SOURCE: Miller, Liam. “W. B. Yeats and Stage Design at the Abbey Theatre.” Malahat Review, no. 16 (October 1970): 50-64.

[In the following essay, Miller—a stage designer—discusses the “pioneering work in stage design” that occurred at the Abbey Theatre during the Irish Literary Renaissance.]

Among the earliest published works of W. B. Yeats are three dramatic poems, “Mosada,” privately printed for the poet's father in the 1880's with a frontispiece showing Yeats at the time, “The Island of Statues” and “The Seeker,” none of which had been attempted on the stage, when, on July 1, 1887, he wrote from London to Katharine Tynan:

I do not think I shall ever find London very tolerable. It can give me nothing; I am not fond of the theatre, literary society bores me, I loathe crowds and was very content with Dublin, though even that was a little too populous

… but, although the twenty-two year old poet did not then realize it, elements of his life and work, his concern for Ireland and the ideals of his friends, were to make him, during the next twelve years, the acknowledged leader of the movement to establish a National Theatre in his native land.

I propose to look at the approach to stage design in that Theatre, principally as it was for so many years directed and shaped by Yeats. But first, it is, I think, right that we should consider briefly some of the influences in the young poet's background which are echoed in his work in the theatre. His family moved in 1888 to Bedford Park in London where among their neighbours and friends were the poet and playwright John Todhunter, who presented his own poetic plays in a club theatre there, among them A Sicilian Idyll, presented on May 5, 1890 in settings by another neighbour, H. M. Paget, who was later to design for a London production of Yeats's The Shadowy Waters, and with, among the players, Florence Farr. Yeats's approach to the theatre seems to have changed radically on coming in contact with these people and in the following September he wrote to Katharine Tynan that he was planning a Mystery play on the Adoration of the Magi, no doubt with Todhunter's theatre club in mind. Yeats also met William Morris about this time and came under the influence of this “happiest of the poets” and his circle of Pre-Raphaelite friends, and through Morris he met Bernard Shaw.

In March 1894 Miss A. E. F. Horniman, who later became The Abbey Theatre's “fairy godmother,” backed a season of plays at the Avenue Theatre in London which included the first Yeats play to be staged, The Land of Heart's Desire, which was presented in a double bill with, first, John Todhunter's The Land of Dreams, and later with Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. The posters for this season were designed by Aubrey Beardsley, foremost among the avant-garde artists of the nineties, who at the time of his early death in 1898 was preparing illustrations for an edition of Yeats's play, The Shadowy Waters. Among the artists who appeared in the Avenue Theatre season is Miss Florence Farr, who was later to appear in several of the Irish Literary Theatre productions. A letter to John O'Leary dated April 15, 1894 in which Yeats says of this season that:

The whole venture will be history anyway for it is the first contest between the old commercial school of theatrical folk and the new artistic school. …

indicates the changes that had come about in Yeats's thinking about the theatre since his statement to Katharine Tynan less than seven years before.

The aesthetic approach of the period is reflected in Yeats's developing work in the theatre. The woodcuts which Sir Edward Burne Jones made for Morris's Kelmscott Press Chaucer, published in 1896, seem to me to find close parallels in Yeats's stage directions to The Countess Cathleen, of which the first published version appeared in September 1892. In scene one he asks for … a door into the open air, through which one sees, perhaps, the trees of a wood and these trees should be painted in flat colour upon a gold or diapered sky. The walls are of one colour. The scene should have the effect of missal painting. The directions for scene two ask that the scenery be all in flat colour, without light and shade and against a diapered or gold background … and so on. The variants in these directions can all be found in Russell Alspach's Variorum edition of the Plays and show, throughout the many re-writings of the text of the play, a remarkable consistency in the visual approach. A production now in preparation by the Abbey Theatre Company for presentation during this winter is designed to adhere closely to these stage directions and may thus come closer to a visual realization of Yeats's ideas than any production in his lifetime.

A letter to Fiona MacLeod written early in 1897 shows Yeats defining an approach to stage presentation:

My own theory of poetical or legendary drama is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but only a symbolic and decorative setting. A forest, for instance, should be represented by a forest pattern and not by a forest painting. One should design a scene which would be an accompaniment not a reflection of the text. This method would have the further advantage of being fairly cheap, and altogether novel.

Two years later, when the first productions of the Irish Literary Theatre were in preparation in Dublin, Yeats entered the controversy aroused by William Archer's review of the published version of The Heather Field by Edward Martyn and, in a letter of January 27, 1899 to The Daily Chronicle, wrote:

I see in my imagination a stage where there shall be both scenery and costumes, but scenery and costumes which will draw little attention to themselves and cost little money. I have noticed at a rehearsal how the modern coats and the litter on the stage draw one's attention, and baffle the evocation which needs all one's thought that it may call before one's eyes lovers escaping through a forest, or men in armour upon a mountain side. I have noticed, too, how elaborate costumes and scenery silence the evocation completely, and substitute the cheap effects of a dressmaker and of a meretricious painter for an imaginative glory. … Such scenery might come, when its makers had mastered its mysteries, to have a severe beauty, such as one finds in Egyptian wall-paintings, and it would be more beautiful, even at the beginning, than the expensive scenery of the modern theatre, even when Mr. Tree has put into the boughs in the forest, those memorable birds that sing by machinery.

I feel that even at this date Yeats is seeing himself as a leader in a new movement which would revitalise the theatre of the time and be in accordance with the general artistic principles he expressed in such writings as his essay on the symbolic artist, Althea Gyles, which had appeared in The Dome during the previous year, and in which he stated:

… there are tides in the imagination of the world, and a motion in one or two minds may show a change in tide.

A motion in one or two minds which was indeed to show a change in tide was the series of meetings between Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn which led to the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre which, in May 1899, presented as its first offering to the public, Yeats's The Countess Cathleen. The staging of the play cannot have come up to Yeats's high ideal, as the critic of the Dublin Evening Mail remarked that:

When we consider the tremendous disadvantage under which the whole performance laboured, the smallness of the stage, the meagreness of the scenery and other necessary accessories, its success appears all the more surprising and gratifying.

[B]ut we can at the same time see that Yeats was prepared for obstacles to the practical realisation of his ideal. In his manifesto of the Theatre's policy printed in the first issue of Beltaine, the organ of the Theatre, he states that:

It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the Theatre of Art; for one must get one's actors, and perhaps one's scenery from the theatre of commerce, until new actors and new painters have come to help one; and until many failures and imperfect successors have made a new tradition, and perfected in detail the ideal that is beginning to float before our eyes. If one could call one's painters and one's actors from where one would, how easy it would be.

But the “Theatre of Art” was not to come at once, as Joseph Holloway's diary entry about the Gaiety Theatre production of Diarmuid and Grainne by Yeats and George Moore in October 1901 shows:

The last scene, the wooded slopes of Ben Bulben, was picturesque, but the others I found only so-so, while the lighting of the stage was very erratic at all times. …

In fact, the Ben Bulben scene was the only one specifically prepared for the play, the remainder being stock scenery for Benson's touring repertoire of Shakespeare and melodrama, and the production must have deepened Yeats's dislike of the standards of the commercial theatres of the time.

II

Although we are not dealing here with the history of the Irish National Theatre and its development from various sources, such as the independent work of the Fay brothers before they joined forces with the Literary Theatre, it is important to point out that the Theatre's whole concern was not for poetic drama alone, but also for the realistic drama which made the Abbey actors famous around the world. But the poetic drama lends itself more readily to conscious thought and experiment on the part of Yeats and the designers he chose, and so the plays mentioned here will be mainly works by Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge, because these are the works which have inspired such thinking on Yeats's part. It is important to consider, too, the physical circumstances in which the early productions of the Irish National Theatre took place. In Ave George Moore's impression of attending a performance in the Antient Concert Rooms shows him:

Making my way with quick irritable steps towards the Antient Concert Rooms, whither the hall porter had directed me, and finding them by a stone-cutter's yard. Angels and crosses! A truly suitable place for a play by Edward Martyn, I said. The long passage leading to the rooms seemed to be bringing me into a tomb. Nothing very renascent about this, I said, pushing my way through the spring doors into a lofty hall with a balcony and benches down the middle, and there were seats along the walls placed so that those who sat on them would have to turn their heads to see the stage, a stage that had been constructed hurriedly by advancing some rudely painted wings and improvising a drop-curtain.

Many of these discomforts were to be solved two years later in the Abbey Theatre, with its proper dressing rooms and stage facilities (even though the players had to emerge into a little back street and re-enter the building by another door if they had to cross the stage unseen during a performance), and here Yeats hoped to realize his ideas of stagecraft. The realistic plays, which made up the greater part of the theatre's repertoire, seem, up to the 1930's at any rate, to have been staged according to repertory conventions of the time in standard “box sets,” which were rearranged and painted “realistically” as required. We must also remember that strict budgetary considerations have always played an important part in the control of the National Theatre, so that for instance, for the production of AE's Deirdre in April 1902, we find Miss Horniman herself sewing the costumes from the designs by the playwright himself. Yeats reported to Lady Gregory that:

… the costumes and scenery were really beautiful. There was a gauze veil in front.

Lady Gregory's son, Robert, designed the setting for The Hour Glass by W. B. Yeats, presented in the 1903 season at the Molesworth Hall. The design, an arrangement of purple costumes against a green curtain, was fully in accordance with Yeats's ideals and he referred to it in his lecture “The Reform of the Theatre” given between the plays. Robert Gregory's sketch was worked into practical detail by Sturge Moore who was, as Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory on December 9, 1902:

emphatic about the great difficulty of getting a green that will go well with purple and wants me to have the curtain made of some undyed material. I have written Fay for some patterns of the purple and to ask if there was to be any green in the costumes.

Here again we see Yeats's concern with the practical details of the theatre and his use of his friendship with Sturge Moore to see that the realization of the idea was expertly carried out. Robert Gregory was to make many designs for the Abbey Theatre before his untimely death in 1917. The Hour Glass was among the productions which the company toured to London later in 1903. A year earlier, in November 1902, plans were made for a production by the English Stage Society of Yeats's Where there is Nothing, using the Irish actors. Pamela Coleman Smith and Edith Craig prepared designs which did not meet the approval of Edith's brother Gordon Craig, who had hoped to play the chief part himself. This production did not, however, take place until 1904, without the Irish players.

In 1904, through the generous help of Miss Horniman, the Theatre got its permanent home. The Abbey Theatre was adapted from the Mechanics Institute and another building which had at one time served as the City Morgue. The architect of the theatre, Joseph Holloway, also was its most regular first-nighter for many years and chronicled its affairs in his voluminous diary (from which I have already quoted), which is now in the National Library of Ireland. Holloway had in fact recorded his “impressions” from the very beginning of the theatre and a volume of these, edited by Robert Hogan and Michael J. O'Neill, was published in 1967, giving some entertaining if eccentric “inside” stories of the Irish Theatre.

For Synge's The Well of the Saints in 1905, Yeats asked his brother Jack to do the scenery and costumes, but at the same time hoped that the pieces made might also come in useful for other plays, as he wrote to Lady Gregory on November 24, 1905:

I am waiting on Jack's designs for Synge's play, as it may be possible to use some bits of scenery which will afterwards come in useful for Synge. They should come today or tomorrow. Failing this I shall get Pixie Smith, who alone seems to understand what I want, to make a design. I am extremely anxious now that I am here, and for the moment at any rate master of the situation, to get designs of a decorative kind, which will get a standard and come in serviceable for different sorts of plays.

The scenery was in fact designed by Miss Smith, built by Seaghan Barlow and painted by Lady Gregory's son, Robert, who was to design several fine settings for the theatre, and the response to the effort pleased Yeats who wrote to John Quinn in New York on February 15, 1906:

… our decorative scenery for Synge's play has been generally liked. It was scrambled through in a great hurry and cost, I think, about £5, and yet was, though often mistaken in execution, obviously right in principle.

Jack Yeats was to design very little for the Abbey, but some things survive—some charming notes for costumes for the first production of The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, and a backcloth design for his brother's play, The King's Threshold, made in 1913. This drawing is now in the National Gallery of Ireland. Jack Yeats does not appear to have made any other designs for the Abbey, but probably designed some settings for Edward Martyn's Theatre of Ireland about 1915. The most vivid of the surviving designs by Robert Gregory is the large watercolour which is an idealisation of his setting for Deirdre by W. B. Yeats, 1906. Yeats was so pleased with the realization that he joined the name of Robert Gregory in the dedication of his play to that of Mrs. Patrick Campbell who created the title part. If we read the stage directions we see how well the playwright's idea is caught in the drawing:

A guest-house in a wood. It is a rough house of timber; through the doors and some of the windows one can see the great spaces of the wood, the sky dimming, night closing in. But a window to the left shows the thick leaves of a coppice; the landscape suggests silence and loneliness. There is a door to right and left, and through the side windows one can see anybody who approaches either door, a moment before he enters. In the centre a part of the house is curtained off; the curtains are drawn. …

If we consider these directions together with Yeats's essay in the 1906 Samhain on “Literature and the Living Voice,” in which he asks that scenery should be:

little more than a suggestion—a pattern with recurring boughs and leaves of gold for a wood, a great green curtain with a red stencil upon it to carry the eye upward for a palace, and so on,

we can visualise the appearance of these early productions. In the revised text of The Shadowy Waters, Yeats is specific in his directions. The setting is:

The deck of an ancient ship. At the right of the stage is the mast, with a large square sail hiding a great deal of the sky and sea on that side. The tiller is at the left of the stage; it is a long oar coming through an opening in the bulwark. The deck rises in a series of steps behind the tiller, and the stern of the ship curves overhead. All the woodwork is of dark green; with a blue pattern on it, having a little copper colour here and there. The sky and sea are dark blue. All the persons of the play are dressed in various tints of green and blue, the men with helmets and swords of copper, the woman with copper ornaments upon her dress.

This, if Robert Gregory's realisation approached the description, must have created a beautiful stage picture, not at all “Celtic,” but rather Pre-Raphaelite in its form and colouring, and vastly different from the established idea of stage scenery at the time, such as the naturalistic painted scenes used in the lavish productions of Henry Irving and Beerbolm Tree.

Lady Gregory, in her book, Our Irish Theatre, recalls these early days when her son Robert designed and painted many of the settings. Her own Kincora had:

the most costly staging we had yet attempted: it came with the costumes to £30. A great deal of unpaid labour went into it.

Joseph Holloway recorded of this production in 1905:

I heard Lady Gregory say with motherly pride that it was her son's part in the production that pleased her most, and I don't wonder at it.

Lady Gregory also tells how:

Mr. Fay discovered a method of making papier mâché, a chief part of which seemed to be the boiling down of large quantities of our old programmes, for the mouldings and for the shields. I have often seen the designer himself on his knees by a great iron pot—the one we use in cottage scenes—dyeing pieces of sacking, or up high on a ladder painting his forests or leaves.

Imaginative costume design was also a necessity for the theatre and it is not surprising that Yeats, in 1904, invoked the aid of his friend Charles Ricketts, a pioneer in this field on the English stage. A letter of November 7, 1904, from Yeats to Lady Gregory, records an early meeting to discuss plans:

I went out to Ricketts on Friday evening and he offered to do scenery for a play, we must think what we will set him at. I will discuss this with you when we meet. He said when we wanted him we should say how much money we could spend and so forth. He is full of fine ideas.

In 1906 Ricketts designed the London production of Oscar Wilde's Salome and A Florentine Tragedy. He made costume designs for the Abbey Theatre production of Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows in 1910. These bright and colourful costumes were the first in a series for plays by Yeats and Synge which Ricketts designed over the next ten years and which added much to the quality of staging at the Abbey. Some seventeen watercolour designs survive and these show a concern with purpose as well as colour and form: indeed, the artist's notes on the drawings reveal that elements in the costumes were interchangeable for different parts. The abstract patterns painted or embroidered on the garments, and the design not of any specific country or period, allowed this flexible interchange and must have done much to centre the impact of these imaginative plays on the audience. There are surviving designs for The Well of the Saints, The King's Threshold and On Baile's Strand by Yeats. We should remember that these designs were made as much as twelve years before Ricketts' greatest success in the London theatre, which came with his designs for the first production of Shaw's Saint Joan in 1922.

Charles Ricketts found Gordon Craig intelligent but diffuse, as he recorded in his diary on December 29, 1903. Nevertheless plans were made at that time for a London production of The Countess Cathleen to be produced by Craig and designed by Ricketts. This never came about, but the fact that the project was even discussed shows how Yeats, in his quest for his ideal theatre, enlisted the foremost people of the time; and the most ardent seeker for a total stage realisation of the poetical drama was undoubtedly Ellen Terry's son Gordon Craig.

III

Yeats's interest in Gordon Craig's pioneering work in stage design dates from 1901, when he attended Craig's production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Coronet Theatre in London, and wrote to Craig: You have created a new art. They became close friends and exchanged plans and ideas. In the following year Yeats was planning with the help of a model stage, and showed the scenario of his new play The Hour Glass to Craig. Craig was resolving his ideas on stage production, expressed first in his book The Art of the Theatre and later through the medium of his magazine, The Mask, to which Yeats contributed his essay “The Tragic Theatre” in 1910. In the same year Craig provided Yeats with a model stage and set of screens with which to plan productions, and was making drawings for the edition of Yeats's Plays for an Irish Theatre, which was then going through the press. With Craig's model Yeats decided that:

Henceforth I can all but produce my play as I write it, moving hither or thither little figures of cardboard through gay or solemn light and shade, allowing the scene to give the words and the words the scene.

Yeats also saw the value of lighting in stage presentation and found that Craig's invention:

enables one to use light in a more natural and more beautiful way than ever before. We get rid of all the top hamper of the stage, all the hanging ropes and scenes which prevent the free play of light. It is now possible to substitute in the shading of one scene real light and shadow for painted light and shadow.

Here we come to the essential difference in the approaches of Craig and Ricketts to stage design. In the diary entry previously quoted, Ricketts goes on to say that Craig

could not understand my advocacy of arbitrary colouring in scenery, absence of complicated lighting effects, and general decorative treatment.

Ricketts was nearer in his approach to the classic Noh Theatre of Japan, which was to be the principle influence on Yeats's plays after 1916.

When we remember that Craig's model stage provided a moveable proscenium and ceiling and other permanent features which have only now found realisation in the rebuilt Abbey Theatre, fifty-five years later, we realise how far-seeing Craig was in his approach. But some difficulties arose in the realisation of his plans. Joseph Holloway, in his capacity as architectural adviser to the theatre:

met W. B. Yeats at the Abbey about lowering the stage to level of footlights and also discussed the Gordon Craig screens for reducing the size of stage pictures by an arrangement that expands or contracts from sides and top automatically. But somehow to Mr. Barlow and me it did not seem very practical on a small stage like the Abbey.

Holloway did not approve of the new methods and records a further visit to see the work in progress in November 1910:

I called in at the Abbey and saw the stagehands setting Gordon Craig's new idea of scenery—a series of square box-like pillars, saffron hued, with saffron background, wings, sky pieces and everything. The entire setting struck me as like peas, only on a big scale, of the blocks I as a child built houses of. As Yeats never played with blocks in his youth, Gordon Craig's childish ideas give him keen delight now.

Despite all the difficulties, however, the Craig screens were finished and first used on January 12, 1911, for The Hour Glass by Yeats, in an arrangement of screens and lighting devised by Craig after the manner of his drawing in Plays for an Irish Theatre, which seems to have impressed the audience, and in an arrangement devised by Yeats for Lady Gregory's play, The Deliverer, in which the experiment seems to have been somewhat less than a success. The programme carried a note to the effect that the method of staging would shortly be seen in a production of Hamlet at the Moscow Arts Theatre. This famous Craig production is discussed by Stanislavsky in his Memoirs and is one of the most famous productions in twentieth-century theatre history. But Joseph Holloway still did not approve and wrote in his diary:

With a great flourish of egotistical trumpets on the part of the management and Yeats in dress clothes with crush opera hat in hand, the Gordon Craig freak scenery and lighting were tried at the Abbey in Lady Gregory's Hiberno-Egyptian one-act tragic comedy. “The Deliverer,” and also in Yeats's morality, “The Hour Glass.” And while most voted the innovation an affected failure with possibilities for effective stage pictures, none considered it in any way an improvement on the old methods.

Despite Holloway's pessimism, I feel that the experiment was a success. The screens continued in use for many years, first at the Abbey and later in the Peacock Theatre, until the fire of 1951. Yeats continued to play along the lines suggested by Craig and in 1913 arranged the showing in Dublin of Craig's designs, including the models for the Moscow Hamlet. An interview given by Yeats to The Freeman's Journal at the time of this exhibition reveals his attitude to stage design and also how much he had learned from Craig. The interviewer asked:

Mr. Craig's method indicates a revolt against realism in stage production … What are your views on that revolt? “The theatre,” answered Mr. Yeats, “is changing over Europe. You cannot put on the stage as a setting, a painting as good as a bad Academy picture. Take the best landscape of Sir Herbert Tree's Theatre, and it is merely a little less distinguished than a landscape by Leader. Realistic painting for the stage gives unreality, theatricality in the worst sense.” Mr. Yeats walked rapidly up and down the room, his hands clasped behind his back, as is his manner when he warms to his subject. “The difference,” said he, “is this. A fine easel painting reveals its beauty in a few minutes. The stage decoration which men like Mr. Craig desire is one which only wakes into its full significance when the players are in front of it. It must be closely associated with their moods and with the moods of the writer.”

IV

Craig had also aroused Yeats's interest in the possibility of using masks for characters in his plays and had designed masks for The Blind Man and The Hour Glass. But Yeats's final understanding of the mask came with his first experiments with the form of the Noh plays of Japan, which he first came to read in the translations of Ernest Fennelosa and Ezra Pound in Certain Noble Plays of Japan, published at his sister's Cuala Press in 1916. He contributed an introduction to this book which shows him working towards an Irish drama in this form:

Perhaps some day a play in the form I am adapting for European purposes shall awake once more, whether in Gaelic or in English, under the slope of Slieve-na-Mon or Croagh Patrick, ancient memories; for this form has no need of scenery that runs away with money nor of a theatre building. Yet I know that I only amuse myself with a fancy; for though my writings if they be seaworthy must put to sea, I cannot tell where they may be carried by the wind. Are not the fairy stories of Oscar Wilde, which were written for Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Shannon and for a few ladies, very popular in Arabia?

The ancient, ritualistic technique of the Noh provided Yeats with the framework he sought for his own dramatic work. The device of the mask presented character without the intrusion of personality, and the presence of chorus and dancers extended and enriched the dramatic action. Most of Yeats's own plays after this date belong to his own concept of the Noh form and he sought designers, dancers and musicians who would work with him towards the realisation of his concept. After the construction in the 1920's of the Peacock Theatre, he wrote his stage directions with this theatre in mind; for example I quote from The Resurrection, published in 1931:

If it is played at the Peacock Theatre the Musicians may sing the opening and closing songs as they pull apart or pull together the proscenium curtains. The whole stage may be hung with curtains with an opening at the left. While the play is in progress the Musicians will sit towards the right of the audience; if at the Peacock, on the step which separates the stage from the audience, or one on either side of the proscenium.

Yeats had some Noh masks in his own collection and was deeply influenced by many aspects of the Noh and of Japanese art. He found in a painted screen by Korin, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts:

the same form … echoing in wave and in cloud and in rock.

And above all he found a method of staging for his dramatic ideas:

where a ship is represented by a mere skeleton of willows or osiers painted green, on a fruit tree by a bush in a pot, and where actors have tied on their masks with ribbons that are gathered into a bunch behind the head. It is a child's game become the most noble poetry and there is no observation of life because the poet would set before us all those things which we feel and imagine in silence.

For the realization of his ideas Yeats invoked the aid, first, of Edmund Dulac, who made cloth, costumes and masks for his Cuchulainn play At the Hawk's Well, first performed in 1916 in Lady Cunard's drawing room in London and later at the Abbey Theatre. This production is recorded in some remarkable photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn and Dulac's masks are still in Mrs. Yeats's collection. But I think this is the point at which the two traditions of theatre which made up the Abbey separate, and also the point at which Yeats realised the necessity of establishing the Peacock. The experiment with Noh was coolly received and Sean O'Casey thought that “a Japanese spirit had failed to climb into the soul of a Kelt.”

But outside Ireland the experiment had aroused interest and productions of the Yeats plays followed. The Dutch artist Hildo Krop made masks for the production of The Only Jealousy of Emer in 1922, and these masks, together with curtain and costumes by Miss D. Travers Smith (who was later to marry Lennox Robinson), music by George Antheil and choreography by Ninette de Valois, were used in the Abbey production of the revised version of the same play, entitled Fighting the Waves, in August 1929. This production seems to have been the most satisfying example of the Yeats Noh form, and we are fortunate that the occasion is well documented and that the designs, masks and photographs can be seen today. The curtain for Fighting the Waves might profitably be compared with the Korin screen I have mentioned.

V

Of the other designers who have worked at the Abbey Theatre, I should first like to mention Seaghan Barlow, who has been with the company from its very beginnings, before the Abbey Theatre was built, and who constructed and painted all the works for many years. Among many other designs he painted the Charles Ricketts scenery for The Well of the Saints, Robert Gregory's for The Image and constructed the Gordon Craig screens. Seaghan Barlow designed and built many of the settings for the regular Abbey plays and worked at the Theatre until this year. Among the settings designed by him were those for Tagore's The Post Office, using the Craig screens, in 1913, and Shaw's Androcles and the Lion in 1919.

Miss Travers Smith, who designed Fighting the Waves, first appears on the programme as designer of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones in 1926. This was a memorable production and the arrangement of forest scenes from draped curtains is still remembered as impressive. Miss Travers Smith might be called the first of a series of resident designers who have worked at the Abbey since that time. Among her other works was the King Lear which was directed by Denis Johnston in 1928, and Fighting the Waves, which I have already mentioned.

After about 1930 Yeats's active participation in the affairs of the Theatre declined: a pattern had been established which has existed until the present of having a resident designer at the theatre with occasional designs commissioned from other designers. Norah McGuinness made some designs for Yeats's plays, Maurice McGonigal designed the Abbey's production of The Silver Tassie by Sean O'Casey in 1935 and Sean Keating designed the setting and costumes for a memorable revival of The Playboy of the Western World.

Tanya Moiseiwitsch became designer to the Theatre in 1935, and, after a period as her assistant, Anne Yeats succeeded her, and designed, among many other plays, the Abbey's first long-running success, The Rugged Path by George Shiels, in 1940. She was succeeded by Michael Clarke who designed a fine Plough and the Stars for its revival in 1942. Alicia Sweetman was the next designer and then Carl Bonn, who had made many designs for the Gate Theatre, worked at the Abbey between 1947 and 1949 and designed the first Abbey Pantomime. Vere Dudgeon was designer at the time of the fire in 1951. Michael O'Herlihy designed several plays after the Company moved to the Queen's Theatre. Tomas MacAnna, who is now artistic adviser to the theatre, had made several designs for the Abbey Experimental Theatre in its seasons at the old Peacock in 1948, 1949 and 1950, and later, after the “temporary” move to the Queen's Theatre, which was to last for fifteen years, designed many of the plays besides directing and organizing. He has, since the opening of the new theatre, made designs for Tarry Flynn, The Loves of Cass Maguire, Red Roses for Me and Borstal Boy, among many other plays. Brian Collins has been resident designer with the company for some years and made many settings during the last years in the Queen's Theatre besides executing the work of other designers. I would like to mention his imaginative settings for the Yeats plays presented during the Yeats Centenary year, in 1965, and his designs for the 1968 revivals of the Synge classics, The Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World. As guest designer, I have done some work at the Queen's, at the Abbey and in the Peacock Theatre, including a revival of The Countess Cathleen for presentation this year. In 1967 Alan Barlow mounted the Boucicault play The Shaughraun in settings which capture the period of the piece with the flavour and style of the Victorian lithographic artists, and, among other designs, created an atmospheric setting for Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Perhaps the recent presentation of The Cherry Orchard with the Abbey players directed by Madame Knebel of the Moscow Arts Theatre and imaginatively designed by Brian Collins in an arrangement of gauze drapes and lighting shows that, despite low periods in its history, the National Theatre is carrying on the approach to presentation initiated by W. B. Yeats.