IT IS a hundred years since the Abbey Theatre toured America and engaged in a rerun of the Dublin Playboyriots.
Public visits to foreign countries, as we know from the two state visits in May, are inherently theatrical. We were particularly aware of how well choreographed the Queen’s visit was, and we were charmed by the spontaneity that made it a public relations success.
In 1911 the Abbey Theatre's American agents, Liebler Co, aware of the commercial potential of controversy, directed that the Abbey stage Synge's The Playboy of the Western Worldand bluntly told them they must "fight it out win that fight again". But no one knew what sort of theatre that confrontation would produce.
WB Yeats travelled with the players to Boston in September to prepare America for the Abbey. He wanted the pre-performance sideshow to be a more or less civilised debate. When Playboyhad been staged in Dublin four years earlier, nationalists had interpreted Synge's warts-and-all realism as an attack on the Irish character. It was safe to assume that this baton would be taken up by the Irish-Americans formed into an array of political organisations.
Yeats’s concern was to demonstrate that the Abbey’s all-embracing artistic vision was no less – in fact more – inherently nationalist than a puritanical insistence on an idealised image of Irishness.
Predictably perhaps, this debate soon descended into the absurd, with each side claiming to have the monopoly on definitions of Irishness. The Gaelic American,an Irish-American newspaper, objected to the Abbey actresses' bare feet, "No such feet ever came out of Ireland before. They were typically Anglo-Saxon feet – big, clumsy and flat". This was the type of pronouncement that George Bernard Shaw, reading the reports in England, relished. "You would suppose", he wrote urbanely in an Associated Press release, "that all of these Murphys, Doolans, etc, that call themselves romantic names like Clan na Gael are Irishmen".
Lady Gregory arrived a week after Yeats to travel America with the players. Yeats and Shaw had played the part of chorus, but she had to become actively involved, for soon after her arrival, 75 Irish-American societies banded together and printed a resolution to "drive the vile thing [ Playboy]from the stage". It was not clear how they would do it, but their vocabulary was lurid, and Lady Gregory was determined that the Abbey would not be intimidated into withdrawing the play or be forced to abandon a single performance.
The new character she would inhabit in America became apparent the moment she stepped off the boat. After eight days at sea she felt disconnected from her old life and ready to take on the interests and concerns of Americans. She was particularly receptive to the reporters’ interest in her. Focused already in 1911 on personality and open to female achievement, they were quick to appreciate her warm good humour, to see her kind, quizzical expression, to take her on as an author who epitomised the spirit of the comedies she wrote for the Abbey. For a woman who had diligently hidden behind Yeats – women, she believed, should never appear powerful – this was novel and heady. Yes, she agreed, she was “quite a working woman”. And within a few days she had broken her rule never to speak in public.
Her pronouncements were amiable and discreet, circumventing controversy rather than stirring it up. But she had noticed that her Irish- American opponents were often divided and ill-informed, objecting to phrases in the play that had already been deleted. And she found that the authorities – local mayors, the police – could be persuaded to support the Abbey. She remained calm. To many, this was unfathomable, especially in New York, where the newspapers were whipping up support for a possible riot and the Gaelic Americancalled on its supporters not to spare Lady Gregory because she was a woman. People's fears were realised on the first night when there was uproar, with stink bombs, rosaries and potatoes thrown at the stage. Amid it all, Lady Gregory stood before the audience calling out to the players to "Keep playing". One of the actors, Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, caught what was for her the slightly incongruous reality of this, with Lady Gregory rotund, thin-lipped, very determined. But John Butler Yeats, the father of the poet and by then a New York resident, raised it to the status of a morality play, "You gave the giant Stupidity a mortal thrust with a courteous smile". Lady Gregory sealed their victory with well-practised diplomacy; she invited Theodore Roosevelt, only two years out of office as president of America and a friend, to the next performance, a gesture that quelled any further dissent.
The climax came in Philadelphia, where their opponents brought out an injunction based on a Bill passed the previous year prior to a visit by Sarah Bernhardt. It forbade further performances on the grounds that the play was indecent, and the cast was arrested. There was a courtroom scene in which John Quinn successfully revealed the flimsiness and absurdity of the opposition. A New York lawyer, an Irish-American patron of Irish culture and a close friend of Lady Gregory’s, he had anxiously supported her during the tour, waiting for an opportunity to fight the hated “pathriots” in the open.
With Quinn we have a subplot, for in New York Lady Gregory had fallen in love with him. “Why do I love you so much?” she asked later, at home in Coole.
“It ought to be from all that piled-up goodness of the years. Yet it is not that – it is some call that came in a moment . . .”
Lady Gregory – An Irish Lifeby Judith Hill is published by The Collins Press