"I sometimes think my life has been a series of enthusiasms." That was Lady Gregory in the last line in Lennox Robinson's edition of her diaries; and it was in the last year of her life, 1930. Sean O'Casey's Shadow of a Gunman, now at the Gate Theatre, Dublin was first put on stage in the Abbey in April 1923.
"It was an immense success," she writes, "beautifully acted, all the political points taken up with delight by a big audience." She and O'Casey got on so well together. "Casey," as she calls him in her diary "said he was a labourer and had `carried the hod'." He was among books as a child, but was sixteen before he learned to read or write. His father loved books and had a big library. How then had his father not taught him? "He died when I was three years old through the same books. There was a little ladder in the room to get to the shelves, and one day when he was standing on it, it broke and he fell and was killed."
When Lady Gregory said she often went up the ladder in her library, "he begged me to be careful". Four years before he had sent the Abbey a play The Frost in the Flower and it was returned, but marked "not far from being a good play". He sent other plays and said to Lady Gregory how grateful he was to her, for she had said "I believe there is something in you and your strong point is characterisation." She had wanted to pull the play together and put it on to give him experience, but Yeats didn't agree.
O'Casey was in between times offered a free pass but, independent as ever, said "No one ought to come into the Abbey Theatre without paying for it. ... All the thought in Ireland for years past has come through the Abbey. You have no idea what an education it has been to the country." in the next year when Juno and the Paycock was being put on, she asked him to come to tea the next day - she had brought up one of her barmbracks. He said he couldn't. He was working with cement that afternoon, and it took a long time to get it off.
She wrote: "That full house, the packed pit and gallery, the fine play, the call of the Mother for the putting away of hatred, made me say to Yeats: `This is one of the evenings at the Abbey that makes me glad to have been born'."
PS: A different outdoor entertainment: the Steam Threshing Festival at Moynalty, near Kells, Co Meath, tomorrow afternoon.