On Sunday night the following explanation was issued on behalf of the Abbey Theatre Company:
The statement communicated to certain of Saturday’s papers makes the following explanation necessary:
During the last week we have been vehemently urged to withdraw Mr. Shaw’s play, which had already been advertised and rehearsed, and have refused to do so.1 We would have listened with attention to any substantial argument; but we found, as we were referred from one well-meaning personage to another, that no one would say the play was hurtful to man, woman or child. Each said that someone else had thought so, or might think so. We were told that Mr. Redford had objected, that the Lord Chamberlain had objected, and that, if produced, it would certainly offend excited officials in London, and might offend officials in Dublin, or the law officers of the Crown, or the Lord Lieutenant, or Dublin society, or Archbishop Walsh, or the Church of Ireland, or ‘rowdies up for the Horse Show’, or newspaper editors, or the King.2
In these bewilderments and shadowy opinions there was nothing to change our conviction (which is also that of the leading weekly paper of the Lord Lieutenant’s own party), that so far from containing offence for any sincere and honest mind, Mr. Shaw’s play is a high and weighty argument upon the working of the Spirit of God in man’s heart, or to show that it is not a befitting thing for us to set upon our stage the work of an Irishman, who is also the most famous of living dramatists, after that work had been silenced in London by what we believe an unjust decision.3
One thing, however, is plain enough, an issue that swallows up all else, and makes the merit of Mr. Shaw’s play a secondary thing. If our patent is in danger, it is because the decisions of the English Censor are being brought into Ireland, and because the Lord Lieutenant is about to revive on what we consider a frivolous pretext, a right not exercised for 150years, to forbid, at the Lord Chamberlain’s pleasure, any play produced in any Dublin theatre, all these theatres holding their patents from him.
We are not concerned with the question of the English censorship, now being fought out in London, but we are very certain that the conditions of the two countries are different, and that we must not, by accepting the English Censor’s ruling, give away anything of the liberty of the Irish theatre of the future.4 Neither can we accept, without protest, the revival of the Lord Lieutenant’s claim at the bidding of the Censor or otherwise. The Lord Lieutenant is definitely a political personage holding office from the party in power, and what would sooner or later grow into a political censorship cannot be lightly accepted.
W. B. Yeats, Managing Director.
A. Gregory, Director and Patentee.
ABBEY THEATRE, August 22nd, 1909.