I cannot describe the various dramatic adventures of the year with as much detail as I did last year, mainly because the movement has got beyond me. The most important event of the Gaelic Theatre has been the two series of plays produced in the Round Room of the Rotunda by the Gaelic League. Father Dinneen’s Tobar Draoidheachta, and Dr. Hyde’s An Pósadh, and a chronicle play about Hugh O’Neill, and, I think, some other plays, were seen by immense audiences.1 I was not in Ireland for these plays, but a friend tells me that he could only get standing-room one night, and the Round Room must hold about 3000 people. A performance of Tobar Draoidheachta I saw there some months before was bad, but I believe there was great improvement, and that the players who came up from somewhere in County Cork to play it at this second series of plays were admirable. The players, too, that brought Dr. Hyde’s An Pósadh from Ballaghadereen, in County Mayo, where they had been showing it to their neighbours, were also, I am told, careful and natural. The play-writing, always good in dialogue, is still very poor in construction, and I still hear of plays in many scenes, with no scene lasting longer than four or six minutes, and few intervals shorter than nine or ten minutes, which have to be filled up with songs. The Rotunda chronicle play seems to have been rather of this sort, and I suspect that when I get Father Peter O’Leary’s Meadhbh, a play in five acts produced at Cork, I shall find the masterful old man, in spite of his hatred of English thought, sticking to the Elizabethan form.2 I wish I could have seen it played last week, for the spread of the Gaelic Theatre in the country is more important than its spread in Dublin, and of all the performances of Gaelic plays in the country during the year I have seen but one—Dr. Hyde’s new play, Cleamhnas, at Galway Feis. I got there a day late for a play by the Master of Galway Workhouse, but heard that it was well played, and that his dialogue was as good as his construction was bad.3 There is no question, however, about the performance of Cleamhnas being the worst I ever saw. I do not blame the acting, which was pleasant and natural, in spite of insufficient rehearsal, but the stage-management. The subject of the play was a match-making. The terms were in debate between two old men in an inner room. An old woman, according to the stage directions, should have listened at the door and reported what she heard to her daughter’s suitor, who is outside the window, and to her daughter. There was no window on the stage, and the young man stood close enough to the door to have listened for himself. The door, where she listened, opened now on the inner room, and now on the street, according to the necessities of the play, and the young men who acted the fathers of grown-up children, when they came through the door, were seen to have done nothing to disguise their twenty-five or twenty-six birthdays. There had been only two rehearsals, and the little boy who should have come in laughing at the end came in shouting, ‘Ho ho, ha ha’, evidently believing that these were Gaelic words he had never heard before.
The only Gaelic performances I have seen during the year have been ill done,† but I have seen them sufficiently well done in other years to believe my friends when they tell me that there have been good performances. Inghinidhe na héireann is always thorough, and one cannot doubt that the performance of Dr. Hyde’s An Naomh ar Iarraidh, by the children from its classes, was at least careful. A powerful little play in English against enlisting, by Mr. Colum, was played with it, and afterwards revived, and played with a play about the Royal Visit, also in English.4 I have no doubt that we shall see a good many of these political plays during the next two or three years, and it may be even the rise of a more or less permanent company of political players, for the revolutionary clubs will begin to think plays as necessary as the Gaelic League is already thinking them. Nobody can find the same patriotic songs and recitations sung and spoken by the same people, year in year out, anything but mouldy bread. It is possible that the players who are to produce plays in October for the Samhain festival of Cumann na nGaedheal may grow into such a company.
Though one welcomes every kind of vigorous life, I am, myself, most interested in ‘The Irish National Theatre Society’, which has no propaganda but that of good art. The little Camden Street Hall it had taken has been useful for rehearsal alone, for it proved to be too far away, and too lacking in dressing-rooms for our short plays, which involve so many changes. Successful performances were given, however, at Rathmines, and in one or two country places.
Deirdre, by A. E., The Racing Lug, by Mr. Cousins, The Foundations,5 by Mr. Ryan, and my Pot of Broth† and Cathleen ni Houlihan were repeated, but no new plays were produced until March 14, when Lady Gregory’s Twenty-five and my Hour-Glass drew a good audience. On May 2 The Hour-Glass, Twenty-five, Cathleen ni Houlihan, Pot of Broth, and Foundations were performed before the Irish Literary Society in London, at the Queen’s Gate Hall, and plays and players were generously commended by the Press—very eloquently by the critic of The Times.6 It is natural that we should be pleased with this praise, and that we should wish others to know of it, for is it not a chief pleasure of the artist to be commended in subtle and eloquent words? The critic of The Times has seen many theatres and he is, perhaps, a little weary of them, but here in Ireland there are one or two critics who are so much in love, or pretend to be so much in love, with the theatre as it is, that they complain when we perform on a stage two feet wider than Molière’s that it is scarce possible to be interested in anything that is played on so little a stage.7 We are to them foolish sectaries who have revolted against that orthodoxy of the commercial theatre which is so much less pliant than the orthodoxy of the Church, for there is nothing so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction. If you inquire into its truth it becomes as angry as a begging-letter writer when you find some hole in that beautiful story about the five children and the broken mangle. In Ireland, wherever the enthusiasts are shaping life, the critic who does the will of the commercial theatre can but stand against his lonely pillar defending his articles of belief among a wild people, and thinking mournfully of distant cities, where nobody puts a raw potato into his pocket when he is going to hear a musical comedy.
The Irish Literary Society of New York, which has been founded this year, produced The Land of Heart’s Desire, The Pot of Broth, and Cathleen ni Houlihan, on June 3 and 4, very successfully, and propose to give Dr. Hyde’s Nativity Play, Dráma Breite Críosta, and his Casadh an tSúgáin, An Pósadh, and An Naomh ar Iarraidh next year, at the same time of year, playing them both in Irish and English. I heard too that his Nativity Play will be performed in New York, but I know no particulars except that it will be done in connection with some religious societies. The National Theatre Society will, I hope, produce some new plays of his this winter, as well as new plays by Mr. Synge, Mr. Colum, Lady Gregory, myself, and others.8 They have taken the Molesworth Hall for three days in every month, beginning with the 8th, 9th, and 10th of October, when they will perform Mr. Synge’s Shadow of the Glen, a little country comedy, full of a humour that is at once harsh and beautiful, Cathleen ni Houlihan, and a longish one-act play in verse of my own, called The King’s Threshold. This play is founded on the old story of Seanchan the poet, and King Guaire of Gort, but I have seen the story from the poet’s point of view, and not, like the old story-tellers, from the king’s.9 Our repertory of plays is increasing steadily, and when the winter’s work is finished, a playI Mr. Bernard Shaw has promised us may be ready to open the summer session. His play will, I imagine, unlike the plays we write for ourselves, be long enough to fill an evening, and it will, I know, deal with Irish public life and character. Mr. Shaw, more than anybody else, has the love of mischief that is so near the core of Irish intellect, and should have an immense popularity among us. I have seen a crowd of many thousands in possession of his spirit, and keeping the possession to the small hours.
This movement should be important even to those who are not especially interested in the Theatre, for it may be a morning cockcrow to that impartial meditation about character and destiny we call the artistic life in a country where everybody, if we leave out the peasant who has his folk-songs and his music, has thought the arts useless unless they have helped some kind of political action, and has, therefore, lacked the pure joy that only comes out of things that have never been indentured to any cause. The play which is mere propaganda shows its leanness more obviously than a propagandist poem or essay, for dramatic writing is so full of the stuff of daily life that a little falsehood, put in that the moral may come right in the end, contradicts our experience. If Father Dinneen or Dr. Hyde were asked why they write their plays, they would say they write them to help their propaganda; and yet when they begin to write the form constrains them, and they become artists—one of them a very considerable artist, indeed. Dr. Hyde’s early poems have even in translation a naïveté and wildness that sets them, as I think, among the finest poetry of our time; but he had ceased to write any verses but those Oireachtas odes that are but ingenious rhetoric.11 It is hard to write without the sympathy of one’s friends, and though the country-people sang his verses the readers of Irish read them but little, partly it may be because he had broken with that elaborate structure of later Irish poetry which seemed a necessary part of their propaganda. They read plenty of pamphlets and grammars, but they disliked—as do other people in Ireland—serious reading, reading that is an end and not a means, that gives us nothing but a beauty indifferent to our profuse purposes. But now Dr. Hyde with his cursing Hanrahan, his old saint at his prayers, is a poet again; and the Leaguers go to his plays in thousands—and applaud in the right places, too—and the League puts many sixpences into its pocket.12
We who write in English have a more difficult work, for English has been the language in which the Irish cause has been debated; and we have to struggle with traditional phrases and traditional points of view. Many would give us limitless freedom as to the choice of subject, understanding that it is precisely those subjects on which people feel most passionately, and, therefore, most dramatically, we would be forbidden to handle if we made any compromise with powers. But fewer know that we must encourage every writer to see life afresh, even though he sees it with strange eyes. Our National Theatre must be so tolerant, and, if this is not too wild a hope, find an audience so tolerant, that the half-dozen minds who are likely to be the dramatic imagination of Ireland for this generation may put their own thoughts and their own characters into their work; and for that reason no one who loves the arts, whether among Unionists or among the Patriotic Societies, should take offence if we refuse all but every kind of patronage. I do not say every kind, for if a mad king, a king so mad that he loved the arts and their freedom, should offer us unconditioned millions, I, at any rate, would give my voice for accepting them.
We will be able to find conscientious playwrights and players, for our young men have a power of work, when they are interested in their work, one does not look for outside a Latin nation, and if we are certain of being granted this freedom we would be certain that the work would grow to great importance. It is a supreme moment in the life of a nation when it is able to turn now and again from its preoccupations, to delight in the capricious power of the artist as one delights in the movement of some wild creature, but nobody can tell with certainty when that moment is at hand.
The two plays in this year’s Samhain represent the two sides of the movement very well, and are both written out of a deep knowledge of the life of the people. It should be unnecessary to praise Dr. Hyde’s comedy,II that comes up out of the foundation of human life, but Mr. Synge is a new writer and a creation of our movement. He has gone every summer for some years past to the Aran Islands, and lived there in the houses of the fishers, speaking their language and living their lives, and his playIII seems to me the finest piece of tragic work done in Ireland of late years. One finds in it, from first to last, the presence of the sea, and a sorrow that has majesty as in the work of some ancient poet.13
I. This play was John Bull’s Other Island. When it came out in the spring of 1905 we felt ourselves unable to cast it without wronging Mr. Shaw. We had no ‘Broadbent’ or money to get one.—March 1908. 10
II. The Poorhouse, written in Irish by Dr. Hyde on a scenario by Lady Gregory.—March 1908.
III. Riders to the Sea. This play made its way very slowly with our audiences, but is now very popular.—March 1908.