In case there's anyone who forgets who Vincent Dowling is, or is too young to know, he was for many years one of Dublin's best-known actors, a core member of the Abbey Company and then a director. America called him away eventually, as it did so many of our National Theatre's brighter lights, but he returned for a brief and unhappy stint as its artistic director before going back to the US. In these memoirs he writes about an Ireland and an Irish theatre that seem even further in the past than the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that form the bulk of the book. The tone is relentlessly and rather winningly optimistic. All his geese are swans and, again and again, justly forgotten plays are given the status of masterpieces and what one remembers as indifferent productions were, apparently, landmarks of the theatrical arts.
Dowling was born in 1929, the sixth of seven children, to an unhappily married couple. It wasn't long before his father left home for good, condemning his family to a life of genteel poverty that would have been even worse but for the generosity of a priest who was a friend of the family. Vincent left school at 16 and soon got well and truly bitten by the theatre bug. There followed the usual round of student productions and touring the small towns of Ireland, until poverty drove him to take the boat to England in 1951. There he had the good luck and talent to be cast in a knockabout farce called My Wife's Lodger, which was a West End hit. It was fustian stuff, as even Dowling admits, but it taught him a lot about the trade.
Forced to return to Ireland in order to avoid National Service, he quickly got himself into the Abbey, where he was to remain on and off for the next 20 or so years. The theatre, under the egregious Ernest Blythe, was near the start of its 15year exile from its original site in Abbey Street and was playing in the Queen's Theatre in Pearse Street, a rather shabby old music hall. The driving force of Blythe's policies, which he often repeated, was: "The Abbey is not an art theatre, it is an instrument of national defence!" What this meant in practice was that the theatre was to be a vehicle for the promotion of the Irish language. Consequently, actors had to pass an Irish exam before being taken on, to use the Irish version of their names in programmes and publicity, whether they wanted to or not, and to play in one-act plays in Irish, which followed the main production of the evening and which were the signal for most of the audience to evacuate the premises.
The main productions were, for the most part, dramas that rehashed the Abbey plays of the past or jaded revivals of the classic Synge-O'Casey works which had made the theatre's reputation. When the curtain came up a wave of boredom and indifference seemed to sweep out from the stage. Most of the actors were on lifetime contracts and, if tonight's show was a failure, so what? There would be another play next week and they would be in that too. Yet, when one reads what is the best part of this book, its accounts of the Abbey Company of the time, one realises how many highly talented players were imprisoned (it seems the only word) in the old Queen's. People like Ray McAnally, Philip O'Flynn, Angela Newman, T.P. McKenna and the author himself, to name but some, hardly ever got the chance at that time to show how good they were. Many of those who managed to get away from the company proved it subsequently, as did some of those who survived the Blythe regime into the new Abbey building. But some, too, fell by the wayside, destroyed by drink or the failure to stretch their talents.
Twice married, Dowling is what used to be called a "ladies' man", and much of the book is taken up with accounts of his bed-hopping through the years. Again, it shows a romantic rather than a lecherous nature that seems naive and rather likeable. Of his later career in the US after his second marriage there is rather less. Most surprisingly of all, there are only a few paragraphs devoted to his unhappy return to the Abbey in the late 1980s as artistic director, a job he had tried and failed to get when a full-time member of the company. Virtually all he says is that a "well-known theatrical juggler" (no prizes for guessing who he means) "took my salaried job ".
This will be a useful, if not always complete and reliable, book for researchers on a less than glorious period of the National Theatre's history.
Fergus Linehan is a novelist and playwright