The limitations of the Abbey Theatre project- begun in such a blaze of glory in the first two decades of the 20th century- were already beginning to be felt in the 1920s.
Hugh Hunt in his Abbey history bemoans a theatre “divorced from European influences” which had become “increasingly parochial”. Its reliance on what became pejoratively known as “kitchen sink” drama was a product of a lack of artistic vision and ambition and the financial imperative to fill houses even after it became one of the first theatres in the world to be in receipt of state subsidy.
It is arguable that the mediocrity to which it had sunk by the 1930s continued to blight it until the 1960s and 70s when – under the direction of Tomás Mac Anna and later his protege, Joe Dowling – it reconnected with the animating spirit of the founders.
The exception in the 1920s was the O’Casey Dublin trilogy, which blazed a trail not only at the Abbey but around the world. It was the controversy over the rejection of The Silver Tassie which saw the famously tetchy O’Casey abandon the Abbey in high dudgeon and turn to London where the play was successfully produced.
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George Bernard Shaw, writing to the producer, Charles Cochran, noted “there is a new drama rising from the unplumbed depths to sweep the nice little bourgeois efforts of myself and my contemporaries into the dustbin”.
To invert a famous slogan from the time, it could be said that the Abbey’s difficulty was London’s opportunity. Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel in his excellent contribution to the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series (ed. Eugene O’Brien) gives a full account of O’Casey’s spat with Yeats over The Silver Tassie and the subsequent impact of the play on London audiences.
What is less well known – and upon which Ritschel is illuminating – is the extent to which the plays of Lennox Robinson, TC Murray, St John Ervine, George Shiels and other Irish writers also featured prominently in the London theatre of that time.
Robinson’s The Whiteheaded Boy, for instance, ran for a staggering 292 performances. These plays, many of which had originated at the Abbey, not only provided entertainment for a growing Irish diaspora in London but also struck a welcome diversionary chord with English audiences still reeling from the decimation of their young men in the Great War and the beginning of the end of empire.
As Ritschel notes in his introduction, there has been an Irish presence in the English theatre since the Restoration – Goldsmith, Sheridan, Farquhar, Shaw and Wilde, to name the best known. All were by dint of voice, sensibility and subject matter English playwrights who happened to be Irish. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island was an exception to that sweeping statement but not, I would contend, Mrs Warren’s Profession, where Ritschel argues its Irishness by dint of “its distinct echoes from the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell”.
This occasional shoehorning aside, we are indebted here to a scholarly due diligence that demonstrates the extent to which Irish drama – in spite of the upheaval in Anglo-Irish relations throughout that decade – was an unlikely but important presence in the London theatre scene of the 1920s.
Ben Barnes is a freelance theatre and opera director and a former artistic director of the Abbey Theatre.
