I found that the sense of continuity at the Abbey was a cherished commodity. It hung by a thread of stories told by old actors, parables that went back to the founders of the theatre and to those who practised in it down the years. Many of the tales you could take with a pinch of salt, like the one about a wardrobe seamstress in the old days who was so pious that she wouldn’t sew buttons into men’s trousers’ flies.
The wardrobe was part of the Abbey tradition. When I became a member there was a great stock of costumes used in the theatre’s repertoire of native plays. Each director selected garments from this collection for his new production. The store contained costumes designed by the artist Seán Keating for a production of The Playboy of the Western World in the 1940s. There were items which must have come from Connemara or the Aran Islands, for their handiwork had all the crude honesty of a country tailor.
From his hand came grey and brown bréidín (tweed) coats, collared waistcoats, báiníns, trousers and knee breeches for the men. There were red flannel skirts for the women. An assortment of aprons and brown-and-fawn paisley shawls with tassels. These last could have walked off the oil painting by Grace Henry of three shawled Connemara women bunched together on a hill. Among all these items there was a gent’s tweed coat, faded and foxy and built in the cutaway fashion of the last century. It came to just above the knees and had large pocket flaps. It was much the worse for wear, with frayed edges and the padding protruding from a tear in the left shoulder. I wore it many times and got so fond of it that I became jealous if I saw it on another actor’s back.
It fitted as if it was made for me, and with a neckcloth, knee breeches and long grey homemade stockings, the outfit on me looked the real goat’s toe in any turn of the century native play; even more so if topped with a battered, greenish, floppy felt hat and supported by a pair of boots so old and pliable they could have first been worn by Barry Fitzgerald. It was my costume in the character of Old Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World and Scots people got an eyeful of it when we took the play to the Edinburgh Festival. The Irish collection, as I’ll name those old costumes, was part of the Abbey’s continuity.
It was in Hugh Hunt’s time as artistic director that a lady from Manchester took over as wardrobe mistress for a while. She must have been flabbergasted at the collection of Aran Islands and Connemara drapery, the likes of which she’d have never seen in the illustrations in her theatre costume textbooks. Anyway she got rid of the whole motley caboodle. What happened to my tweed coat I do not know.
I would have liked if ‘the clothes’, as Harry Brogan always called the costumes, went to the St Vincent de Paul. And it could be so, for one day I am almost certain I saw my foxy coat on the back of a poor man fingering the keys of a decrepit concertina in Talbot Street. A dark green hat with a scattering of coppers inside lay by his ancient boots. If the coat was mine it was still in show business.
It may be only a fancy, but my feeling is that the old Abbey went out the door with those costumes. The permanent company to all intents and purposes is gone and there are new faces before the footlights.