George Moore on the Irish Theatre

Boston Evening Transcript, 23 September 1911, page 40, 2,023 words

The Intimate and Reminiscent Impressions of the Noted Writer

George Moore, familiar to both American and English readers as an unusual novelist, essayist and critic of the arts, has sent from Dublin an article about the Irish national drama and the Irish players who are to act specimens of it here, beginning at the Plymouth Theatre tonight. Mr. Moore has shared in its beginnings, encouraged its progress, quarreled with it when he disliked its  works or its tendencies, praised it when they pleased him, and generally played the part of the candid friend to the Abbey Theatre. As such he wrote the intimate, reminiscent and generally interesting article that follows.

Yeats’s original idea of the theatre was a little mist, some fairies and a psaltery, and his achievements are realistic plays and an admirable company of actors and actresses. The story of the Abbey Theatre is an interesting one, but it is much too long a story for me to attempt here: suffice it to say that when the Irish Literary Theatre, founded by Yeats, Martyn and myself, came to an end with the performance of “Diarmuid and Grania,” a play written by Yeats and me and produced by  F.R. Benson at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, Mr. Willie Fay and his brother, Mr. Frank Fay, came to me one evening to ask me to use my influence with the Gaelic League to send them out with a little company to act plays in Irish and in English all over Ireland.

While I was trying to persuade the Gaelic League to accept the offer of the Fays, the brothers read a play entitled “Deirdre,” by A.E., and abandoning their project of the provincial company they decided to devote themselves to the production of “Deirdre” and “Kathleen ni Houlihan,” a one-act play written for them by Yeats. The plays were produced in April, 1902, and they were received with so much approval by the audiences that assembled to hear them in St. Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon street, that the Fays determined the idea of an Irish theatre should not be dropped: a society was founded entitled The National Theatre Society, and Yeats was elected President.

The choice was a happy one. During the summer Yeats placed all his great energy of mind at the service of the Fays; he wrote plays for them and asked everybody to write plays. He asked me, but I was haughty, whereas Yeats knew how to stoop to conquer, and he conquered because he was possessed of an idea, and an idea is always sufficient to secure success.

Yeats had no knowledge of the technique of the stage and no aptitude for learning it. I doubt if even today he would be able to produce a play efficiently; instead of acting he preferred, and perhaps still prefers, a sort of chant which he called “the speaking of verse.” He certainly seemed the last man in the world who would succeed in running a theatre, and I thought this because I overlooked the fact that he was possessed of an idea.

He liked folk, and he desired a folk theatre: peasant plays written in the language the peasant speaks. Art begins in folk as the river begins in the mountains, and we must always return to folk.

If an epigram be permitted in an article, I will say that though there is no high road to Panassus, the boreen will take us there. Boreen is Irish for a little road, a by-way, and Yeats and his company have reached Olympus by following the boreen: that is to say, the dialect.

The plays of the Abbey Theatre are written in dialect, or, to speak more exactly, in Anglo-Irish idiom. Idiom redeemed the Abbey Theatre from the conventional play: the gentleman in evening dress and diamond studs beseeching a lady in silk attire to leave her husband; and it redeemed the theatre from the idiom which we speak and in which our newspapers are written — an idiom dim and defaced like a coin too long in circulation.

It would be interesting to tell how this idiom gradually made its way into literary usage, but if I have abbreviated the story of the Abbey Theatre, I must leave untold the first babblings in the new speech so that I may have space to speak at some length of him who first used it as an artist and carried into — well, into a little immortality.

Everything connected with the Abbey Theatre is strange, for John N. [sic] Synge came to Yeats with no literary lustre about his brow. Until he met Yeats he was merely an unsuccessful journalist, who wrote so indifferently about Jules Lemaître and Anatole France that his articles were seldom printed in the magazines to which they were sent. From these Yeats could not have gathered any idea of the literary genius in him, nor could he have gathered it from his conversation, for Synge had none; an appearance awkward and clumsy, with no grace of wit in conversation, silent, morose, avoiding his kind and given to strange ways of life; for what is a stranger way of life than to spend six months of the year in the Latin quarter and the other six months with the almost dumb peasants that inhabit the islands off the coast of Ireland.

It must have been his strange manner of life that appealed to Yeats and prompted him to tell Synge to leave off trying to write what he thought was the English language and to write in the Anglo-Irish dialect which he knew so well.

The result of this excellent advice was a play called “[In the] The Shadow of the Glen,” which was produced in the Molesworth Hall in October 1903.

Yeats when he heard it read is said to have cried out “Euripides!” A few months later Synge read “Riders to the Sea” to the company, and on this occasion it is stated that Yeats again limited his appreciation to a single word — “Aeschylus!” And the appreciation is not altogether as exaggerated as some people would like to think. Synge has told the story of the old woman whose children have been raped by the sea year after year with beauty and pathos, without sentimentality.

As soon as the Irish National Theatre had produced a masterpiece Miss Horniman came forward with two of three thousand pounds and built the Abbey Theatre and gave it to Yeats rent free, He was able to reward the lady’s munificence with another masterpiece — “The Well of the Saints.” No further doubt could exist that Synge was reforming the theatre, but not by new methods of acting, stage managing, scene designing, dancing, lighting, wig making, Synge began his reformation by writing literary plays, and it would be a good thing if other reformers were to follow his example.

“The Well of the Saints” being in three acts, and each act perfect in itself, left no room for doubt that a man of genius had come among us; but beautiful and perfect as the play is, it would have been a very subtle critic indeed that would have foreseen “The Playboy of the Western World,” the most original piece of stage literature that has been written since Elizabethan times, exceeding Sheridan and Goldsmith, for these were but echoes of Wycherley and Congreve; whereas Synge in “The Playboy” is himself and nothing but himself.

One listens to this play as one listens to music: it can be heard again and again. At the first hearing one discovers many faults; at every subsequent hearing one of these faults drops away, and when it has been heard for the sixth time no faults are left. Such is my experience of “The Playboy,” and such, I think, will be the experiences of the American audiences, at least of everyone among the American audiences who is disposed to give his mind to thinking out artistic problems.

About the steps of the throne on which Synge sits are many worthy of attention. Among these, place aux dames, is Lady Gregory, the author of many pleasant farces, all little folk-tales written in the Anglo-Irish idiom, everyone of them full of cheerfulness and pleasant humor. “The Rising of the Moon” is quite a dainty trifle, and it is difficult to imagine anybody not being amused by “Hyacinth Halvey,” and not leaving the theatre feeling that he had been listening to something more than mere farce.

The Abbey Theatre Company no doubt takes over two admirable farcical comedies by Mr. William Boyle, “The Building Fund” and “The Eloquent Dempsey,” and those as acted by the company are as good as any I have seen at the Palais Royale, and I knew that theatre in its best days when Labiche and Meilhac and Halévy wrote for it. “La Cagnotte” and “La Boule” were played by Hyacinthe, Brasseur and a great actor whose name I cannot think of at this moment. The Abbey Theatre Company will take over some comedies written by Lennox Robinson and T.C. Murray. Mr. Robinson’s writing I admire especially in his long plays, and Mr. Murray’s “Birthright” impressed me so much that after the first performance I felt compelled to ask Mr. Robinson to introduce him to me.

Just now I mentioned the Palais Royale and the actors that used to delight me in the ‘70s. We are tempted to think the past always better than the present, but, hand upon my heart, it is impossible for me to say that I ever saw a better actor than Arthur Sinclair of the Abbey Theatre, in his best parts. Sinclair in the part of the drunken publican in “The Playboy” is one of my most distinct playhouse memories, and nearly as distinct is my memory of Miss Maire O’Neill in the part of “Pegeen Mike.” That “nearly” should be crossed out, for in certain scenes I can see her as distinctly as Sinclair, and her part is the more difficult, for she is in every scene, whereas Sinclair only appears in the first and the third acts. She is in my opinion a most admirable actress in everything that she attempts, and I shall be surprised if my opinion of her is not endorsed by the entire American public.

I know no part in any play that demands from the actor so much tact and judgment as the part of Christy Mahon, the Playboy, and all the necessary tact and judgment are supplied by Mr. Fred O’Donovan. All the other parts in the play are what is known as straightforward acting; O’Donovan balances his on a needle’s point all the time and at any moment it is easy for him to lose the sympathy of the audience. J.M. Kerrigan is an excellent actor, a little more thoughtful and less spontaneous that Sinclair — an admirable comedian. Sidney Morgan I remember very well in his impersonation of Christy Mahon’s father (the father that was supposed to be killed by the blow of a boy) and I never have been disappointed by him in any part that he ever played. J. O’Rourke is sometimes a little monotonous but always an excellent actor. I remember Miss Eileen O’Doherty so well in “Birthright” that I cannot refrain from mentioning her name here, although I have exhausted my space and have already begun to think of the paragraph with which I shall wind up this article.

The Abbey Theatre Company are going to America and they will bring with them the fragrance of bog-land and meadow-land and also of publichouse-land. They will reveal the hard lot of the peasant on a scant farm better than Jean François Millet ever did in his pictures. I am glad they are going, for the sake of the American public. However tempting the offers that may be made to the members of the company, I hope that each will remember the old adage “United we stand, divided we fall.”

Dublin, Sept. 14 [1911].  GEORGE MOORE.