FEBRUARY 26TH 1926:THE ABBEY Theatre has never been short of critics, and the role of a national theatre has always been a subject for debate. A year after receiving its first government grant in 1925, one of the Abbey's former managers, GN Reddin, had some harsh things to say about it at a meeting of the Dublin Literary Society.
MR REDDIN said that the discussion of the necessity for a national theatre, implying, as it did, the non-existence of such a theatre in the fullest sense of the word, was bound to produce definitions and interpretations which could not possibly please everyone. A national theatre must naturally be the spontaneous product of the nation or country from which it springs.
Its expression must be the expression of the entire people, even of the most humble and uninteresting. To its audiences it must portray the national being of the country. A theatre that, either intentionally or otherwise, restricted its portrayals to the being of any particular section of the people, automatically ceased to be national, and became a cult.
Let them be honest with themselves. Did the Abbey Theatre give expression to the life of the entire people – and he emphasized the word entire? Surely their lives and their outlook and aspirations were not identical with, and were as worthy of portrayal on the Abbey boards, as those of the “Purple Peasant” in the eternal peasant interior, who seemed (if these Abbey dramatists are correct) to spend his lucid moments – when he is not cheating his brother out of a ditch, or a sheep-rack, or killing his da – in whining and philosophizing into “the mist that does be on the bog”, and, he might add, speaking in a jargon evolved by stout Cromwellians, condescendingly called Kiltartan, which he for one – and he had lived with the people of the South and West – had never heard used by them.
He had often thought that this Kiltartan jargon, and the venerable authors of it, were the creation of the same foreign and biased mind as evolved, for the same political motives, that mirth-provoking buffoon – stage Irish Pat. The Cromwellian tradition and the national tradition would never blend, and the continuance and consolidation in the direction of the destiny of the Abbey Theatre was, in his view, strangling its progress towards the achievement of its fuller and final ambition – namely, that of being the National Theatre of Ireland. (Cheers.)
As to what should be the language of a National Theatre, he said that the language should be the traditional language of the country – Irish. If they did not admit that Irish was the language of their country, they had clearly no claim to a separate national individuality from Britain, and automatically they admitted their delineation as a shire or province of that country. Such an admission would clearly obviate the necessity for a National Theatre, as London could supply all they wanted, with probably greater efficiency and promptitude.
The Abbey was in existence, roughly, about twenty-three years, during which there had not been a single production in Irish officially under its authority or patronage, until early in 1925. In other words, the Cromwellian prejudice was so strong in the directorate of the Abbey Theatre that it took Gaelic Ireland 23 years to effect a breach in the fortifications. Now, Gearoid O’Lochlainn and his gallant little band of players played every fortnight.
This was not because the Abbey directorate had frankly discarded their arrogant prejudices and adopted the Gaelic players, believing that such were essential to the accomplishment of the real ideal of the Abbey Theatre. That could not take place until a nominee of Gaelic Ireland was co-opted on the Abbey directorate.
The prejudice was as strong as ever it was, but its expression had become less openly articulate. They should bear in mind that when Gaelic Ireland entered the Abbey, she held a Government grant in one hand, and that this grant had been definitely accepted by the directorate.
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