (24 August 1931). Temporal Powers, her prize-winning play which opened on 12 September 1932, received a less flattering press, though the Irish Times wrote, ‘The author has produced one of the most thoughtful works seen for some time at the Abbey Theatre.’

THE CHARWOMAN OF THE ABBEY

In 1924 and 1927 Lady Gregory contributed her last plays to the Abbey, The Story Brought by Brigid (14 April 1924), Sancho's Master (14 March 1927), and Dave (9 May 1927). Shaw called her ‘the charwoman of the Abbey’; she was in fact not only its servant but its mistress. In 1932 she died; her last years saddened by the knowledge that her home to which she had devoted so much loving care was to pass out of the hands of her family. Coole Park was taken over by the Forestry Commission; its lawns and gardens neglected, the great house that had played so vital a part in the history of Irish theatre was wantonly destroyed. Yeats had written in 1929,

Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon the shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate—eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade—
A moment's memory to that laurelled head.(33)

With her death there ended what might be called the domestic Abbey; the family theatre whose members were held together by her matriarchal rule, whose green-room with its homely furniture and photographs was the centre of family life; a quarrelsome family sometimes, liable to sudden flareups, abrupt departures and petty jealousies, with the patriarchal Yeats held in fearsome awe in his presence but good for ‘great gas’ behind his back, and ‘Lady G.’ prone to have her favourites, dispensing tea and barmbrack, a strict but kindly matriarch; now all that was changing; parental rule was to be replaced by an oligarchy.

Notes

1. Sean McCann, ‘Introduction’ in The World of Sean O'Casey, ed. Sean McCann, 9.

2. Quoted in David Krause, Sean O'Casey and His World, London 1976, 45.

3. Curtain Up, 13.

4. Journals, 73.

5. Quoted in Coxhead, Lady Gregory, 192.

6. Journals, 74-5.

7. Impressions, Hogan/O'Neill, 236.

8. During the Abbey's closure period, normally June to mid-July, players were free to accept outside engagements.

9. Gabriel Fallon, Sean O'Casey, The Man I Knew, London 1965, 29.

10. Journals, 87.

11. Ria Mooney, The Days Before Yesterday, an unpublished autobiography, 48.

12. Impressions, Hogan/O'Neill, 251.

13. The Days Before Yesterday, 51-2; Sean O'Casey, Inishfallen Fare Thee Well, London 1949, 175-7; The Irish Times, 12 February 1926; Shelah Richards, an unpublished autobiography; Impressions, ed. Hogan/O'Neill 254; Sean O'Casey, The Man I Knew, 92-3.

14. Inishfallen Fare Thee Well, 181.

15. Journals, 104.

16. Ibid, 106.

17. Sean O'Casey, Rose and Crown, London 1952, 34.

18. Correspondence relating to the rejection of The Silver Tassie is published in The Letters of Sean O'Casey, 1910-41, ed. David Krause, London, 1975, 225-326.

19. Journals 106-11, 123-4.

20. Quoted in Micheál Ó hAodha, The Abbey Theatre—Then and Now, Dublin 1969, 61.

21. W. B. Yeats, ‘A People's Theatre, A Letter to Lady Gregory’ in The Irish Statesman, 29 November and 6 December 191.

22. Journals, 70.

23. In Ireland's Abbey Theatre, 149, Lennox Robinson states: ‘I had become a Director in 1923’. The minutes of the Board of Directors, however, record that his appointment dated from 15 April 1924. In the same year he succeeded St. John Ervine as dramatic critic of The Observer but continued to be resident in Ireland. M. J. Dolan succeeded him as manager and director of plays until the end of his newspaper assignment in August 1925.

24. Journals, 81-2.

25. Ibid, 90-1.

26. Inishfallen Fare Thee Well, 270.

27. Liam Miller, The Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats, Dublin 1977, 231.

28. Joseph Holloway's Irish Theatre, Vol. 1, 1926-1931, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O'Neill, California 1968, 51.

29. Ibid, 78.

30. Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, 366-77.

31. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, London 1911, 165-6.

32. Journals, 117.

33. W. B. Yeats, ‘Coole Park’ in Collected Poems, 274-5.