More lives than a sack of cats

Abbey 100 Part 1: A chequered history: In the first part of a week-long series marking the centenary of the Abbey Theatre, Fintan O'Toole looks at its past, when it served as both national institution and national irritant.

In April 1904, the Dublin architect Joseph Holloway met the English heiress Annie Horniman and, as he noted in his diary, "had a chat about turning the Mechanics' Institute and the Dublin City Morgue into a theatre chiefly for the Irish National Theatre Society". The following day, the two of them tried to gain access to the buildings, but were turned away by the irate manager of the Mechanics' Institute, who deeply resented these interlopers leasing the theatre.

When they finally got in, accompanied by W.B. Yeats, and were surveying the site of their dreams, "the manager came in by the door at the back of the stage, and measuring us with a withering look, exclaimed 'You've got a cheek!' And he ordered us out without further ado, which we accomplished without delay, amid a volley of 'Land grabbers!' etc, at them, and a wink of the eye, by way of a stage aside, to me. His parting shot - 'May you and your morgue have luck!' - was distinctly droll."

This auspicious beginning to the now century-old history of the Abbey foreshadowed much of what was to come. Jokes about the Abbey's former status as the City Morgue would resurface on those frequent occasions when the theatre seemed moribund. And the feeling that Yeats, Augusta Gregory and John Synge were cultural land-grabbers, upper-class Protestants claiming the soul of the emergent Catholic Ireland, would persist, giving the theatre its peculiarly ambiguous status as a national institution that was also a national irritant. Yet, however sardonic the manager's blessing, the morgue did have luck.

Almost from the beginning, the Abbey has been seen as an institution in decline, usually by people who didn't much like its glorious past when it was the irritating present. In February 1912, the Irish Review was complaining that the theatre's glory days were gone and that its new wave of writers - Lennox Robinson, T.C. Murray and St John Ervine - had "gorgeously vulgarised the sources of inspiration of the first dramatists . . . The later Abbey dramatists have steeped the peasant play in all the horrors and paraphernalia of ancient melodrama".

A variant on the complaint that the Abbey is falling away from its glorious past is that it is stuck in the past altogether. By 1916, just 12 years after it opened its doors, the theatre was already alleged to be living in the past. An article in New Ireland magazine complained: "The Abbey made great traditions. It is now occupied in looking back at them instead of looking forward to them. Its object is to conserve, not to create." Between them, these two complaints - that the Abbey has betrayed its past and that the Abbey is stuck in the past - have remained the staple diet of critics.

Along, of course, with the charge of cultural land-grabbing. Even before the Abbey opened with Yeats's On Baile's Strand and Gregory's Spreading the News, Frank Hugh O'Donnell had published a book attacking its likely repertoire as "a sort of witch's cauldron of aboriginal superstition and Ibsenite neo-paganism". Yeats, he said, should "advertise himself as strictly non-Irish and non-Celtic". (The Irish Times, in its review of O'Donnell's book, broadly agreed.) For "non-Irish" it was possible to read "Protestant": the critic D.P. Moran remarked of the opening night of the new theatre that he thought at first he had "strayed by mistake into a prayer meeting of the foreign element in Ireland".

The charge had some substance. If to be Irish was to be Catholic and straightforwardly nationalist, then the Abbey was not founded as an Irish theatre. Its presiding figures were Protestant, though most of its early actors were Catholic. The founders were certainly nationalists, but not in the militant, relatively uncomplicated sense that became the norm in the revolutionary years.

The ability of the theatre to disgust Irish nationalists was, indeed, one of the few unquestioned aspects of its early years. Arthur Griffith denounced The Playboy of the Western World, arguably the greatest new play in the Abbey's history, as " a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform". Patrick Pearse (who later came to regret his attack) called Synge an evil spirit. In 1926, Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars infuriated nationalists, including the widows of some of the 1916 leaders.

Yet the Abbey's power has always lain precisely in its ambiguity. It was founded as a national theatre for a state that did not yet exist. It was a Protestant intervention in a Catholic culture that was coming into its own. It was, after its first few years, essentially a commercial theatre turning out paltry rural comedies that yet had, sewn into its psyche, a repertoire of high modernist art. It was a writers' theatre that nevertheless managed to reject in its convoluted history major plays by Sean O'Casey, George Fitzmaurice, Denis Johnston, Brendan Behan, Tom Murphy, John B. Keane, Billy Roche and many others. (A season of plays turned down by the Abbey would contain almost as much classic drama as an official celebration of its centenary.) It was, at various times in its history, a world-famous theatre with standards of production that would have embarrassed a small provincial rep.

Not all of these ambiguities are good ones. But their very existence has given the Abbey its character. The contradictions and paradoxes have allowed it to elude the great danger of national theatres: the petrifaction of official attitudes. Sometimes, the Abbey has been at odds with Irish society for good reasons, like the magnificent defiance of public opinion over The Playboy or The Plough. Sometimes, it has been out of touch with Irish society for bad reasons, such as in the long period between the 1930s and the 1950s when it was incapable of dealing with social reality at all.

It is indeed, in some ways, a weird institution. Who ever heard of a national theatre that is, in legal terms, a private company? Who ever heard of a national theatre that largely ignores the plays of its own presiding icon (Yeats), almost as if the Royal Shakespeare Company never did Shakespeare? And since the permanent acting company was finally disbanded in the early 1990s, can the Abbey really be said to exist, except as a building and a small management staff? These oddities, however, give the Abbey a curious freedom. Beyond the obvious obligations of trying to produce new Irish plays and generally make good theatre, it has remarkably few real obligations.

It is supposed to produce some plays in Irish, but almost never does so. It is supposed, in some vague way, to carry on its traditional repertoire, but happily ignores most if it. It is supposed to be "national", but since the great legacy of Yeats, Gregory and Synge is the patriotic duty to tell the nation what it doesn't want to hear, even that obligation is not especially burdensome. Many people abroad think of it as synonymous with Irish theatre, but strong alternatives such as the Gate, the Pike, Druid, Field Day, Rough Magic and an increasing range of inventive companies have long left it free to make choices.

The Abbey has always been at its worst when it has sacrificed that freedom to political caution or commercial pressure and at its best when it has used it to create bold and sometimes difficult work. And it would be a caricature to suggest that all the honourable side of this equation belongs to the heroic early days and all the shame to the more recent period. Yeats and Gregory stood up for The Playboy and The Plough but chickened out of Johnston's The Old Lady Says No! and O'Casey's The Silver Tassie and ruthlessly painted Fitzmaurice out of the official Abbey picture. Tomás MacAnna brought Tom Murphy's plays back home to the Abbey and Joe Dowling persisted with them when even a now-acknowledged masterpiece such as The Gigli Concert couldn't find an audience. Initially, strange new voices such as Frank McGuinness, Sebastian Barry and Marina Carr were allowed to grow in strength within the Abbey's walls long before they were heard internationally.

Its slow, uneven recovery from its long, mid-century disgrace made the Abbey a lucky morgue - a perpetually moribund institution that seems to have more lives than a sack-load of cats. It survives its failures, and the prejudices of its audiences, because it is still the place where someone with a big theatrical idea is likely to turn up. So long as that continues to happen, the Abbey will continue to live up, and down, to its chequered history.