There has been no Samhain for a couple of years, principally because an occasional publication, called The Arrow, took its place for a time.1
Some twelve months ago Mrs. Patrick Campbell was so well pleased by some performances of our Company that she offered to come and play with it in my Deirdre; coming, I need hardly say, for the love of our people’s art, and bringing her service as a gift. She let me announce this from the stage, and afterwards announced it herself from the stage of the Gaiety in kind and gracious words.2 We all feel that this great actress who has played in the one play with Bernhardt, will confer upon us in November a supreme honour.3 When we and all our players are with the dead players of Henley’s rhyme, some historian of the Theatre, remembering her coming and giving more weight to the appreciation of a fellow artist than even to the words of fine critics, will understand that if our people were not good artists one of the three or four great actresses of Europe would never have come where the oldest player is but twenty-six.4 To the sincere artist the applause of those who have won greatness in his own craft is often his first appreciation, and always the last that he forgets. When I had just published my first book, I met William Morris in Holborn Viaduct, and he began to praise it with the words, ‘That is my kind of poetry’, and promised to write about it, and would have said I do not know how much more if he had not suddenly caught sight of one of those decorated lamp posts, and waving his umbrella at the post, raged at the Corporation. As the years pass I value those words of his not less but more, understanding, as I could not at that time, how much I learned from the daily spectacle of that great, laborious, joyous man.5
The Freeman of September 18th contained a leading article on the passing of the Gaiety Theatre and the Theatre Royal into the hands of a trust. After pointing out the way in which all such trusts lead in the long run to musical comedy, and this alone, and regretting what it thinks to be the errors of ‘the only independent theatre left to us’, the article wound up with: ‘The Abbey patent expires in 1910, so there is no time to lose, . . . . . would it one day be possible for the Corporation to take it over as a municipal theatre? Municipalisation is the method by which the Germans have successfully fought monopoly and saved their stage from decadence. But is dangerous even to mention such a thing in these days of punctilious auditors.’6
† At the expiration of our patent our present arrangement with Miss Horniman will also have come to an end. We hope, however, before that day comes, to have made the theatre either self-supporting or nearly so, and to be able to hand it over to some management that will work it as a business, while keeping its artistic aim. We shall be able to hand over to that management a great mass of plays, and we shall have accustomed audiences and dramatists alike to the freedom necessary for vigorous literature. Whatever form of organization takes the place of the present, it is not likely to be subsidized, or at any rate subsidized to any large extent, and will, therefore, be much more in the hands of the public than we are. Before that time, however, all the plays which have caused disturbance with us will have been accepted as matters of course; The Playboy and The Piper will trouble their audiences no more than The Well of the Saints, at one time so much disliked, or The Shadow of the Glen, against which a newspaper once used all its resources.7 We know that we have already created a taste for sincere and original drama and for sincere, quiet,† simple acting. Ireland possesses something which has come out of its own life, and the many failures of dramatic societies which have imitated our work without our discipline and our independence, show that it could not have been made in any other way. But when the new management comes we hope that we, the present Directors, may be able to return to our proper work without the ceaseless distraction of theatrical details.
Before the present Patent of our Theatre comes to an end we hope to visit America. We believe that the success of our players here and in England would repeat itself in America, and upon a larger scale. In fact it was a part of our original calculation when we set out to form an Irish stock company, that it would spend a certain portion of every year among the Irish in America. It has been lack of money that has prevented us going there, and kept us playing a greater number of months in Dublin than we had thought possible. A good deal of touring is desirable, for it is difficult with a company so small as ours to put on new plays at short enough intervals to hold a Dublin audience for nine or ten months in the year. If we were to do no worse than we already do during the most fortunate part of each Dublin season, for, say ten months in the year, we should be more than independent of subsidy. Some three months touring every year with the same amount of success we have had in London, and Oxford, Glasgow and Manchester, and somewhat better stalls in Dublin than we get at present, would pay expenses and allow for all necessary widening of activity.
Last spring the hoardings of New York showed placards announcing that The Irish National Theatre Company of Dublin was performing there. A great many who had seen or had heard of our work in Ireland crowded to the theatre, and some of them have written to us of their disappointment, for The Pot of Broth and The Rising of the Moon were given, not by our whole company, but by three of our players who had left us, and by other players who, though they had played in a few of our performances, had been in America for many years. We allowed Mr. William Fay to take these plays to America, as his engagement with Mr. Frohman was conditional on his getting them, but it was on the understanding that Mr. Frohman was not to use the name of our Society. Not only was it used (at first with the alteration of a word) but a programme headed with the words ‘Mr. Frohman presents the Irish National Theatre Company of Dublin’, was otherwise copied so accurately from our Dublin programme that the names of actors who never left the Abbey Theatre were set down as playing in New York.8 Everything was done by Mr. Frohman’s agent through advertisements, interviews and portraits to identify the New York experiment with us, and after the programmes had been stopped in New York under threat of legal proceedings, and the plays had been withdrawn, ‘Mr. Frohman presented the Irish National Theatre Society’ (not Company this time) in a play by Mr. William Boyle to the people of Chicago.9 The speculation was a failure. The plays were produced on large stages and in large theatres, instead of the little theatres they are written for, and as curtain-raisers to some French farce that drew its own audience; and the section of the literary and the Irish public who had heard something about us expected our whole company and a selection of plays as representative as we send to London and Oxford and Cambridge. We had hoped to have gone to America this autumn, but this failure has delayed us.
Last January Mr. William Fay, his wife and brother, left us, but, great as their loss has been, their places have been taken by other players, and the general efficiency of the Company has not suffered. We have never produced so many plays in so short a time as we did last spring, nor had such good audiences as in August, September and October this year.
When Mr. Fay was leaving us I wrote this paragraph for a SAMHAIN we had thought to bring out immediately, read it to him, and, with his approval, published it in certain papers at the time:
‘We are about to lose our principal actor. William Fay has had enough of it, and we don’t wonder, and is going to some other country where his exquisite gift of comedy and his brain teeming with fancy will bring him an audience, fame, and a little money. He has worked with us now since 1902, when he formed his company “to carry on the work of the Irish Literary Theatre”, and feels that he must leave to younger men the long laborious battle. We have his good wishes, and he will return to us if at all possible to play his old parts for some brief season, or seasons, and may possibly rejoin us for a London or an American tour. We believe that William Fay is right to go, and he will have our good will and good wishes with him, though we have lost in losing him the finest comedian of his kind upon the English-speaking stage.’—Irish Times, Jan. 5, 1908.10
Last May a performance of Measure for Measure was given by the Elizabethan Stage Society at Stratford. Mr. Poel asked us to lend him Miss Sara Allgood to play the part of Isabella. I confess that she surprised me very much. I had not thought her capable of tragedy unless where, as in Dervorgilla and Cathleen ni Houlihan, she has a character element to help her, and was altogether astonished at a performance full of simplicity and power, where the elements were purely passionate.11
One of our hopes for the Abbey Theatre was that it would encourage Irish dramatic enterprise apart from our own company. Rivalry should be a help in matters of art, for every good work increases the public interest in all similar work. This hope has only been fulfilled by the two visits of the Ulster Literary Theatre, which have given us a very great pleasure. I was away at the time of their last visit, but I remember vividly in the performance of a year ago the absence of the ordinary conventions, the novelty of movement and intonation.12 I saw a play of Cockney life the other day. The actors were incomparably more experienced, the playwright was one of the new school who go directly to life, and one felt that the players were conscientious enough to do their best to go to life also. But I felt that though there was observation in detail, there was in every case a traditional representation in the player’s mind. He hung his observation about some old type as a dressmaker hangs a new dress upon the Mannequin d’Osier that is in every dressmaker’s room.13 I believe, furthermore, that these Ulster players, like ourselves, are doing something to bring to an end the charlatanism of International acting. I saw a while ago a performance of The Corsican Brothers, which, but for its Corsican peasantry, had been excellent. The Brothers themselves, essentially traditional types of romance, were played with sincerity, but when the other Corsicans began to quarrel, I went straight back to the days when my uncles and aunts helped me to dress up in old tablecloths.14 When we have a sincere dramatic art there will be in every country actors who have made a study of the characteristics of its different classes. This will make ‘adaptions from the French’, let us say, more difficult, but not more than the translation of a fine poem, which somebody says is impossible.15 You can re-create it, making an English poem of a French or a German, and in the same way it will be necessary to re-create drama as we do when we play Le Médecin malgré lui in ‘Kiltartanese’. 16 The inaccuracy of detail, the persistence of conventional types, has arisen from the same causes, which have destroyed in modern drama eloquence, poetry, beauty, and all the reveries of widsom, and given us in their place a more or less logical mechanism. When I saw the Ulster players, upon the other hand, it was in their mechanism that their playwrights failed. It was in their delight in the details of life that they interested one. I hear, however, that their plays upon their last visit showed much more unity. In any case it is only a matter of time, where one finds so much sincere observation, for the rest to follow.
The Ulster players are the only dramatic society, apart from our own, which is doing serious artistic work. Two other performances were lamentable; that of the Independent Theatre Society showed little sign of work or purpose. One or two of the players had a gift for acting, and working upon new material among hard workers might have struck out something new and forcible. But the performance as a whole made me wonder why so much trouble was taken to put on something not finer at its finest moments and much worse at every other moment than a third-rate touring company. The Theatre of Ireland made me indignant, because although the playwrights had found more of themselves than Count Markiewicz struggling with the difficulties of a strange language and strange circumstance, there was even less evidence of work and purpose.17 Such adventures can do nothing but injury to the drama in Ireland. They all show talent here and there, for Ireland has talent in plenty, but it is brought to nothing by lack of work and lack of subordination to a single aim. Though I used to speak with the greatest freedom of the performances given by the Gaelic League, I have not hitherto touched upon the work of these societies, and would not now, but for my real pleasure in the Ulster Theatre. One feels that in a country like this, where there is so little criticism with any special knowledge behind it, it is a wrong to the few fine workers to omit anything that may help to separate them from the triflers. I have a right to speak, for I asked our own company to give up two of our Saturday performances that we might give the Independent Theatre and the Theatre of Ireland the most popular days.18 I see some talk in the papers of those two societies uniting. If they do so, there is only one means of success, the appointment of some competent man who will be able to cast parts with no thought but efficiency, and to insist upon regular attendance at rehearsals. The Gaelic League companies must do the same if they would raise the Gaelic drama out of its present decline, for theatres cannot be democracies. The Gaelic League has difficulties one must respect, for the Gaelic League can hardly spare many of its thoughts for any art till its battle is more nearly won, and this single purpose gives to even their most clumsy performance a little simplicity and entire lack of pretense. The same excuse applies to the National Players, whose representation of Robert Emmet in St. Cecilia’s Hall some years ago, interested me and touched me.19 It was frankly propagandist, had the dignity of a long national tradition, and carried my imagination to Davis and to Mitchel.20 All work which is done without selfishness for something beyond one’s self has moral beauty.