FROM THE ARCHIVES:Writer Denis Ireland described how he inadvertently put the fear of God into George Bernard Shaw and an Abbey Theatre audience in the late 1930s.
GEORGE BERNARD Shaw was coming along Piccadilly on a bright sunny morning of May 1939, five months after the death of William Butler Yeats – a time and interval with a bearing on what followed.
I was passing through London on my way to Paris and had arranged to meet a friend at Piccadilly Circus, at Swan Edgar’s corner to be exact.
There, against a background of waxen young women displaying bathing dresses, came my last encounter with Mr Shaw. I was standing with my back against the plateglass, with the bright May sunlight shining on my shock of white hair, not to mention my horn-rimmed spectacles, and there advancing along Piccadilly was Mr Shaw – very erect, his beard now snowwhite, his tweed suit still buttoned high in Edwardian fashion and immaculately pressed.
Just like old times, I thought – just like the Roaring Twenties.
I soon discovered the difference. It was not the Roaring Twenties but the sinister 1930s, with poison in the air, thunder clouds over Europe, and Mr Shaw behaving in a thoroughly un-Shavian manner. He was, in fact, hesitating in his stride, staring straight towards me with a stricken expression, like a man who had just seen a ghost.
Then, Mr Shaw, recovering himself, went on his way. The shadows that had darkened the sunlight of Piccadilly evaporated. I stood there, puzzled, staring after the Olympian figure with the snow white beard and the resolutely Edwardian suit – a figure that for an astonishing moment or two had lost its poise, had suddenly looked like a thoroughly frightened old man.
One night the following winter I was in the Abbey Theatre. I forget the title of the play. All I remember is that I had booked a seat in the third row of the stalls, that I was late for the opening curtain, that the lights were already dimmed, the famous gong had boomed three times and I had to grope my way in the dark.
The play began. But I don’t remember much about it, for I couldn’t get attending to it. The audience behind me was restive; there was movement, rustling, subdued conversation. I kept looking around to see what was wrong, but the rustling and the sibilant conversation only got worse. The Abbey audience, not for the first time in its history, was in a state of “chassis”.
At the interval my friend Denis Johnston, who had been standing at the back of the stalls, came up to me and said: “Did you notice a lot of commotion during that act?”
“Yes,” I said, “I did. What was it all about?”
“It was all about you,” said Johnston. “You were causing it.”
“Me?” I said in my best literary manner. “What have I done?”
“It’s not what you’ve done,” said Johnston. “It’s the way you look. It’s that big white head of yours and those horn-rimmed spectacles. They thought you were Yeats’s ghost.”
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