The Abbey Theatre Comes of Age Constantine
Curran, P.
THE ABBEY THEATRE COMES OF AGE By CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN ON DECEMBER 27, 1925, the Abbey theatre, Dublin, brought together a happy, reminiscent fellowship of its old collaborators and...
...The company drew together a public, sometimes small but never indifferent, sometimes hostile, and ultimately enthusiastic...
...Like other theatres, the Abbey has had its vicissitudes...
...Writers and actors had brought genius to the new service, but without the tenacity, the arrogant tenacity, of Yeats and his co-directors, the movement would have been dissipated...
...In 1902, the year of junction with the Fays, six plays were put on, including A. E.'s Deirdre and Yeats's Kathleen ni Houlihan...
...member of a Pipers' club, of a Labor Union, and out with a rifle against the English in 1916...
...There also were grave financial difficulties...
...The reaction from the early idealism and the later civil strife in Ireland nowhere is more significantly expressed than through him...
...They spent themselves in the work of training the new actors who were, of course, unpaid, and had other daily occupations...
...Accordingly, when the first act of Deirdre was printed, the two brothers called upon A. E. and asked his permission to put it in rehearsal...
...Companies are fissiparous...
...Synge followed, playing upon his subject with piercing intensity and grotesque imagination...
...Approving their work, he wrote to Yeats and Lady Gregory that he thought he had found the actors they required...
...They played through good and ill years and through the Black and Tan terror under curfew to men "on the run" when other Dublin theatres closed down...
...And, therefore, gathering and holding together a little company who played here and there in Dublin to patriotic clubs or temperance and workingmen'st societies, he held to his vision of a similar theatre movement in Ireland and of his function in it...
...The founder of the Moscow Art theatre has set out his aims in words which exactly describe the aims of the National Theatre society if one replaces "Boyar" by "Irishman...
...Since the Abbey opened its doors twenty-one years ago, the society has produced 216 plays, the work of eighty-six authors...
...All this time the Fays had been obscurely at work from the other end...
...Above all, they impressed upon the company their own single-minded earnestness, a rigorous self-restraint, a fashion of beautiful speech, and that particular quality of simplicity and noble acting which has made the reputation of the Abbey...
...and finally for the third act, which he wrote when the second was in rehearsal...
...O'Casey's fertility is evidence that the vital impulse of the Abbey is not spent...
...It was necessary to defend oneself against it and to find a new stencil at all hazards . . . The founding of our theatre was in the nature of a revolution...
...foreign actors were hopelessly out of place on a national stage...
...In 1901, two plays only had been produced...
...He works in the material of the Dublin streets and is lavish of their local color while creating types of general and lasting value...
...It is true that before the National Theatre society was formed, a group of guarantors, of whom W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, George Moore, and Douglas Hyde were the chief members, had founded the Irish Literary theatre in 1898, engaged an English company of actors, and arranged for annual performances in 1899, 1900, and 1901, of new plays by Yeats, Martyn, and Moore...
...How dimly foreseen by the workers of twenty-one years ago was the interlude in which Lady Gregory— the charwoman of the Abbey, as Bernard Shaw once called her—recited their achievements to the Minister for Finance who recently endowed the Abbey and constituted it the only state-endowed theatre in the English-speaking world...
...His Juno and the Paycock now is conquering London as Sheridan once won the city...
...and so, that collaboration of author, actor, and audience which makes drama, was impossible...
...W. G. Fay is a comedian of quite unusual power, full of invention and fancy, and with an experience won from rich and grotesque adventures with low-class traveling companies through Ireland...
...The society began with heroic and poetic drama, staging the shadowy figures of mythology and early Irish history...
...Witness of the waste and squalor of the latter struggle, he now is in protest against violence, pitifully regarding its wreckage...
...He was essentially a man of the theatre, steeped in its traditions and fascinated by its contemporary development in Europe...
...Nor is there any sign of slackened production...
...A. E. found it very bad and when Moore had gone, A. E., believing he could do better himself, sat down and wrote the first act of his Deirdre, although at that time he had not been four times inside a theatre...
...The little world of the Theatre society reproduced these outside stresses...
...Yeats came to other rehearsals and so the union of forces, which formed the National Theatre society, came about in 1902...
...Himself a laborer, living in a tenement, he has undergone the vital experiences of his generation...
...But this was, in great measure, a false start...
...At the moment, the line of development is through Sean O'Casey and the town play...
...In 1903, with the accession of Synge and Padraic Colum, the ultimate success of the theatre was assured...
...Including the earlier work from 1899, the total is 237, of which all but thirty-four were first performances and all but twenty the work of Irish dramatists...
...Padraic Colum introduced the peasant, firmly characterized, of native stature and dignity, and with his full social significance...
...The type of play changes, and the spirit of the playwright...
...In the realm of creativeness, the actor's problem was not to look like the ordinary stage Boyar . . . The ordinary theatrical stamp and stencil of the Boyar is the most repulsive of all stencils on the Russian stage...
...Audiences must be trained in self-criticism and appreciation...
...In the formative years of the present Irish State, from 1900 to 1910, there were many contending strains and tendencies, many energetic and powerful personalities...
...A. E. did not know them and they were somewhat awed by him...
...Present success is less interesting in the telling than early struggles or speculations on the future, and to find the origin of the National Theatre society which controls the Abbey theatre, it is necessary to go back to the obscure efforts of two brothers, Frank and W. G. Fay, to form an Irish dramatic company...
...THE ABBEY THEATRE COMES OF AGE By CONSTANTINE P. CURRAN ON DECEMBER 27, 1925, the Abbey theatre, Dublin, brought together a happy, reminiscent fellowship of its old collaborators and playgoers to mark its twenty-first birthday...
...E.) to read him the first act of this play...
...The Fays gave continuity to the movement when continuity was most necessary, for at this time Yeats did not live in Dublin...
...A. E. remembered his drafted act and sent it to O'Grady, who printed it...
...The old plays were played by actors old and new, to an audience which filled the theatre, not with its presence merely but with presiding memories of absent writers and actors, some dead, some over-seas, and of the old warm friendships, quarrels, and enthusiasms which are the quick life of the theatre and the brave music of youth...
...About this time, as I am told, George Moore came one evening to George Russell (A...
...We protested against the customary manner of acting, against theatricality, against bathos, against declamation, against over-acting, against the bad manner of production, against the habitual scenery, against the star system which spoiled the ensemble, against the light and farcial repertoire of the Russian stage...
...he has been secretary of a Gaelic League branch, of a Gaelic Athletic club...
...Intelligent, regular audiences could not be built up on merely annual performances...
...He gave them his first act and they rehearsed it...
...These were the days of Ibsen, the Theatre Antoine and of the Moscow Art theatre...
...George Moore has given an account in Ave of the composition of Diarmuid and Grania, one of the plays so produced, but amusing as this tale is, it was hardly less amusing than the struggles of English actors to arrive at some intelligent unanimity in the interpretation of characters from an Irish saga, or even in the pronunciation of their names...
...Yeats, as well, enlisted the support or Miss tiormman whose generosity provided the Abbey and a subsidy for a term of years...
...came back and asked for a second act, which he wrote in another evening...
...Having written the first act, he laid it aside until a few years after, when Standish O'Grady wrote to him to send him something to fill out the columns of his All Ireland Review, as he was ill and could write nothing...
...Frank Fay nourished ambitions of a higher order...
...Born near the street where Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born, he uses the slang and free rhythms of the street as masterfully as Sheridan uses the slang and artificial rhythms of the drawing-room...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 12
