The Plough that broke the ground

Does a theatre that receives funding from the State have the right tocriticise that State? Yeats thought so, and did everything in his power tosee that the first run of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Starscontinued. That play has gone on to become an integral piece in the Statetheatre's repertory, writes Roy Foster

The 1916 Rising was as much of a shock to the Abbey directors as to most of Ireland, but the players may have been less surprised; several of the company were closely involved, most famously Sean Connolly, who would eventually find his way into a Yeats poem on the subject.

Feelings ran high behind the scenes at the theatre, and the actors mounted an open revolt against the manager, St John Ervine, a few weeks after the Rising, on the grounds of his attitude towards the rebels - though there were other long-standing differences, too. But Yeats's own first reaction to the event was ambivalent, as was Augusta Gregory's - though she initially felt more sympathetic to the Rising's leaders than he did, and her arguments about their motivation may have influenced his poem 'Easter 1916'.

Both Gregory's and Yeats's opinions, like those of many others, shifted and radicalised after the executions and set hard with the advent of the Black and Tans four years later. And when partial independence was conferred by the Treaty at the end of 1921, the Rising was built into history as the great originating event, and its leaders as founding fathers of the new Free State.

Early in 1925, that state, after intensive lobbying by Yeats, Gregory and Lennox Robinson, offered the Abbey an annual subsidy, making it - as Yeats proudly said - "the first State-endowed theatre in any English-speaking country". But he was equally proud of the theatre's independence, which he had fought so hard to protect throughout its controversial history. When they began to rehearse The Plough and the Stars only a few months later, it rapidly became clear that some kind of confrontation would follow.

O'Casey's previous two Abbey plays had laid bare the world of the city tenements; but the third used that tenement world to evaluate the Irish revolution itself, projecting a sceptical light upon the fortunes of "ordinary" people caught up in national tragedy. Portraying a prostitute on stage was risky enough, but the real risk was taken when the words of a Pearsean speech come drifting through a pub window into the cross-talk of the bar-room habitués. "The dramatic effect is a terrible one," a disapproving reviewer would write, "all the more terrible when one remembers that one is Irish."

The irony and distance which O'Casey brought to his interrogation of the Rising was all the more sensitive given the Abbey's brand-new state subsidy. The Government's nominee on the Board, George O'Brien, called for severe cuts, warning that the grant might be withdrawn, but he was steamrollered by Yeats. "To eliminate any part of it on grounds that have nothing to do with dramatic literature would be to deny all our traditions."

Some of the actors were equally antipathetic to the play's material, and trouble loomed. Dublin rubbed its hands with anticipation, and the first run was booked solid 10 days before it opened. Yeats went to a great deal of trouble to prepare for the first night on February 8th, 1926, entertaining influential public figures like Kevin O'Higgins, Ernest Blythe and Hugh Kennedy to dinner beforehand, and bringing them backstage at the interval. Ominously, the inveterate theatregoer Joseph Holloway hissed "Bloody murderers!" as they passed his seat, which indicated the passions simmering below the surface.

SUBSEQUENT audiences were more openly restive, and the explosion came on the fourth night, when the stage was rushed, actors attacked, and stink bombs thrown. Yeats himself famously took the stage, telling the audience they had "disgraced themselves again" in the way they celebrated "the arrival of Irish genius". He was clearly referring to the precedent of Synge and the riots that had greeted The Playboy of the Western World 19 years before. His words were completely inaudible, but - as he later admitted - in an astute anticipatory move, he had delivered the text of the speech to The Irish Times beforehand, so it appeared promptly the next day. He took another precaution, too, by calling in the Civic Guards. Gabriel Fallon, who was backstage that night, noted the delight with which he said "I am sending for the police, and this time it will be their own police".

Yeats wanted to stress the echoes of the Playboy affair even more insistently by organising public debates about The Plough in the theatre, but his fellow directors squashed the idea. The protestors were now being ably marshalled by the formidable Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and Gregory correctly noted that the widows of 1916 could provide far more embarrassing opponents than Synge's heavy-handed traducers. From Sheehy-Skeffington's point of view, "in no country save in Ireland could a State-subsidised theatre presume on popular patience to the extent of making a mockery and a byword of a revolutionary movement on which the present structure claims to stand".

Many agreed with her, and though Yeats was denied his wish for a formal public debate, the controversy raged through newspaper columns for weeks. Attacks concentrated on the inappropriate tone of the play as much as the offensive content. The role of Rosie Redmond was condemned, O'Casey's own chequered relations with James Connolly and the Citizen Army were raked over, Yeats's own "Mussolini-like" pretensions towards cultural dictatorship were denounced; hostile comment came not only from outraged nationalists but from liberal intellectuals, including Liam O'Flaherty, Austin Clarke and F.R. Higgins. One issue of the Catholic Bulletin used up eight pages excoriating "Subsidised New Ascendancy linked up with the Associated Aesthetes, the Mutual Boosters and the Subsidised Director in Chief and Orator at Large, W.B. Pollexfen Yeats". As Holloway sourly remarked in his diary, "Yeats was in his element at last".

As the dust cleared, the power and sincerity of the work came into focus; it would receive nearly 1,000 performances at the Abbey over the next 50 years and, just like The Playboy, graduate from controversy to acceptability. Yeats and his fellow-directors were, of course, fated to have further troubles with O'Casey himself. But Yeats's commitment to steering The Plough and the Stars through its stormy first passage was utterly genuine: all the more so because it focused his own growing preoccupations, first with the dangers of Government censorship of the arts in independent Ireland, and secondly with the artist's right to criticise national pieties. This was made very clear when he lectured on the ostensibly safe subject of 'My Own Poetry' only 10 days after the riot provoked by the Plough - an event closely reported by The Irish Times.

AFTER the lecture, a member of the audience asked would Yeats express his opinion on the patriotism that resented the faults of a country being exposed. Were the people of other countries as sensitive as the Irish, if a play showing their faults was put on the stage, and was such a play likely to be hounded down in other countries, or to be considered beneficial, as having the effect of curing their faults?

Yeats said that he thought that a nation was likely to go through that phase, that it was a very natural phase, but he was quite sure that when it reached intellectual maturity, it got over that feeling; every country that had had in any way the opinion of other nations thrust upon it felt that way for a time. The moment a nation reached intellectual maturity, it became exceedingly proud and ceasedto be vain; and when it became exceedingly proud, it did not disguise its faults, because it was satisfied to know what were its qualities and powers. When it was immature, it was exceedingly vain and did not believe in itself, and so long as it did not believe in itself, it wanted other people to think well of it, in order that it might get a little reflected confidence. With success came pride, and with pride came indifference as to whether people were shown in a good or bad light on the stage. As a nation came to intellectual maturity, it realised that the only thing that did it any credit was its intellect.

This was Yeats's way of "remembering that he was Irish", and his riposte to the argument that a theatre in receipt of a State grant should not put on plays that interrogated the founding beliefs of that State. The reception of The Plough and the Stars had helped define for him the point when a nation's pride triumphed over its vanity; therefore, it was a key moment in his own artistic development as well as O'Casey's. It is also one of the reasons why this particular Irish play demands revival in every generation.

The Plough and the Stars opens tomorrow at the National Theatre. This commentary by Roy Foster was originally written for the programme note