'Drama at Inish', which opens at the Abbey Theatre next week, is the quintessential Lennox Robinson comedy, writes Christopher Fitz-Simon
To students of my generation in 1950s Dublin, Lennox Robinson (1886-1958) was the visible surviving literary figure of a past era, a tall, tweedy streak of a man, swathed in long overcoats and scarves even in the best of weather, myopically weaving his way from the Queen's Theatre (in which the Abbey Players were enduring a 15-year sentence) towards the No 8 tram stop or Westland Row Station, fortifying himself for the arduous journey home to Monkstown by means of judicious stops at this or that public house.
When approached during such a progress, he invariably expressed himself willing to take part in a college debate or to give an informal and, as it would turn out, hilarious talk about the early days of the Abbey Theatre to an audience of a hundred or more in the Players' Theatre where fire regulations decreed no more than 60 - though you had to keep reminding him about the date. His aura of artistic vagueness and his world-weary delivery, which seemed to issue from a soul in continual reverie, were said to be copied from Yeats - but on a short acquaintance it became obvious that his idiosyncrasies were not those of a poseur. Nothing about him savoured of self-aggrandisement.
His appearance was constantly caricatured in the press, particularly in Dublin Opinion, and he provided an endless model for comic impersonation, especially in Christmas pantomimes. He had been associated with the Abbey in a number of capacities since 1907, when his earliest play was presented there. He retired from the board of the National Theatre Society only two years before his death in 1958.
For us he embodied the connection with the Literary Revival's greats. Lennox Robinson's plays of the preceding four decades were frequently revived - often at seemingly punitively short notice to the actors - to replace works by other authors that were not doing too well. Attendance at these revivals revealed a dramatist of widespread interests and styles, unerringly skilful stagecraft, a use of wry understatement that raised far more laughs than anything more obviously comical, and a surprising - to us - affinity with the modern European movement (if we were expecting innocuous forays into a now vanished rural Ireland, that only demonstrated the extent of our received ignorance). It was clear that Robinson, still living, was also one of the greats.
Esmé Stuart Lennox Robinson was born in Cork in 1886. His father was a stockbroker who later took holy orders, so, from the age of five, Lennox was brought up amid picturesque Church of Ireland curtilages. Due to persistently poor health he had little formal education save for sporadic terms at Bandon Grammar School. He read voraciously, in the established tradition of unwell yet thoughtful boys.
An inexplicable compulsion drew him to Cork Opera House, only 25 miles from Ballymoney Rectory but a two-hour trip each way via the Cork, Bandon and South Coast Railway. He was disappointed by the latest London melodramas, but his real moment of revelation came at a matinée given by the Abbey Players, where he saw Lady Gregory's The Jackdaw and The Rising of the Moon with Yeats's The Hour Glass and Cathleen ni Houlihan. It was the last of these that, according to himself, aroused his latent nationalism and an intense desire to write for the stage.
WITHIN A YEAR his first one-act play, The Clancy Name, was staged at the Abbey following suggestions for improvement from Augusta Gregory and William Butler Yeats. An irrevocably realistic piece with an improbable dénouement, it contains elements which Robinson would develop with real distinction in later work: a genuine apprehension of provincial snobbery and gombeenery, a sharp ear for vernacular dialogue, and an ability to imbue what seems on the surface to be light material with deeper glimpses of disappointment and disillusion.
Two further plays were accepted and produced. In 1909 he was suddenly asked by Gregory and Yeats if he would join the Abbey Theatre as producer. One might well suppose that Gregory and Yeats were out of their minds, for Robinson was only 23 and had never directed a play in his life. Yet the appointment may not have been as preposterous as it seemed to Abbey-watchers of the day, for he was dispatched to London for three months to train under George Bernard Shaw, who appointed him as his assistant while directing Misalliance.
It was also arranged that he should attend Harley Granville Barker's rehearsals for The Madras House, and Dion Boucicault II's for JM Barrie's The £12 Look. Both of these latter luminaries of the London stage proved, as Robinson later recalled in his memoir, Curtain Up!, to be exceedingly gracious and helpful.
He found Shaw altogether too absorbed in the projection of his own clever text; he was impressed by Granville Barker's technique of marking the actors' moves on a vast stage-cloth, though he felt this ultimately had a deadening effect on the performance; and it appeared to him that Boucicault's rehearsals were unimaginative but practical and obtained the best results.
When Robinson returned to take over the Abbey productions, Yeats became uneasy, especially as this polite novice's first task would be to direct established actors such as Sara Allgood and Máire O'Neill in a play for which they had little liking.
Robinson described Granville Barker's marked-out stage-cloth and Yeats was delighted: "That will terrify them!"
HOWEVER, IT WAS Robinson's administrative inexperience that caused the final rift with the theatre's benefactor, Annie Horniman, for he kept the theatre open on the evening following the death of King Edward VII in 1910. He staggered along as producer for three more years, resigning when Lady Gregory criticised his management of the money-losing US tour of 1914, but he was reinstated five years later. Most of his 27 plays were premiered at the Abbey and some - including Drama at Inish - were immensely successful in London.
Drama at Inish (1933) is the quintessential Robinsonian comedy. The author is, of course, having a go at his own early dramas, which were consciously modelled on the work of certain European writers of the schools satirised in the play. It has been speculated that its entrepreneurial theatrical couple, Hector de la Mare and Constance Constantia, were inspired by Anew and Marjorie McMaster, who were famously touring "the Irish smalls" at the time Drama at Inish was written. Another couple sometimes cited are Ian Priestley Mitchell and Esmé Biddle, who were noted for arranging their dramatic private rows in public.
A much more intriguing notion was recently put forward by Robert Welch, who suggests that these characters are "oblique if affectionate caricatures of Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir who "have a vision of theatre as a mission to revolutionise people's souls".
It is the comparison of these flamboyant thespians - much-travelled, showy, intense and urbane (is there a hint of the charlatan in them?) - with the stay-at-home, down-to-earth residents of the seaside town that ignites the drama. Then, with a consummately deft touch, Robinson turns what would simply have been an amusing comedy of contrasts into a brilliant theatrical tour-de-force in which the apparently quiet, respectable people of Inish start behaving like the characters in the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov which they have just witnessed on the stage.
IF ROBINSON'S EARLIEST plays veered irresolutely between the Ibsenite and the Strindbergian, he brought to them something which neither of those innovative authors possessed: characters observed with humour. Like so many Irish dramatists before and after, he is at his most serious when speaking through the medium of comedy.
His best plays of provincial life are The Whiteheaded Boy (1916), The Far-Off Hills (1928) and Drama at Inish. The Big House (1926 ) and Killcreggs in Twilight (1937) are generally described as "Chekhovian" but that is merely on account of their location in faded country mansions, for the dialogue is crisp and plain-spoken. When he was helping to run the Dublin Drama League, which performed foreign plays on the Abbey Stage on Sunday nights, Robinson became fascinated by Pirandello. There are echoes of Pirandello in Drama at Inish, where reality and imagination confront one another, but his one truly Pirandello-like play is the marvellous Church Street (1934), rarely performed because of its large cast and awkward length.
On some apocryphal occasion in the first decade of the 20th century, on being assailed by some well-meaning busybody who declared that "the Abbey Theatre is not what is was!", Robinson retorted: 'It never was!' He believed that the theatre must evolve and change. His succession of plays demonstrates that he practiced what he preached.
Drama at Inish opens at the Abbey Theatre on Wednesday
Christopher Fitz-Simon is the author of The Boys, a biography of Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir (New Island), and The Abbey Theatre: the First Hundred Years (Thames & Hudson)