[In the following interview, originally published in 1910, one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre discusses the peasant plays of the Abbey Theatre as part of a dramatic movement “that is representative of the social life and the economic conditions of Ireland.”]

‘The side of our work with which we have achieved our greatest successes,’ said Mr. Yeats to our representative, ‘is undoubtedly the peasant comedy and tragedy. We have placed upon the stage for the first time the real Irish life as opposed to the traditional. The dialect of Lever and of Lover¹ was a composite thing, and displayed a very limited understanding of the peasant mind. The proper understanding of the peasant mind only arose with an understanding of Gaelic.

‘These peasant plays’, he continued, ‘are not primarily studies of peasant life. Synge's plays, for instance, contain a philosophy of life just as truly as do the lyrics of Shelley. They express the ideas of the man in the symbolism of the peasant world he had studied so deeply and knew so well. His was not photographic art; it was symbolic. He used the Irish peasant as a means of expression, just as the painter uses the colours on his palette. His plays are the complete expression of his own soul.

‘Lady Gregory's comedy is equally personal, but in a different manner. Both writers studied their symbols profoundly. Lady Gregory, I believe, wrote down over 200,000 words of peasant speech before she wrote a line of her dialogue. Synge, of course, lived in the cottages of the people as one of themselves.

‘That part of our movement represented by Lady Gregory, Synge and myself, is individualistic. We aim at expressing ourselves, they in dialect, myself in verse. But there is a new movement arising that is representative of the social life and the economic conditions of Ireland. We have just produced in Dublin, for instance, and we shall stage it in London, a play by Padraic Colum, in which one sees what one often sees in Ireland, a man whose whole life is a struggle to get free from his duty to his family. The hero, Thomas Muskerry, a workhouse master, is a sort of King Lear of the workhouse. Then we have Harvest, by S. L. Robinson, a powerful play, in which is shown the struggle of the farming classes to bring up their children in the professions, thereby ruining their farms. We have produced another play which is a study of the moral conditions left behind by the Agrarian war, the fear of public opinion and the like—The White Feather, by Wray [sic].² These men are the historians of their times in a way that we are not.

‘It is, of course, the poetical drama in which I am most interested, though until lately we have been unable to do very much in that direction because we have concentrated on our peasant work. Deirdre has lately been played in Dublin, however, and I am now going back with excitement to this work—and with scenery that will give me real pleasure. Mr. Gordon Craig, after years of study, has at last created a method for the staying of poetical drama which suggests everything and represents nothing.’

Asked for some description of this creation, Mr. Yeats said that the invention was Mr. Craig's patent, of which he had secured the Irish rights, and he could not enter into detail. ‘One sees upon the stage’, said Mr. Yeats, ‘a vast Cyclopean place, where one can have the light and shade of Nature for the first time upon the stage. At last one escapes from all the meretriciousness, from the bad landscape painting, from the stage lighting which throws a shadow which in no way agrees with the painted shadow. At last we shall have a stage where there is solemnity and beauty, and where for all that, the verse is free to suggest what picture it will without having to compete with some second-rate painter.’

Up to the present, Mr. Yeats explained, they had worked on the lines he explained to the interviewer five years ago, when he criticised customary stage methods with great severity. They worked by suggestion rather than by representation. An inside scene they presented as faithfully as their purse permitted. There it was possible to attain realism. But a landscape painted in the ordinary stage manner, he contended, must always be meretricious and vulgar. ‘The moment an actor stands near to your painted forest or your mountain, you perceive he is standing against a flat surface.’ Far better, he argued, to suggest a scene upon a canvas, whose vertical flatness one accepts and uses, as the decorator of pottery accepts the roundness of a bowl or jug or the flatness of a plate.³

A woodland scene might be represented, he explained, by a recurring pattern, or painted like old religious pictures upon a gold background. Or there was the comparative realism of the Japanese print. This kind of decoration not only gave them a scenic art—which would be true art because peculiar to the stage—but it would give the imagination liberty, and without returning to the bareness of the Elizabethan stage. ‘Mr. Robert Gregory (Lady Gregory's son) has designed some beautiful scenes for us on those lines’, added Mr. Yeats.

In conclusion, Mr. Yeats expressed himself as more than satisfied with the success the movement had achieved.

Mr. Yeats was recognised by many people at the Theatre last night. His striking personality, so splendidly revealed by Mr. Strang in his delicate drawing of the poet that now hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum, attracted a number of students familiar with his Celtic poetry and anxious for an introduction to the famous author.

Notes

1. Charles James Lever (1806-72) and Samuel Lover (1797-1868), popular novelists.

2. The White Feather, by R. J. Ray [Robert Brophy], had its first production at the Abbey Theatre on 16 Sept 1909.

3. Cf. ‘Samhain: 1904’, in Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962) pp. 177-9.