WHEN is an Irishman not an Irishman? When he’s an Englishman pretending to be an Irishman pretending to be an Englishman. As is now well-known, Micheál MacLiammóir, acclaimed as the greatest Irish actor of his age, was English to the core.
Seventy years ago he and Hilton Edwards, his partner at the Gate Theatre, led their company on a Balkans tour designed to bolster British cultural propaganda on the eve of the second World War.
The partners had met the British Council representative in Athens and in October 1938 he visited Dublin to discuss whether the Gate company could credibly be regarded as ambassadors for British drama for a tour of the Balkan states to promote British culture.
The new British Council was rapidly becoming a central part of Britain’s diplomatic efforts to hold the allegiance of the smaller central European states as war became an inevitability. In March 1939, the House of Commons was told that the Balkan states had sought increased activity by the council at all levels: “Britain may well look to the British Council as being the means of nullifying false propaganda and restoring in due course the ancient prestige of this country among the nations of the world.”
Although war did not begin until September 1939, the six months prior to that saw the gradual dismantling of Czechoslovakia, as Germany annexed the Sudetenland and Slovakia was ceded to Hungary, which also occupied Ruthenia in March 1939.
There was a very real sense of impending disaster by the time the Gate company set out for Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, that April. Having experienced border controls between the Free State and Northern Ireland during an appearance in Belfast the previous month, Hilton Edwards announced that “remote and impenetrable as the Balkans appear from Dublin, it is easier to get into Bulgaria than across the frontier of the six counties at the top of our own map”.
The repertoire for the tour was "British" in the catholic sense of representing works mainly by English playwrights – Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hamletand The Comedy of Errors– but also including Shaw ( Don Juan in Hell) and Wilde ( The Importance of Being Earnest), and the thrillers The Unguarded Hourby Ladislas Fodor and Night Must Fallby Welshman Emlyn Williams, which had been included expressly at the wish of the British Council to represent contemporary British drama.
The tour also included Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights(dramatised by Ria Mooney) and And So to Bed, a light-hearted view of Samuel Pepys by the Belfast-born James B. Fagan.
Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia had been unified only 10 years earlier as the “Kingdom of Yugoslavia” in an uneasy alliance of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs – to say nothing of Montenegrins and Makedonians. In 1939, the cities visited by the Gate were the historic capitals of some of Europe’s smallest and most vulnerable states: Ljubljana; Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia), followed by the Macedonian/Greek city of Thessaloniki, and the capitals of Bulgaria (Sofia) and Romania (Bucharest).
Irish newspapers questioned the propriety of an Irish company undertaking “British propaganda”.
The actors were ostensibly representing "Britain", and were expected not to flaunt their Irishness. Several Balkan newspapers referred to the company as "English" and one, La Parole Bulgare(the French-language weekly of Bulgaria), carried an open letter addressed " Aux Acteurs Britanniques", in the course of which they were informed that Sofia, far from being ignorant of English-language drama, had witnessed three different interpretations of Hamletin recent years and that " ce public a vu, compris et aimé Oskar Wilde'¨; but the letter acknowledged that this would be the first time British
actors would be presenting the works of their compatriots.
Certainly, the fact that the Gate was from Dublin was not hidden from view, and, according to MacLiammóir's diary All for Hecuba, he found himself in Belgrade before a large group of journalists who asked about the difference between English and Irish acting styles.
“If Irish acting never finds more distinctive things to say than the platitudes of an outworn English school clothed in the homespun of a brogue,” he told them, “our movement has been so much waste of time, and we would do much better to look for jobs in London or New York which indeed is where the best of us have finally gone.”
MacLiammóir also recorded that after the company’s last performance on tour, in Bucharest, he found himself extemporising a curtain speech. Reading it today, it brings home to us the precarious and ambivalent role of the arts in a sectarian or war-torn context:
“Could not the arts of all countries, when the futile storm should break, become the images to be kept always before the mind’s eye, so that sanity should be preserved, the slenderest bridge still arching rainbow-like over the rivers of hell? In all the countries of Europe there was one imperishable link, one common heritage; it was the only tangible thing we knew, the only outward sign of grace.”
Back in Dublin, the partners announced: “Our tours have made known the name Dublin Gate in Egypt, Greece, Yugo Slavia [sic], Bulgaria, Roumania and Malta. They have enabled
us to bring back to you experience gained from some of the best equipped theatres in the world.”
The cost to the British exchequer of this bonus for Irish drama was £7,056. 1s. 8d. – about €175,000 in today’s money.