The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899-1939

Anthony Roche

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781408166000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Escritura de obras de teatro

The Irish Dramatic Revival was to radically redefine Irish theatre and see the birth of Ireland's national theatre, the Abbey, in 1904. From a consideration of such influential precursors as Boucicault and Wilde, Anthony Roche goes on to examine the role of Yeats as both founder and playwright, the one who set the agenda until his death in 1939. Each of the major playwrights of the movement refashioned that agenda to suit their own very different dramaturgies. Roche explores Synge's experimentation in the creation of a new national drama and considers Lady Gregory not only as a co-founder and director of the Abbey Theatre but also as a significant playwright. A chapter on
Shaw outlines his important intervention in the Revival. O'Casey's four ground-breaking Dublin plays receive detailed consideration, as does the new Irish modernism that followed in the 1930s and which also witnessed
the founding of the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The Companion also features interviews and essays by leading theatre scholars and practitioners Paige Reynolds, P.J. Mathews and Conor McPherson who provide further critical perspectives on this period of radical change in modern Irish theatre.

CHAPTER 1

THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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Douglas Hyde

The term ‘The Irish Dramatic Revival’ was designed to echo related cultural developments in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Foremost among these was the revival of the Irish language as the primary aim of a nationalist movement dedicated to pursuing an agenda summed up in the title of a seminal lecture, Douglas Hyde’s ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ (1892). Among his many cultural and political activities,¹ Hyde wrote one-act plays in the Irish language, some on his own, some in collaboration with Lady Gregory. In 1901 Hyde’s Irish language play, Casadh an tSúgáin/The Twisting of the Rope, was staged by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory as an early contribution to their nascent theatre movement. But almost every play which followed, especially once the Abbey Theatre opened in 1904, was to be in English; and the Abbey Theatre’s claim to be a national theatre was often challenged on the language front.

W.B. Yeats was the leading light in what became known as the Irish Literary Revival. His forceful personality and early eminence as a poet enabled him to draw together a politically and aesthetically disparate group of writers and intellectuals into a self-conscious literary movement. Its poets faced up to the dilemma of whether their work would be in Irish or in English by drawing on the important scholarly work done during the nineteenth century with the publication of properly annotated editions of Irish language texts and the provision of English translations. Chief among these scholar-translators was Douglas Hyde in such works as Love-Songs of Connacht (1893). The revolution of Hyde’s translations was to provide an English version much more closely and directly modelled on the Irish original than the usual translations, which emulated an eighteenth-century English poetic style. The first quatrain of ‘An Tuirse agus an Brón So’/‘The Weariness and Grief’ gives the flavour: ‘This weariness and grief/Are going greatly, greatly, round my heart,/And the full of my two shoes of it,/And the tears dropping down with me.’² Declan Kiberd has provided a full account of how key speeches from J.M. Synge’s 1907 drama, The Playboy of the Western World, are drawn directly from Hyde’s Hiberno-English translations.³ Lady Gregory also owed Hyde a debt when she fashioned what became known as ‘Kiltartanese’, an English closely modelled on the language spoken by native Irish speakers in her locality, close to her Coole estate in the west of Ireland. Synge and Gregory both knew Irish (as, later, did Sean O’Casey) and were able to draw on it to fashion an English dramatic speech that was closely based on Irish syntax and drew much of its idiom from that language. Yeats knew no Irish and when he wrote plays for the early Irish theatre frequently did so in collaboration with Lady Gregory, whose experience of dialect, as he acknowledged, helped him to ‘get down out of the high window of dramatic verse’ when it came to writing plays.⁴

But Douglas Hyde was also a scholar of Irish literature and in his pioneering study, A Literary History of Ireland (1899), he observes that ‘great producers of literature as the Irish always were … they never developed a drama’.⁵ A partial exception he cites are the dialogues between St Patrick, the man who converted Ireland to Christianity, and Ossian (or Oisín), the aged remnant of pagan Irish civilisation. (I will argue in Chapter 3 that Synge drew on these dialogues in The Well of the Saints.) Hyde’s fidelity to Irish sources may help to explain why he never became the great Irish playwright the Revival was looking for, since he lacked the dramatic experience and technique to develop his plays beyond the briefest of sketches. But his remarks point to a stubborn fact that will bedevil the history of the Irish Dramatic Revival throughout: there was no native Irish drama to develop. The models would have to be sought elsewhere, with the Norwegian Ibsen as the most fruitful resource, and this would lay the writers’ dramatic products open to the repeated charge of not being Irish.

A no less important argument would be to suggest that the development of a native Irish theatre movement was not entirely dependent on nor to be found entirely within the metropolitan proscenium theatres of Ireland’s major cities (Dublin, Cork, Belfast), but rather in a primarily oral literature, mostly in the Irish language, found on the west coast. Synge’s prose work, The Aran Islands (1907), has widely been regarded as showing how he found the language for his plays and many of their themes and stories by going to the islands. What Synge encountered there which he and his drama most needed were the storytellers who knew this folk literature and delivered it in a proto-dramatic context. The old storyteller Pat Dirane is the source of the story of the unfaithful wife, which has many variants in folklore sources, on which Synge modelled his play, The Shadow of the Glen (1903): it recounts the narrative of an older husband who feigns death in order to catch out his adulterous young wife and her lover. About the folk narrative of the unfaithful wife on which he drew, Synge says ‘he [Pat Dirane] told [it to] me’.⁶ Many of the stories he heard on the islands were delivered to him personally. But he also records the more social occasions when the storytellers of the Aran Islands delivered their stories to an impromptu audience that gathered in one of the cottages to hear them, on evenings that were a mixture of music and storytelling. Even when Pat is telling his story directly to Synge, his presence in the cottage is noted and soon draws an audience: ‘some young men [had] come down to listen to the story’.⁷ The last page of The Aran Islands records Synge’s own contribution to such a gathering: ‘After that I had to get out my fiddle and play some tunes for them while they finished their whisky.’⁸ The story of the unfaithful wife runs to approximately two pages in Synge’s prose volume, pithy, pointed and with a strong finish. And while Synge is going to develop it when he writes his own version, the brevity of his play shows how closely he has kept to its storytelling origins. Lady Gregory, before she had even met W.B. Yeats, responded to his cultural summons by going out into her Kiltartan neighbourhood and gathering folklore from native informants. These stories, and that dialogue between the tenants and the lady of the manor, form the basis of the plays she was to write for the Abbey Theatre, both on her own and in collaboration with Yeats. All three playwrights favoured the one-act form, Yeats above all. While this emphasis distinguished the Abbey Theatre as an avant-garde and artistic enterprise from the commercial Dublin theatres which offered full-length plays, the prominence of the one-act play in the early Abbey repertoire also marked the National Theatre of Ireland as one which drew directly for its drama on native culture and on the centrality of the storyteller and his or her closeness to their audience.

The nineteenth century and Dion Boucicault

As Nicholas Grene has pointed out, every new ‘dramatic movement claims that they can deliver the true Ireland which has previously been misrepresented, travestied, rendered in sentimental cliché or political caricature’.⁹ This was certainly the case when Yeats and Gregory in 1897 wrote and two years later circulated their manifesto for an Irish Literary Theatre. Their statement explicitly addressed itself to the form of Irish theatre their new movement was designed to supplant: ‘We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment, as it has been represented.’¹⁰ This was readily recognised as an allusion to and an attack upon the Irish plays of Dion Boucicault, whose political melodramas enjoyed a great popularity in larger commercial theatres such as the Queen’s.

In mid nineteenth century, a Dublin playwright with the unlikely name of Dionysus Lardner Boucicault produced his first play. London Assurance (1841) was a remarkably assured London debut for this twenty-one year old Dublin emigré. The play shows verbal wit, a reinvigorated set of comic stereotypes in figures like Lady Gay Spanker, acute social observation and great energy. But most of Boucicault’s prolific writing for the London stage over the next decade or so subsided into hackwork. Translations from French plays or stage versions of novels like Dumas Père’s The Corsican Brothers proved more financially rewarding and were quicker to produce than original plays. With Boucicault’s sudden and unexpected move to the US in 1853, when he eloped with the actor-manager Edmund Kean’s actress protégée, his career took a different direction.

The move to the US appears to have encouraged Boucicault to undertake a series of plays that were explicitly Irish in setting and characters, and increasingly nationalistic – the plays for which he is now primarily known. The first of these, The Colleen Bawn (from the Irish, the beautiful fair young woman) (1860) was hugely successful and brought Boucicault back in triumph to the London stage. The play was based on Gerald Griffin’s novel, The Collegians, and a famous murder trial where a young aristocrat had his boatman do away with the teenage peasant lover of whom he had grown tired. Boucicault’s most significant addition to the story is the first of his Stage Irishmen, Myles-na-Coppaleen (from the Irish, Myles of the little horses), a role he wrote for himself and which came to dominate subsequent productions. Myles is addicted as any Stage Irishman to the drink (he runs an illicit still in the mountains and usually appears with a keg on his shoulder) but in this he is usually joined by the other native Irish characters, including the local priest, Father Tom. He is characteristically pugnacious but the violence he metes out is usually in the cause of honour.

Earlier plays by Irish playwrights occasionally featured a Stage Irishman in a minor role. But since these plays were set in English society, the Stage Irishman rarely appeared to advantage and was usually the object of ridicule, most often on the score of his brogue, ‘so deviant and ludic in relation to the norms of English pronunciation’.¹¹ Relocating a Stage Irishman to the geographical space and sociopolitical context of Ireland lessens his oddity and eccentricity, enhancing both his dramatic visibility and his complexity. In particular, it makes clear that the Stage Irishman is involved in a self-conscious performance, in part for his own enjoyment, in part to deceive others in that he is wearing a protective mask. This is the case with Boucicault’s distinctive treatment of the Stage Irishman. As Andrew Parkin has argued: ‘What had once been a foolish, drunken butt of English wits, he transformed into a clever, courageous and resourceful descendant of the tricky slave.’¹² His Stage Irishman characters stand outside the strict social hierarchy of Bouicault’s plays, with their idealised aristocracy and peasant characters and the despised middle class of grasping agents and magistrates. Myles lives in the wild, comes and goes like a free agent and at the close is not part of the formal marriage celebrations between the major characters. He is excluded from the social world that Boucicault represents while remaining central to the dramatic activity. In this, he prefigures the tramp figures in the plays of Hyde, Synge, Yeats and Gregory.

Boucicault’s masterpiece was 1874’s The Shaughraun (from the Irish, vagrant or wanderer), with the Stage Irishman promoted to the title character. The play complicates the class structures of the earlier Irish plays and their romances by introducing the relationship between the two neighbouring islands and their national identities (as Shaw was to do in 1904 with his Abbey play, John Bull’s Other Island). In the opening scene, Captain Molineux, a young English officer, arrives with ‘a detachment of our regiment at Ballyragget’¹³ to apprehend a Fenian rebel who is rumoured to be returning to Ireland from Australia. He encounters the beautiful young Irishwoman Claire Ffolliot and is immediately enraptured. In detailing the political imperatives that find him in Ballyragget, Molineux tries to make light of his mission and hence of his involvement. Naturally, the returning, outlawed Fenian rebel turns out to be Claire’s brother, and Molineux is confronted throughout with a conflict of motives, between duty and desire. The political villain in The Shaughraun, as always in Boucicault’s melodrama, is neither the English officer nor the returned Fenian outlaw, who even his opponent can recognise is ‘a gentleman’, but rather the local police agent and the squireen, the resolutely lower middle class and upwardly mobile characters. Conn the Shaughraun is somewhat less of a free agent than Myles na Coppaleen in The Colleen Bawn; he knows his social place and remains unswervingly loyal to his ‘master’, Claire’s exiled brother. The political resolution to the play fuses with and is absorbed by the romantic: Robert Ffolliott is pardoned by Queen Victoria (no less) and is free to marry his beloved; simultaneously, Claire’s way is cleared to accept Molineux’s proposal.

Boucicault’s melodramas in the late nineteenth century went from being hugely popular to falling increasingly out of favour. This happened not only because the plays of Henrik Ibsen and those of Yeats and Gregory’s Irish Literary Theatre arrived to transform theatrical modes of expression, but because Ireland’s increasing struggle for political independence from England made the utopian metaphor and the political allegory of a marriage between the two countries increasingly untenable.¹⁴

Boucicault and his Stage Irishmen did not prove as easy to supplant as Yeats...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Late Nineteenth Century
• 2 Yeats as Founder and Playwright
• 3 The Impact of J.M. Synge
• 4 Shaw and the Revival: The Absent Presence
• 5 Lady Gregory: Irish Woman Playwright
• 6 The Arrival of Sean O’Casey
• 7 The Revival from O’Casey to the Death of Yeats (1928–39)
• 8 Critical Perspectives
• Conclusion: The Legacy
• Chronology
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright