The Plough and the Stars (11 page)

The theatre for which O’Casey first wrote was the Abbey in Dublin. Founded in 1904 by the poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), the playwright and administrator Lady Gregory (1852–1932) and the poet and playwright John Millington Synge (1871–1909), the Abbey from the outset was a brave and combative little theatre. Its origins lay in two impulses which were not always in harmony and when in opposition created explosive audience reaction.

One impulse was to create a theatre of art along the lines of the new ‘free’ or ‘independent’ theatres in London, Paris, Berlin and, perhaps most famously, Moscow. There was a common idea stretching right across Europe from the late 1880s, namely to oppose the commercial, conventional theatre of the nineteenth century, with its star system, its reliance on spectacular scenery and sensational effects to create the maximum illusion, and its cultivation of worn-out dramatic styles (as seen in the ‘well-made play’ in particular). The Independent Theatre established in London in 1891 probably first gave Yeats the idea of providing an alternative theatre for Dublin, where similar conditions were in place. Indeed, Yeats himself contributed an early play to the Independent Theatre in 1894, sharing the double bill with Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
. Shaw, however, was a lot more interested in using the Independent Theatre to create a new drama similar to the realistic plays of Ibsen (1828–1906), such as
A Doll’s House
(1879) and
Ghosts
(1881). Yeats was rather more interested in Symbolism, and in the new poetic plays he had seen or read in Paris. He had serious doubts about the value of realism, and hoped to control its development in
favour of a restoration of poetic drama to the stage. However, the spread of naturalism – an extreme form of realism – across Europe culminated in the establishment in 1898 of the Moscow Art Theatre, dedicated to the plays of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). One of the founders of the MAT, Constantin Stanislavsky, quickly developed acting and staging techniques to make Chekhov’s plays seem more real and more natural than anything seen in the theatre before.

Naturalism thus conquered the older nineteenth-century theatre of illusionism. The Moscow Art Theatre merely brought to perfection certain revolutionary developments already challenging the older styles and traditions and paved the way for the triumph of realism. Yeats, it has to be said, was somewhat dismayed by this victory and did not in fact accept it. At the Abbey he fought to maintain a theatre movement which had two strands: poetic drama (mainly written by himself) and realistic ‘peasant plays’ (best written by J. M. Synge) which owed a lot to the new naturalistic ideas on authenticity of setting, costume and acting style.

As time went on, the realistic side of the Abbey repertory seemed to win out over the poetic or symbolic. And yet it could be said that the Abbey plays, such as Synge’s
Riders to the Sea
(1903) or Lady Gregory’s
Spreading the News
(1904), were not realistic in the same way as, for example, Shaw’s
Candida
(1895) or
Major Barbara
(1906). The Abbey plays usually had a remote, other-worldly flavour and did not seem directly to relate to the events and problems of contemporary life. After the premature death of Synge in 1909, however, others began to write more sordid, more genuinely realistic plays. Writers such as Lennox Robinson (1886–1958) and T. C. Murray (1873–1959) held the mirror up to disillusioned Irish life in the style of Ibsen’s problem plays. Yeats, having abandoned the Abbey for the moment in order to write poetic
plays modelled on the Japanese Noh drama in London, seemed about to give up the fight against realism in Dublin. He wrote a famous open letter to Lady Gregory in 1919: ‘We did not set out to create this sort of theatre, and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat.’ And yet, if Yeats could have been fair about this point, Abbey realism had already created some of the most striking and original work in the modern theatre, and was about to recreate former glories in the new drama of Sean O’Casey.

The second impulse was nationalism. Here the Abbey Theatre was quite unlike any other of the new little theatres in London, Paris, Berlin or Moscow, all of which concentrated on fighting the existing commercial theatres with a new set of artistic principles. The new Irish theatre complicated matters by making its foundation part of the movement in cultural nationalism which thrived in Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland from the early 1890s. The literary renaissance which then developed, headed by Yeats, celebrated independence as the goal worth fighting for. Home Rule seemed a real possibility as time went on, but there was a group of militant republicans (of whom Maud Gonne, Yeats’s lover, was one) whose extremism penetrated all activities. These nationalists assumed that the Abbey Theatre, which was built on their support, had a duty to idealise Ireland first and be entertaining or satirical only when the consciousness-raising was accomplished. Therefore, when Synge began to write comedies which, far from idealising Ireland or Irish manners, actually held them up to some ridicule, the nationalist critics and supporters turned on ‘their’ theatre and demanded Synge’s head. Yeats was determined to fight for artistic freedom, even where the artist took it upon him or herself to laugh at flaws and absurdities in Irish life. He answered the journalist and founder of Sinn Féin Arthur Griffith in 1905 by insisting that Synge had heard the story of
The
Shadow of the Glen
(1903) on the Aran Islands and not in Paris as Griffith, accusing Synge of French decadence, had said in his newspaper. Yeats was clearly arguing that Synge was being faithful to what he saw and heard among the people, and, according to Yeats’s own definition in ‘First Principles’ (1904), national literature ‘is the work of writers who are moulded by influences that are moulding their country, and who write out of so deep a life that they are accepted there in the end’. Synge’s case was to be O’Casey’s later on.

But first came the storm over Synge’s
The Playboy of the Western World
in January 1907, which uncannily anticipated the riots that greeted
The Plough and the Stars
in February 1926. Synge’s play, a comedy and a satire, greatly angered that section of the Abbey’s audience who were either strong nationalists or members of the urban Catholic middle class, who resented this slur, as they saw it, on Irish rural people. In a programme note, Synge claimed once again that his play was based on reality (‘suggested by an actual occurrence in the West’) and that the language was also derived from the speech of the people. In short, he claimed
The Playboy
was realism. But its first audience took exception to what they saw and heard on patriotic grounds; in painting the people as fools, worshippers of a murderer, and (worst of all) immoral, this play
must
be a sneer at the ‘real’ Irish. Lady Gregory and Synge had to send a telegram to Yeats, who was lecturing in Scotland: ‘Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.’ The reference was to Christy Mahon’s speech, ‘It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts [underwear] itself, maybe, from this place to the eastern world?’ The police were called in the next night, and the play went on amid uproar, the actors playing ‘almost entirely in dumb show’. When Yeats returned on the next day he took over and determined to fight back in
defence of artistic freedom. That night the police were there again, and many arrests were made. Yeats shouted at the audience his determination that
The Playboy
would not be taken off. And so it went, night after night, with up to fifty policemen in the aisles of the Abbey and opposition continuing. The play completed its short run and then Yeats arranged a public debate at the Abbey – to which Synge himself did not come. Yeats made one of his bravest speeches to a hostile audience; when they refused to listen he reminded them that he was the author of the patriotic play
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
.

The story of the
Playboy
riots makes clear the principles on which the Abbey was run. As a modern theatre, established as an alternative to commercialism, it was dedicated to forms of entertainment which were fundamentally artistic and truth-telling. As a theatre founded in the midst of a nationalist movement it was supposed to hold a mirror to the realities of Irish experience and of Irish history. But above all it stood for the writer: the Abbey was primarily a writers’ theatre and an actors’ theatre after that. And the writer had to be free to cultivate his or her vision of Ireland, regardless of propaganda.

O’Casey ran into exactly the same problems at the Abbey as Synge. However, it has to be said that O’Casey was more politicised. When he wrote
The Story of the Irish Citizen Army
(1919), an account of how Larkin’s army formed, O’Casey had become somewhat disillusioned with Irish nationalism. But from the sidelines, as it were, he observed and continued to observe the factions which, after 1916, gradually united under the Sinn Féin umbrella and left Labour in the lurch. The flag of the ICA was the ‘starry plough’, representing the labourers toiling to reach the stars (i.e., some kind of spiritual fulfilment built upon their manual labour). To O’Casey, the ‘plough and the stars’ represented a struggle which should have been directed solely at the improvement of the workers’
conditions. Hence his impatience with the blood-sacrifice of 1916. O’Casey further argued that after 1918 Irish Labour ‘will probably have to fight Sinn Féin … but the labour leaders must become wiser and more broadminded than they at present seem to be’ if they were to democratise the national movement.

Beginning with
The Shadow of a Gunman
(1923), O’Casey introduced a new form of realism to the Abbey Theatre. Because he could not afford the price of admission, he had been to the Abbey only twice before his own plays were staged there. One of the plays he saw was
Blight
(1918), a little-known drama by Oliver St John Gogarty which for the first time introduced the Dublin slums on to the stage. Here poverty, consumption and appalling living conditions ‘blight’ the lives of the ordinary Dublin characters. O’Casey’s outlook was never so bleak or pessimistic, and he was always eager to contextualise his representations politically: that is, to locate his stories of tenement life within the political events and atmosphere of the day. This concern lent to O’Casey’s plays their special distinction. Each play juxtaposes two worlds, the private and the public. The private is the life of the tenement dwellers, where indeed privacy is hardly to be thought of; and yet the families who encroach freely on each other’s space are preoccupied with personal and domestic problems. The public life in O’Casey’s plays inevitably means the political: he shows how the affairs of state and the ambitions of freedom hold the lives of ordinary people in a vice. There is no escape from the battles raging in the streets. There is no hiding place from the consequences of a movement dedicated to overthrowing the oppressor. O’Casey’s point of view is neither nationalist nor unionist: on balance it is anti-unionist and anti-imperialist, but it is the ‘balance’ which matters. Compassion takes precedence over political allegiance or ideology; each of the three Dublin plays is called a ‘tragedy’.
The laws of tragedy insist that pity and terror rather than political ideas should be primary. O’Casey’s great achievement was to rise above local allegiances and turn the harsh conditions of working-class life into the materials of modern art.

It was stated above that the Abbey Theatre was and remains a writers’ theatre first and an actors’ second. Yet this is not to deny the contribution of the Abbey actors to the playwrights’ achievements. From the beginning, the Abbey actors avoided the ‘star system’ dominant in the English and French theatres (whereby a production was mainly if not solely for the performances of some major actor or actress, while all other performers were supposed to keep out of the ‘limelight’ and subordinate their talents to the star’s). The Abbey style is based on the ensemble, which means that no one individual gets top billing; all actors are regarded as equal. The actor playing a major role one night could well be in a minor role the next night (for the repertory system means a rapid change of plays). Further, the Abbey style is based on realism. The speech, gestures, movements and costume are all rooted in local conditions. In contrast to the English and French theatres of the early twentieth century, where ‘received pronunciation’ and a classical acting style dominated (and were supported by such training centres as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), and the Comédie Française), the Abbey Theatre relied on the natural, inherent qualities of the performers. Authenticity took precedence over standardised elocution; the dominant value was ‘peasant quality’, or truth to native Irish experience.

At the time O’Casey’s plays were first performed, an excellent company was in residence at the Abbey. It included the great F. J. McCormick (real name, Peter Judge), Barry Fitzgerald (real name, Will Shields), Sara Allgood, Maureen Delaney, Michael J. Dolan and Gabriel Fallon.
The same group of players acted in all of O’Casey’s plays written for the Abbey, grew to know his work as intimately as the players at the Moscow Art Theatre knew their Chekhov, and as a result provided performances so convincing that audiences saw them as real. When
Juno
and
The Plough
transferred to London, only some of the original cast were included in the new productions, yet the playing of these original cast-members was recognised in London as startlingly original. The young Laurence Olivier, for example, was bowled over by the performances and vowed one day to play in
Juno
: he directed an outstanding production many years later (1966) at the National Theatre in London. In short, the Abbey players contributed enormously to the success of the plays on stage.

A final point refers to the staging. The original Abbey Theatre, which was destroyed by fire in 1951, was a small space with a capacity of just over 500 people. The stage was disproportionately small (curtain-line to back wall 16 feet 4 inches, proscenium opening 21 feet, width of stage wall-to-wall 40 feet). These dimensions, coupled with the absence of ‘flies’ or overhead space, meant that the staging had to be simple. Scenery was functional and unspectacular. Simplicity was the essence of every production. It is important to bear this point in mind because it means – as in the Elizabethan theatre – that a great deal of responsibility was thrown on language to create atmosphere, colour, variety and sheer entertainment. O’Casey’s plays were sometimes termed ‘Elizabethan’ in style (usually by critics in London or New York) and this, basically, is the reason behind it. It is not that O’Casey was trying to be Shakespearean; it is that the theatre conditions required it. (Synge as well as O’Casey wrote poetic prose virtually to compensate for the lack of mise en-scène.) In reading O’Casey’s plays, then, it is important not to think the language stilted or artificial but to imagine instead performances where language becomes a major resource which the
characters, impoverished though they are, can exploit as a weapon, a defence against deprivation, and a source of rhetorical delight – a kind of richness – even for the poorest of the poor. Thus a new kind of poetry was invented for the modern stage.