At the Abbey
By GERARD FAY IF I were to attempt my own memoirs of the Abbey they would not fill much space and would certainly not be adequate to mark the jubilee of Dublin's small but powerful theatre which opened fifty years ago. I was four when my father, Frank Fay, after an absence of ten years, returned to Dublin to play with the Abbey in Bernard McCarthy's Crusaders. This was in 1917, and from time to time after that my father played at the Abbey, usually in revivals of earlier plays in which he had made a hit before the disastrous quarrel in 1907 which parted the Fays from the Abbey. As a boy I used to go to the theatre and play about in my father's dressing-room or in the green-room. Perhaps it was to keep me out of mischief or out of danger that Lennox Robinson proposed a shameless piece of type-casting and gave me the part of my father's son in The Hour Glass. I must have been a success in the part, in which I had two or three lines to speak, for in December, 1925, at the twenty- first birthday performance of the Abbey I was asked to play again. That was almost the whole of my career at the Abbey. But this does not mean I am ignorant of the theatre's history. I have spent years browsing through several volumes of documents collected by my father, and more recently I have hadlgreat help from Mrs. W. B. Yeats, who lent me a bulky bundle of early letters and papers about the Abbey. I have learned a lot about what led up to the night of December 27, 1904, which was a culmination as well as a beginning—a lot more than can be found in the existing histories of the Irish theatre and a lot more, even, than ever came out in talks about the Abbey with my father or his brother William Fay.
Among the different groups of men who worked for years for the founding of an Irish national theatre there was con- fusion of aims and there were clashes of character. Surprising Successes—as when it first visited London—marked the early history of the Irish National Theatre Society—as well as !miserable failures like the attempt in 1902 to set up a theatre in a warehouse in a slum. Gradually the efforts and ambitions of the several founders converged on the Abbey.
My father had been very early in the field with a suggestion that what Ireland needed most was a Gaelic-speaking theatre for which the chief dramatist was more likely to be Douglas Hyde than W. B. Yeats. But his real motive was not nationalism or patriotism. It was a passion for acting which ho shared with his brother.
Yeats was interested chiefly because he wanted a stage on which to work out some ideas he was developing about poetic drama. He was one of the first to realise that the Irish Literary Theatre of 1899 to 1901 in which Edward Martyn and George Moore were his chief allies was more likely to lead to a borrowing of ideas than to the creation of them; and it was tainted with Ibsenism.
The widow, Lady Gregory, and the spinster, Miss Horni- man, were both interested in Yeats. Possibly both were in love with him, though I have not seen what I would call evidence of this. Miss Horniman in her letters to Yeats never went beyond affectionate intimacy coloured by a simple thank- fulness to Yeats for allowing her to help with designing and making costumes. ' You have given me the right to call myself artist,' she wrote, though one direction in which she was notably unsuccessful in helping the Abbey was as a designer. She had first met him in one of the obscure mystical societies he used to haunt. She stayed by when his mind began to dwell again on the theatre and was able to give him the most glittering gift of all, a stage for his plays. Lady Gregory gave Yeats a lot too—a country home when he needed quiet to write his early poems, a brisk executive spirit in which to tackle problems which, left to himself, might have drifted into insolubility. She did for him, she said, what she would do for her son and never had any thought of marriage. Synge died leaving behind one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of the dramatic flowering which began in Ireland in the late Nineties and lasted until the Twenties when O'Casey blew into a flame the spark he had first seen at the Queen's, a working-class theatre on the other side of the river from the Abbey. After the fire of 1951 the Abbey had to seek refuge in the Queen's and is there still—in the house where O'Casey had his first theatrical lessons, where Synge's eyes were opened to standards of professionalism in comic acting. In 1904 Dublin was a No. 1 Town on the normal theatrical touring circuit and was entertained (apart from the melo- dramas at the Queen's) entirely by English travelling com- panies. There would have been no ordinary commercial capital available for a theatre like the Abbey. If Miss Horni- man had not been able to put up the cash for converting the Mechanics' Institute into a theatre there would have been no Abbey. It cost her £12,000 to build the theatre and subsidise it for five years.
Up to now Ireland has had its national theatre on the cheap, for the famous government subsidy has never amounted to anything substantial. -Yet on Miss Horniman's capital there was built up a theatre which not only offered a voice to a school of dramatists who would have been struck dumb by the clamour of Broadway or Shaftesbury Avenue, but which also became one of the chief schools of acting in English. It sent its pupils to New York and London and later to Hollywood. It had evolved from a small group run by the Fays, with additions from the Daughters of Erin, a woman's patriotic) society in which Maude Gonne was a towering figure. These two together made the Irish National Theatre Society. Their performances were at first approved of by both the nationalists and the loyalists of Dublin who rubbed shoulders in the audiences, but Arthur Griffith and Maude Gonne quickly quarrelled with the INTS after Miss Horniman gave it the Abbey. Respectable viceregal society soon began to suspect that in spite of Lady Gregory, Mr. Yeats and Miss Horniman being clearly gentlefolk, there was something wrong with a company which put on allegories about Irish independence and never played God Save the Queen' after its performances. So the Abbey among its other struggles had to fight against two opposing pressure groups. Dublin Castle threatened to withdraw the theatre's patent in 1909 if it produced The Skewing-up of Blanco Posner. The IRA ordered tit theatre to close down for a period of national mourning' in 1921. Neither form of pressure succeeded—any more than Miss Horniman could succeed in reducing the Abbey to contrition for the offence of remaining open on the night of Edward VII's funeral. It caused her to withdraw for good from Dublin and from the Abbey.
That is all well known. But what I learned from Miss Horniman's letters to W. B. Yeats was that almost from the beginning of her connection with the Abbey she was an out• spoken and in many ways a malicious critic of both the FaY brothers, especially of William. She equally disliked Synge. Sara Allgood and Maire O'Neill. In fact, she disliked most Irish people, except Yeats. It was her persistent nagging of Yeats that widened the breach between William Fay and the directors into a gap that was never closed. She was a haughty. imperious woman: William Fay was headstrong and a little imperious hjimsell: That the two might clash was always on the cards, but Om Tho stormy first years, which were the real foundation of everything the Abbey has since achieved, were followed by some years of consolidation. O'Casey brought the badly- needed change in fortunes. The last twenty years have shown singularly little development; much of the theatrical vigour seemed to flow into the Gate Theatre which, in turn, became stagnant. The destruction of the theatre in 1951 has provided the architect's opportunity, but nowhere in the world has it ever been proved more completely that a theatre is not a build- ing, for the Abbey was .always beneath contempt structurally.
Jubilees are often occasions for re-assessments and the making of elaborate plans. What the Abbey decides to do with the second half of its first century is not simply an Irish concern, or need not be. The English-speaking theatre owes a lot to Dublin both in acting and play-writing. The debt has not grown much lately, but perhaps there is simply a halt, rather than a complete stoppage, in the flow of talent which came from the small theatre by the Liffey opened on the night of December 27, 1904. The goodwill that has been built up in these fifty years is enormous. Sothetimes I think the Irish Players have been overflattered—but the conclusion of most Critics is against me. Still, I hope that in facing the next fifty years the Abbey will show less of the smugness it has some- times suffered from on the management side since the war. Some words of Micheal MacLiammoir (from Theatre in Ireland, 1950) might be taken to heart : . . We in the theatre in Ireland, when we look beyond our own horizons for a hearing, must not expect to find the world that forty years ago was eager to listen to the recital of a romantic and almost un- known story. The clouds that lent to us mystery as well as gloom have lifted, and something more than mere dramatic beof quaint and unfamiliar faces and landscapes will bo expected. . . In other words, Ireland needs new drama, new dramatists, and if they are not discovered the Abbey will not be able to live forever on its reputation—as it has been doing for at least half of its first fifty years.
Previous page
