Tomás Mac Anna was a crucial figure in Irish theatre – helping to foster a new generation of playwrights, actors and directors, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
IN 1966, Thomas Kilroy submitted his remarkable play The Death and Resurrection of Mr Rocheto the Abbey. It was mould-breaking in featuring a sympathetic portrayal of a gay man and using the violence his presence provokes among a group of drinking companions to question Irish male sexuality. In common with so many of the best Irish dramatists of the period, Kilroy received a letter of rejection. Signed by the Abbey's "artistic adviser" Tomás Mac Anna, it said that the theatre "could not accept the play . . . not yet". Mac Anna's boss, the deeply conservative managing director of the Abbey, Ernest Blythe, had made it clear that he was not going to stage the play.
But Mac Anna wanted to signal his own encouragement of the young playwright.
The ambivalent answer summed up Tomás Mac Anna’s position in the history of the Irish theatre. Every regime-change requires a transitional figure, conservative enough to be part of the old regime, radical enough to help to kill it off.
Mac Anna was the Gorbachev of Irish theatre. He was sufficiently trusted by the cultural Establishment to be the Abbey’s principal director of Irish-language plays and to be given the job of staging the commemorative pageant in Croke Park for the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. But he was also a crucial figure in Ireland’s cultural glasnost, opening the Abbey up both to European theatre and to the energies of a new generation of playwrights, actors and directors.
When I started to write about theatre in the early 1980s, I was often harshly critical of Mac Anna’s productions, which seemed to me to cling on to some of the fustier aspects of the Abbey’s history. It was surprising to talk to those like Joe Dowling who saw the precise opposite. Whereas I saw the vestiges of the old, they were acutely aware of how essential he had been in making space for the new. It is, perhaps, the fate of transitional figures to be criticised by the young for what they have not changed, rather than appreciated for what they have.
It is instructive to recall Mac Anna’s early years at the Abbey. The theatre was then in its “Babylonian exile” at the old music hall, the Queen’s, after its own home had been destroyed by fire. The need to fill a music hall was not conducive to experimentation. Blythe, in any case, had been managing director since 1936 and saw the theatre’s priority as the revival of the Irish language. Most of the emerging playwrights of real substance – Brendan Behan, Tom Murphy, John B Keane, Kilroy – were rejected by Blythe. (The exceptions were Brian Friel and Hugh Leonard.) Mac Anna entered the Abbey, not as a director, but as a set designer.
Blythe’s enthusiasm for his work had a great to do with Mac Anna’s proficiency in Irish – he was made the principal director of Irish-language plays. This might have been an exciting position in another context, but the chosen repertoire does not seem inspiring. A large part of Mac Anna’s job was co-writing and staging the Abbey’s annual Irish-language Christmas panto. Most of the rest was staging translations of existing English-language plays by writers ranging from WB Yeats and Lady Gregory to Harold Brighouse and Matthew Bolton.
MAC ANNA WORKEDIN this environment for almost 20 years, becoming Blythe's most trusted theatrical ally. There was no sign of revolt and unhappiness on his part. Yet he clearly hankered for a more ambitious theatre. Mac Anna's instinct as a director was towards the Epic Theatre of Bertolt Brecht.
He visited Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. He directed The Life of Galileofor the Abbey in 1965, while it was still at the Queen's. Alone among major figures in the Irish theatre, he showed an interest in Seán O'Casey's later, more expressionistic plays.
His Croke Park pageant in 1966 does not seem to have been the kind of epic spectacle he would have liked. High winds blew away some of the scenery and turned parts of the action into high farce. Mac Anna’s son, the novelist Ferdia, recalled that “I was 10 years old and was part of a crowd carrying letters spelling out ‘Republic of Éire’. I was the second E in Éire, but the wind blew off the bottom half of my letter. The Republic of ÉIRF was born that night.”
But the experience did not dampen Mac Anna’s enthusiasm for colourful, large-scale theatre on historical themes.
Mac Anna was not timid. He directed (though not at the Abbey) Mairéad Ní Ghráda's astonishing feminist attack on Irish sexual hypocrisy, An Triail, in the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964. He staged an adaptation of the Circe episode of Ulysses, which is set in a brothel. His greatest success, the adaptation of Brendan Behan's Borstal Boythat triumphed on Broadway, was as bawdy and irreverent (not least towards the shibboleths of Irish republicanism) as it was technically and dramatically inventive.
One of his great achievements was in bringing Tom Murphy to the Abbey in 1968. Murphy's ferocious tragedy A Whistle in the Darkhad been rejected by Blythe in 1961 and the playwright followed his creation to London. It was Mac Anna who drew him back by staging the first production of his epic Faminein the Peacock, with Niall Tóibin in the central role of John Connor.
With a cast of 32, and a Brechtian style, it was perhaps the nearest thing to Mac Anna’s ideal of a large-scale, indigenous epic theatre – an enthusiasm that evokes some nostalgia in these days of micro-theatrical monologues.
