Irish Studies: Was Augusta, Lady Gregory, a proto-feminist? In this special issue of the Irish University Review, most answer "No".
Leading the Abbey tour of the USA in 1911, Gregory fashioned herself into an American celebrity with the help of women's clubs and colleges, but, Paige Reynolds observes, she did nothing to create such institutions for Irish women after she got home. Admittedly, she had a theatre to run (on top of the estate, the grandchildren, the poet, and her literary career), but in general Gregory was more interested in men than women. Always a lion-hunter, she became close to AE, Hyde, and W.B. Yeats, but was at least distant, more usually cold, to each of their wives.
In her smart, enjoyable article on how Gregory's first literary work arose out of London table-talk (the gossip of imperialist MPs) and, to her delight, wound up as table-talk at Gladstone's dinner party, Lucy McDiarmid reveals that Gregory used a woman's arts and privileges ("a lady may say what she likes") to step into a man's role, that of public moralist . . . Not a Queen Victoria lookalike, but a Victorian sage.
When he met Lady Gregory (as he always called her), and not until then, Yeats met his match - tough, intelligent, and even better at pulling strings than he was. She did not like Synge, James Pethica reveals, whose ghost appeared to Yeats in a Detroit séance with a message of appeasement: praise of Gregory's plays.
She never got enough of that. A second question that hangs over these essays is: are Gregory's plays a suitable object for a classic feminist retrieval of literary works silenced and erased by patriarchy? There are obstacles here. Gregory ran the Irish National Theatre Society for more than 25 years; she was the patriarch. She put her own plays on the programme, and often. They were toured to the US and Australia. Great actors did their best by her. So she had every privilege a playwright could want, but in the last 50 years, her dramas have dropped completely out of the repertoire.
The current Abbey management gets a bit of stick in this collection for featuring Gregory's portrait in its centenary poster but not her plays on its programme (apart from a rehearsed reading of Spreading the News on June 18th to an invited audience at Coole). Anti-female bias is alleged.
Yet there are great female director- managers in Ireland now - Garry Hynes, Lynne Parker, Annie Ryan, Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy, and so on - scores of female arts administrators, and an audience predominantly female; still, no managers are risking their budgets and prestige on Gregory's plays.
A production of Spreading the News in a "Commedia" style might work, Eric Weiz argues; Cathy Leeney proposes Grania in a naturalist form. Unproduced in Gregory's lifetime, Grania is long enough to fill a bill, and its stagecraft, economy (only three actors and two tents) and sensibility are attractive. The theme is trendy: in love triangles, women are just the conduits for desire between the men. But the Kiltartan idiom and history-play bathos are obstacles. The actor playing Finn is in the unenviable position of having to say: "He is dead indeed. Look at that wound in his neck. He is bleeding and destroyed with blood."
Gregory's great and ongoing contribution to Irish drama was not, as Yeats thought, the "dignity and power of . . . dialect". It was for plot situations: the artist disturber hero that James Pethica describes, or in Nicholas Grene's words, the stranger-in-the-house; the rebel and the policeman, the lame man and the blind man, and other mythemes that acquire new meanings when recombined with particular situations by recent playwrights. Joe O'Byrne's It Come Up Sun (2000) is a variant (not just in title) of The Rising of the Moon, and the lame man/whole man plot is recycled in John B. Keane's Sharon's Grave, revived by Druid in 2003.
Augusta, Lady Gregory, is still with us both in the theatre and, ever more largely, in the biographies and histories of the period, in which her "powerful character" kept so many swallows to their first intent ('Coole Park, 1929'), and sometimes to hers.
• Adrian Frazier is the editor of Playboys of the Western World: Production Histories (Carysfort Press, June 2004)