CultureShock/Fintan O'Toole:Lennox Robinson could be a playwright of fierce courage, but there was no place for Big House Protestants in the official culture of the new State
It is striking that Lennox Robinson's The Big House, currently revived at the Abbey in an intriguing production by Conall Morrison, had its premiere in 1926, a few months after Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars.
Though the latter is an incomparably better play, the two works have a great deal in common. Both appeared self-consciously in the context of the 10th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. Both are set in a Big House - Robinson's play literally so, O'Casey's in the kind of ironic parody of a Big House that was the Dublin tenement building. And both deal with groups of people who are left behind by the new order that was then still emerging from the national revolution: O'Casey with the urban working class, Robinson with the Anglo-Irish.
Both plays, in retrospect, look like a last hurrah of the Abbey's extraordinary boldness. There are very few instances anywhere of a national institution marking the 10th anniversary of the already mythologised founding act of a new State with such complex, unheroic reflections. Three years after a civil war, and in a febrile and fragile State, a national theatre could be forgiven some pious simplicities. That O'Casey and Robinson were allowed, in their very different ways, to raise difficult and complicated questions seems remarkable. A young wife driven mad by the death of her rebel husband, a Big House burned down in an act of mindless destruction - these are not the images of a simplistic celebration.
But there was a price to be paid. O'Casey soon became an alienated exile. Robinson's fate was arguably worse: he stayed in Ireland, remained as a director of the Abbey until his death in 1958, and never fulfilled his artistic potential. For all the skill, facility and intelligence he showed in The Whiteheaded Boy, Drama at Inishand The Big House, he never wrote a great play. Indeed, he became the embodiment of the failure of the hopes expressed by his heroine, Kate Alcock, at the end of The Big House, where she states her hope that the Anglo-Irish can both find a place in the new State and "glory in our difference".
Robinson believed, in effect, that his class of people, the Big House Protestants, could have it both ways, being Irish patriots with a devotion to the common good of the new nation and, at the same time, preserving their distinctively contrary culture. Artistically, Robinson was also a contradictory figure. He was very good - perhaps too good - at the 19th-century well-made play: The Whiteheaded Boyand Drama At Inishare deftly constructed 19th-century bourgeois social comedies. The latter, moreover, serves, albeit in comic form, as a kind of a surrender note in which the disturbing theatrical power of the Abbey's first decades is laid at the feet of the new conservative social order.
Yet there was another Robinson, too, a figure of fierce, even reckless courage. To take a tiny example from The Big House,there is an incident in the play when Kate's nurse is killed by a stray bullet fired by the Black and Tans. This death of a woman sitting by a field with her child in her arms is based on the death of Ellen Quinn, who lived by the crossroads in Lady Gregory's Kiltartan. WB Yeats wrote a poem, Reprisals, about the same death and sent it to the London Times. But he withdrew it from publication after Lady Gregory objected to it as "not very sincere". Robinson went ahead and put the disturbing image into his play. He didn't flinch.
Two years before The Big House, his short story The Madonna of Slieve Dun, about a country girl who is raped and comes to believe that the child she conceives is the second coming of Christ, caused almighty ructions. The Catholic Bulletinattacked its "repulsiveness and villainy", and a priest who was on the Carnegie Library Committee, which employed Robinson as its secretary, resigned in protest. Even the Protestant intelligentsia took fright. The provost of Trinity College, who chaired the committee, demanded Robinson's resignation. The great essayist Hubert Butler, an impeccable liberal, who saw the Carnegie Library Committee as a crucial forum for non-sectarian co-operation, blamed Robinson for its destruction: "His story was unimportant and sooner than take his stand for 'intellectual freedom' . . . he should have resigned."
Robinson continued at times to defy his own evident isolation. His 1934 play Church Streetis daring both in its form (heavily influenced by Pirandello) and in its content (an attack on social hypocrisy with the issue of abortion at its centre). But the brutal truth was that there was no real place for him, or for the Protestant intellectual tradition he represented, in the official culture of the new state. And he didn't quite have the artistic resources to fully embrace a defiantly unofficial fate.
The Big Housecaptures the poignancy of his situation. It is brave and intelligent, unsentimental about the Ascendancy, and clear-eyed about the inevitability of its fate. But is also too neat, too well-mannered, to achieve a full grip on history.
Hovering around its own ambiguities, it lands neither on the Chekhovian comedy it flirts with nor on the grand tragedy it sometimes glimpses. Well worth reviving and emphatically worth seeing though it is, it stands ultimately as a fascinating hint at possibilities that could never blossom into achievements.