Tomorrow is the centenary of a humble production in St Teresa's Temperance Hall which led to the founding of the Abbey. Tomás Mac Anna pays tribute to Maud Gonne, Annie Horniman, Frank Fay - and Willie Fay, who searched Dublin on his bicycle for a location for the new theatre.
When Lady Gregory died in 1932, quite a controversy arose over who were the real founders of the Abbey Theatre. Annie Horniman in Manchester insisted that she was the one and not Lady Gregory or even Yeats. Several others chimed in, notably the northern playwright, St John Ervine who supported Horniman's claim, maintaining that no native southerner could possibly have had a hand in it, and the brothers Willie and Frank Fay were hardly mentioned at all. In just two years' time the old place will be celebrating its centenary and despite the rumours of its intended flitting to other and varied locations, will still be there at the corner of Marlborough Street and Abbey for the festive occasion.
But the centenary of the venture that led to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society, which owns and runs the theatre to the present day, is tomorrow. On April 2nd, 1902, the two Fay brothers, Willie and Frank, assembled a company of amateur players, called themselves W. G. Fay's National Dramatic Company and presented two plays at the Saint Teresa's Temperance Hall in Clarendon Street, Deirdre by the poet and mythic, George Russell (AE) and Kathleen Ni Houlihan by W.B. Yeats (the authorship of this work is disputed, with some claiming that much of it was written by Lady Gregory; however any actor who ever acted in it will confirm it was written by Yeats).
It was neither Yeats nor Gregory who brought it about, however, but the redoubtable Maud Gonne, hoping to raise funds for her organisation, Inghinidhe na hEireann, though she has seldom been given credit for it. Yeats wanted her to appear in his one-act play, Kathleen Ni Houlihan. She went to the Fay brothers, who had already assembled a company of players intending to take over from the Irish Literary Theatre - with Irish actors for a change, instead of the English professionals preferred by its founders, Yeats and Edward Martyn. The Fays had helped Maud and her Daughters of Erin girls several times before, producing pageants and tableaux for them to fund their nationalistic activities.
But the Yeats play would barely last half an hour, so a longer play was needed to fill the bill. As luck would have it, Standish O'Grady just then published two acts of a play by George Russell, based on the legend of Deirdre, the tragic Celtic Queen of Ulster in his All Ireland Review. It was just the thing the brothers were looking for, so they went to see Russell to ask him to finish the play and add the necessary third act. To their amazement, he told them not to bother him, as he had no intention of finishing the play, having thought of it as an essay in dramatic literature, rather than as a piece to be staged. The Fays weren't so easily put off, however. Willie casually mentioned that they had a new play by Willie Yeats with Maud Gonne willing to star in it. This caused Russell to ponder awhile, murmur something about consulting the Celtic Sea-God, Mananan Mac Lir, and having apparently done so, decide to finish the play after all.
A week or so later the Fays had a finished script, had managed to stump up a full £10 between them, and rented the Coffee Palace in Townsend Street for rehearsals. With commendable optimism, they rented St. Teresa's Hall for not one, but three full nights, hiring the York Street Workmen's Club String Band as well, to provide the interval music.
There were no dressing rooms, the players had to dress upstairs in the billiard room and get on stage before the audience arrived. They found that there was hardly room enough in the wings for them all, awaiting their cues. Maud Gonne arrived late, causing a minor sensation as she swept through a nearly full auditorium in her ghostly robes as Kathleen. Frank Fay, peeping through the curtain and not at all impressed, called her behaviour most unprofessional.
The plays did well over the three nights, accompanied (according to Joseph Holloway's jottings) by the clicking of billiard balls from upstairs and snatches of singing and revelry from nearby rooms. A photo of the setting for the Yeats play shows crude canvas flats, very amateurish, but AE himself had a hand in the setting and costumes for Deirdre, and Willie Fay managed to find a gauze behind which the players in green and amber lighting (according to Máire Ní Shiulough, one of the players) gave the impression of figures in a mist rising out of a mystic past.
The critics were in the main very kind and even Arthur Griffith in The United Irishman had a word or two of praise, so the brothers were encouraged to press on with their dream of a National Theatre and to found their National Theatre Society with their actors and a few would-be playwrights as the first members.
Over they went once more to George Russell, this time to ask him to be president of the new society, but again he surprised them, told them Mananaan Mac Lir wouldn't hear of it and advised them to ask Yeats. They did, a little reluctantly perhaps, but well aware that his acceptance would give their society both a prestige and an assurance of eventual attainment.
That done, off they went again in quest of a roof and a stage, managed to collect no less than £40 from their members and rent a small draughty hall at the rear of a shop in Camden street. They mended the leaking roof, press-ganged their company into sawing and nailing to provide a tiny stage, some crude benches, a few lights in biscuit tins, and even a smoky stove in a corner, so that the Evening Mail complained loudly about a so-called "classic simplicity" and begged its promoters to have some regard for "the dignity of dramatic literature and the comfort of the play-going public".
Willie Fay in his autobiography, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre, was later to insist, logically enough, that they had provided a theatre, however rough and ready, and the play-writing followed.
AE never wrote them another play but Yeats wrote several, as well as Fred Ryan and James H. Cousins, and they even had one in Irish from Peadar McGinley. The society was nothing if not democratic; everyone had a say in selecting the plays and so Lady Gregory's The Rising of the Moon was (rather unwisely) turned down. And then one evening a certain, John Millington Synge turned up with a play called In the Shadow of the Glen in his pocket, and before they knew it, they were into controversy.
By then the plays were being staged in the Molesworth Hall and the "classic simplicity" was more or less abandoned. And in 1904, a year which the Fays were to call their "annus-mirabilis", a fairy godmother arrived in the be-cloaked personage of Annie Fredericka Horniman, the dedicated friend of Yeats, who, as she later said, was eager to be allowed to call herself an artist. She was intrigued by what she found and promised to buy the brothers a proper theatre, insisting that it must be very small and very simple.
So Willie, always the practical one in contrast to the more sedate Frank, got on to his old bicycle and searched every likely and unlikely corner of Dublin until at last he found the Mechanics' Hall in Abbey Street, closed because the proprietors couldn't afford to carry out the necessary repairs demanded by the new fire regulations. And as the cliché may well have it, the rest is history.
A fine portrait by John Yeats of Horniman hangs in the foyer of the present building together with those of the two brothers, but her name is not on the foundation stone down the laneway outside. And, but for the insistence of the late Gabriel Fallon, who was a director at the time of its laying, the names of the Fays would be missing as well. Yet without them, the rude mechanicals, and Annie Horniman's generous purse, while there may have been a National Theatre, it would not have been the Abbey.
Tomás Mac Anna is a former artistic director of the National Theatre
