For much of the time during his last years Yeats did not attend meetings of the Abbey Board at all. Either he was abroad or he was at home and didn’t feel strong enough to face the trip into town. Initially, not being observant, I got the impression that he was only vaguely interested. I should have remembered the evenings at his home when Robinson dropped in late to report on the takings and the other evening when Higgins had telephoned him after the meeting of the Academy of Letters to report on what O’Faolain and I had said. The old watchdog never relaxed his vigilance, and after every Board meeting Higgins called, telephoned or wrote to recount every word that had been said – rarely in a favourable way, if I knew Higgins.
Yeats was one of the most devious men I have ever known, and I deliberately mocked at his deviousness as he mocked at my simple-mindedness, probably with equal justification. He was taken aback at the trustfulness I showed towards my fellow-directors, and he once hinted as much to me. ‘Well, I can’t treat them as if they were a gang of masked conspirators,’ I said irritably, and he replied with great unction, ‘No, you remind me of a character in a Victorian novel by a lady that I once read – someone who believes that for most of the time the vast majority of people do not intend much harm to the others.’ That description of my own character delighted me so much that I didn’t even notice the pinch till I got home. In the light of later events he was putting it mildly.
The best example of his deviousness I remember was in the last years of his life, at a time when I felt that at last he and I were on the point of an understanding. By this time, like the two kings in The Herne’s Egg, we had fought so long and so hard that there didn’t seem to be much left to us except to become close friends. Paul Vincent Carroll had written a play which offended some members of the Board and, instead of sending it along to Yeats and me in the ordinary way, they had returned the play to the author with an exceedingly insulting letter. When the Secretary showed me the letter I grew furiously angry. Quite apart from the fact that Carroll was a distinguished playwright who had earned a good deal of money for the theatre, I felt that no writer should be treated with such discourtesy, so I wrote to Carroll, asking him to submit the play again to Yeats and myself. He did so, and Yeats and I did not meet again until the Board meeting at which our two reports were read out. Yeats said, ‘All the characters in this play are corrugated iron’, but he went on in his noble way to praise Carroll’s work and volunteered to contribute fifty pounds from his own pocket (a lot of money for an old man who made manuscript copies of Innisfree for American booksellers at five pounds a time) towards its production by Edwards and MacLiammóir at the Gate or any other theatre that wanted to produce it. My report read, ‘All the characters in this play are cardboard’, and Yeats started and stared incredulously at me. Then, as my negative report went on, he began to chuckle grimly, and when it concluded he said, ‘O’Connor, I owe you an apology. I thought you’d asked the play back because Carroll was a friend of yours. It had not occurred to me that you had asked it back because you thought he had been unfairly treated. It serves me right! I’ve lost my fifty pounds.’ How could anyone not love the sort of man who said a thing like that?
Still, in the matter of deviousness, he was a child compared with Higgins. Even as I wrote down this fairly straightforward story I found myself wondering, ‘Who or what gave Yeats the notion that I was a friend of Carroll’s; above all, a friend who, right or wrong, would insist on the production of his play?’ Twenty times at least I had evidence that Higgins told Yeats things that simply weren’t true. Why had it not occurred to me that this might be another of them? The truth is that Higgins created such a miasma of intrigue about him that I look back on it as I used to look at Abbey plays of the period, wondering what exactly was going on behind it all.
Most of the time Hayes made an admirable director, warmhearted, appreciative and intelligent. I paid no attention to the old-maidish tizzies into which he worked himself occasionally about a scene or a word – generally concerning politics or religion. Usually he could be kidded out of them. Walter Starkie, the ex-Government representative whom Yeats had brought on under his own steam, was a fat amiable man, as amiable as Higgins, but with none of Higgins’ intolerable treachery. Starkie took little part in meetings or discussion, although once – it was the time of the Civil War in Spain – when I came into the boardroom late with an evening paper and said, ‘Well, boys, we’ve got the Alcazar,’ he became very voluble. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I cannot understand how people who knew nothing of Spain can speak like that of this terrible Civil War.’ (He later became the British Council representative to Madrid.) Robinson had what no other Board member had, an immense capacity for silent, despondent resistance. He merely sat back in his chair, sucked his pipe and replied in monosyllables. If I had known that Ernest Blythe was the man who would outlast us all I should have paid more attention to him than I did. He looked like a Buddha in grey plaster, and spent most of his time doodling on his pad. Then someone would use a specialized polysyllabic word and immediately a great change came over Blythe. Pencil poised on paper, he waited for inspiration, and then would write down a Gaelic equivalent. Then there was a further pause and he wrote down an alternative. He was genuinely attached to the Irish language and anxious to revive it, but in his wise way he realized that it was lacking in polysyllabic words. He believed that the language could be revived if only people could be induced to sing popular songs in it. His collected poems contain his translation of ‘The Beautiful Isle of Capri’ and American songs like ‘I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo’ in his peculiar version of the Irish language. One might call Blythe a single-minded man if the adjective did not raise the question of whether or not it was a contradiction in terms.
Hugh Hunt got off on the wrong foot by wearing a red, white and blue rosette in the theatre on some English state occasion (King George V’s jubilee I, imagine), which infuriated Higgins. Higgins’ dislike of Hunt had turned to a persecution mania when Hunt gave an interview to some English weekly paper in which he spoke of his difficulties and described Higgins and myself as Red revolutionaries, determined on turning the theatre towards our own political aims. Higgins, having at last unmasked a genuine plot, demanded his immediate dismissal; Hayes was fearfully upset because he didn’t want ‘that charming boy’ dismissed over an indiscretion. I had conceived an admiration for Hunt that has outlasted our theatrical relationship, and was delighted at Hunt’s display of independence. When he came before the Board to explain that he had never said those dreadful things – and I’m sure they were exaggerated in the news report – I interrupted to say that of course he had, but in future would he mind not saying them before newspapermen.
At the same time I found myself engaged in a long battle with Robinson which was to go on until I resigned. I had come on the Board as his friend, but it didn’t take long to realize that the theatre had been mismanaged for years and that most of the mismanagement could be traced to him. When the bank threatened to close down the theatre, he merely shrugged and said, ‘Every theatre in the world carries an overdraft.’ We had two producers, Robinson for Irish plays and Hunt for European ones, and two secretaries, Eric Gorman for correspondence and Robinson’s brother, Tom, for accounts. The presence of Robinson’s brother at Board meetings made another difficulty, for it meant that even when Robinson was absent there could be no confidential criticism of his work. The directors groused among themselves, but nothing was ever said at meetings. I asked for the exclusion of Robinson’s brother from Board meetings. Soon afterwards his appointment was terminated. I regretted it, but it was difficult to see how else we were to save the Abbey. Then the company shares were redistributed to deprive Robinson of the controlling interest he would have when Yeats died.
Higgins, of course, was the most pugnacious member of our Board and criticized me to Yeats and Yeats to me and Robinson and Hunt to anyone who would listen; but he could not fight. He saw secret agents everywhere, but the vivid imagination that had created them collapsed the moment they presented themselves before him in ordinary human shapes, and at the least sign of opposition his astute criticisms turned into jokes. His very amiability prevented his fighting. I had no ability as an intriguer and could be fooled by appearances most of the time, so I had no shyness about fighting for any reasonable cause. Higgins made no secret of the fact that he used me as his muscle man – just as the Board used me in that capacity to have the shares redistributed and have Robinson’s brother removed from the room during meetings. Once, reporting in shouts of laughter to the Board how he got rid of some importunate playwright, he said, ‘I use O’Connor all the time as an excuse. You have no idea of the character that man has in Dublin! Murphy showed me his play and I couldn’t read it, so I told him it was a masterpiece, and then, when he kept persecuting me, I said O’Connor had turned it down. They’ll believe anything of him.’ He enacted these scenes with such laughter and devilment that only an out-and-out egotist could have complained, but now I wonder whether the joke was not on me and Yeats.
The New Abbey Policy of competing with Edwards and MacLiammóir I disagreed with on two grounds. One was that it seemed to require two producers when we couldn’t afford one. The other and more important reason was that, in my view, it was wrong. For years the directors had been unable to find new Irish plays, or so they said, or so Robinson had persuaded them, and later, when really interesting new plays were submitted the Board had practically decided beforehand that the plays could be no good. Even when it was working at full capacity the theatre never managed to produce more than a half-dozen new plays a year. I felt that this could be increased to nine or ten, but, allowing for the fact that some of them would have to be popular plays by established playwrights like Robinson himself. Shiels and MacNamara, the production of four or five European classics like Coriolanus and Dr Faustus would mean that there would be no opportunity for young serious dramatists. This would mean the end of the literary movement, for magazine and book publishers we had none.
As for the European classics, I had seen them performed as well as I was ever to do and had decided that they might not be as classical as they were generally supposed to be. Shakespeare could be boring, so could Sheridan; one could even get too much of Ibsen and Chekhov. I had not yet classified them as ‘Museum Theatre’, and in those days would probably have disputed the theory. The theory I later evolved to explain my own disillusionment I have expounded so often that I have almost ceased to believe in it myself. It seemed to me that the theatre is by its nature a contemporary art, a collaboration between author, players and audience, and once the collaboration is broken down by time it cannot be repeated.
There are exceptions, of course, particularly when an old text is rehandled by a modern writer and the staging recreated in terms of a contemporary society. Even with Hamlet one can still enable the audience to walk on the razor’s edge of real drama, but in my experience it was much easier to make them walk it with some little play by a contemporary author in a local setting. The lightest of Robinson’s own comedies had an immediacy of effect that Goethe’s Faust or Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the rival theatre did not have. If I was to work for it, the Abbey had to be an all-Irish theatre.
Yeats, too, of course, wanted a living theatre. If he had been younger and in better health he would have come to the theatre himself and insisted on it. It was he who in the middle of the New Abbey Policy was desperately holding on to Lennox Robinson and a few rough-and-ready comedies, so that when he died he might transmit some part of what he and his friends had achieved in the creation of an original repertory and an original style of acting. Nowadays when I think of what the situation really was, it is not of my work and feelings that I think, but of his. Like many a lesser man who has created some unique institution, he wanted to guarantee its continuance when he himself was dead, and did not realize that what he wanted was a miracle. His sense of urgency is evident in the dispute over the production of Coriolanus. It had just been produced in Paris in coloured shirts and caused a riot. Yeats demanded that we produce it in coloured shirts among our European classics, in the hope that, as in France, a Dublin audience might riot and he could defend the message of the play as he had defended the message of The Playboy of the Western World and The Plough and the Stars.
I don’t think he understood that I admitted the tradition as much as he did, but in the circumstances of the theatre I thought he was going the wrong way about saving it. Coriolanus might be a dramatic gesture, but there is a difference between that and drama. Besides, with Spain bleeding to death, my judgement as a theatre man was influenced by not wanting to have any part in Fascist propaganda. I refused to agree to its being produced in coloured shirts, so Hunt finally produced the play in Renaissance costume. This saved a riot maybe, but it lost the theatre a lot of money, and I practically finished the job of bankrupting it.
After that, the New Abbey Policy was not heard of again till I went to the first performance of a nice little play about the poet James Clarence Mangan, and saw a Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins, which had not been in the original manuscript. I realized that Hunt simply could not stand those beautiful and expensive masks that had been made for Dr Faustus lying around unused, and had induced the author to write a scene about them. Poor Mangan! Later, when I came to write a study of Macbeth this enabled me to understand why Macbeth’s death scene had been omitted and his head brought in on a pole instead. The stage director of Shakespeare’s company had a head available, as we had masks for the Seven Deadly Sins. Theatre people are like that – even Hunt. Not economical – definitely not economical – but very conscious that use can be made of the stuff that is lying about the theatre.
Meanwhile, though Robinson had blown cold on our two best plays – Carroll’s Shadow and Substance and Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche – we produced new plays and recovered lost ground. I had gone the rounds begging for plays and had a few promises, one from Sean O’Faolain and another from Brinsley MacNamara. Then Hunt had the idea of dramatizing a story of mine called ‘In the Train’, and, with the threat of Dr Faustus hanging over me, I jumped at the chance. I disliked Hunt’s method of dramatization, which had choruses in the manner of a German impressionist play, with invisible groups chanting in the rhythm of the train. ‘To Stop the Train Pull Down the Chain – PULL – DOWN – THE CHAIN – Pull Down the Chain.’ But the performance proved that Hunt was the very man we needed to put new life into the tradition. The curtain went up and there was an Irish railway carriage, lovingly re-created in every particular, and a group of Irish villagers – not Abbey comics – who were involved in a murder trial the significance of which they could not apprehend. The whole performance was drawn to a fourth of the scale usual in Abbey productions, but every detail was in focus and exquisitely rendered, and one could hear from the audience little chuckles of delighted recognition, as when one of the policemen pulled down his greatcoat to use as a card table. The most beautiful performance was that by Denis O’Dea, whose voice and build have kept him cast as the stage Irish policeman, and who there, for a few minutes, created a gentle timid country boy in uniform that I have never been able to forget. I knew that night that Hunt could give us the thing I had dreamed of for years, a theatre that could express the poetic realism that I admitted in Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faolain and Peadar O’Donnell.
As I rushed round to the green-room to congratulate the players I bumped into Yeats, who was equally excited, but for a different reason. ‘O’Connor, you have made a terrible mistake. You should have explained in the first scene that the woman was the murderess. You must never, NEVER, keep a secret from your audience.’ He said it in the tone of an American television announcer telling you you may never drive a car without consulting your local agent, but though I fancy I swore under my breath, I knew he was right again. Fictional irony and dramatic irony have nothing in common. It was one of the occasions when I got a hint of what a really great man of the theatre Yeats was, far greater than Robinson, who had the reputation.
Yeats had a fixation on the well-made play and the functional type of production which he passed on to Robinson. ‘A play is two chairs and a passion,’ Robinson would quote, and Yeats went one better by quoting enthusiastically a story of Salvini. Salvini was rehearsing on a stage that was empty but for one chair, and finally he could stand it no longer and asked, ‘When do I break the chair?’ I saw Yeats’ original production of his own translation of Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus hardly changed his position from beginning to end of the play, and for once I wanted to scream. Years later I saw Laurence Olivier’s production of the same version, and Laurence, remembering that ‘Oedipus’ means ‘clubfoot’, demonstrated the fact by jumping nimbly up and down boxes until I wanted to cry: ‘Is there an orthopedic surgeon in the house?’ That, it seems to me, is the weakness of the Shakespearean convention; it runs to irrelevant bits of business that merely distract attention from the eternal words.
Admittedly, if he was bored, Yeats could be worse than useless as a critic, and even dangerous. Once he went to see Cartney and Keaveney, a popular play of George Shiels, which had been in the repertory for several years, and insisted on its being removed. His reasons might have been those of Dr Johnson; the principal characters in the play glorified idleness and irresponsibility, and this was an improper moral lesson to teach our audience. Long before I joined the theatre we had an argument about Teresa Deevy, whose plays I admired. ‘She might have been a good playwright if only she let me reconstruct her plays,’ said Yeats, and even for Robinson, who was listening, this was too much. ‘A play of Teresa Deevy’s reconstructed by you would be rather like a play of Chekhov’s reconstructed by Scribe,’ he said tartly.
But when Yeats was excited he never missed a point. Once – it was the time after Higgins had already ousted Robinson from first place in Yeats’ confidence and esteem – we did a revival of Robinson’s early play The Lost Leader. It dealt with the idea that Parnell, the greatest of Irish leaders, had not died, but, suffering from amnesia, had lived on as porter in a small West of Ireland hotel. A hypnotist from London breaks down the old man’s secret. It is a good dramatic gimmick, and, as usual with gimmicks, there was a masterly first act, a weak second act and a silly third act – in which Parnell, having delivered a typical Robinsonian appeal to love and good fellowship in Ireland, is killed by a stone thrown by a blind man. Hunt made a beautiful production of it, and the opening of the third act is the only occasion I recall of a décor being applauded in its own right.
The lead was played by an established London actor, and, as usual, Yeats couldn’t stand him. We spent the interval together, and Yeats embarrassed me in the foyer by illustrating how he felt the Englishman acted. ‘When he should have been calling down the thunderbolt,’ he said, reaching towards the ceiling, ‘he was picking up matches,’ and the tall figure bent and groped on the floor. But during the last act Yeats’ imagination was working overtime; he had his old affection for Robinson, and nothing could keep him from rewriting the works of people he liked. When I went up to the boardroom later, Robinson was sitting with his head in his hands while Yeats strode up and down in a frenzy, lecturing him. ‘Tell him, O’Connor,’ he snorted at me when I entered. ‘When Parnell has to tell the mob what to do, he must tell them only what has already happened. There must be no abstractions. Everything must be concrete. He must tell them to do only what the audience knows they themselves have already done.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Robinson said, looking at the floor. ‘I disagree.’
God knows I sympathized with Robinson, being lectured like a schoolboy on his first night, because I had been lectured myself in my time and hadn’t liked it, but I knew Yeats was right again. Nothing could have rescued that feeble last act but some such impudent piece of theatrical dexterity.
It was a grave mistake not to take up Yeats on those wild ideas of his, for, apart from anything else, if you couldn’t do the job yourself, he was only too pleased to do it for you. He had the ultimate brazenness of the great performer, the man to whom the audience was merely an instrument, and any refusal to use the instrument he regarded as ‘barren pride’ – the phrase he used when dismissing a friend of mine who had refused to accept any suggestions for the improvement of his play. He was not afraid to accept suggestions himself – ‘She might be that stately girl that was trodden by a bird’ is supposed to be the suggestion of a poet he particularly disliked – though he did kick up a great pother before accepting them. He hissed with rage when I told him that ‘Made Plato’s tolerance in vain’ was not English, but all the subsequent editions have ‘Made the Platonic tolerance vain, and vain the Doric discipline’, in spite of the nasty assonance.
In plays that nominally are not his, one can sometimes see his workmanship in the ‘properties’, the things that are actually on the stage when the play opens – Salvini’s ‘chair’. In On Baile’ Strand they are the cooking-pot and the stool. Once he told me how he and Lady Gregory had worked on The Rising of the Moon until he was exhausted and sank on to a piano stool. That gave him the idea. ‘A barrel!’ he cried. ‘We must have a barrel!’
Towards the end of his life a young dramatist submitted a bad play on a theme that seemed inspired. A party of pilgrims is setting out from an Irish provincial town on foot to an Italian hill-shrine when the father of one of the girl pilgrims falls ill and she has to stay behind to nurse him. She makes the pilgrimage, walking about the sickroom, but when the pilgrims reach the shrine they find her there before them, kneeling at the altar. Yeats was ill at the time, so I went to his house to talk the play over with him, and as we talked the old man’s mask was dropped and I saw the face of the boy behind. It was astonishing to see the reserve of energy he could throw into any literary project: of course the energy was nervous, not physical, and left him exhausted, and one felt guilty at having excited it, but less guilty than when, as sometimes happened, one felt one was boring him. The finest scene he planned took place outside the heroine’s house while she made her pilgrimage round the room, unaware of being watched, while the awed villagers interpreted every movement of hers in terms of a real landscape. ‘Now she’s climbing a hill. It’s a steep hill. Now she is stopping and pulling up her skirt. It must be a mountain stream she is crossing.’ As he described it, I could even see an Italian landscape emerging.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it was the only sort of play that made any profound appeal to Yeats. It was a mystery, and all the great early plays of the Abbey Theatre – with the solitary exception of Colum’s – were mysteries.
Now I am sorry that after that evening, with a masterpiece ‘ready made to my hand’, I got cold feet. I had a vague feeling that Yeats and I had been able to construct that scenario easily only because a better dramatist had done so already. He was so convinced of the overall importance of the fable that he once said to me, ‘When you want to write a play, write it on the back of a postcard and send it to me. I’ll tell you whether you can produce it or not.’ I had the feeling that that particular postcard had already been written and mailed. I lunched with the author and begged her to tell me whether she might have read it. She couldn’t remember, but thought it might have been in a book of Chinese fairytales she had read when she was a child. This gave me new hope and I read every book of Chinese stories I could lay my hands on without finding it. Indeed, it was only long after I had left the theatre that I found it described in a book of Nora Waln’s as one of the masterpieces of the Chinese theatre. The curious orientalism of the whole Abbey Theatre movement was visible that evening when an Anglo-Irishman and a mere Irishman tried to compose the scenario of a great modern Irish play round the theme of a great ancient Chinese play whose existence we didn’t know of.