Madam, - It must be great to be as young as Peter Crawley, but should not a professional theatre reviewer be aware, at the very least, of the major attempt made by James Flannery in the early 1990s to stage the body of Yeats's drama?
Should he not be aware that Conor O'Malley, director of the Cuchulain Cycle at the National Library which Mr Crawley condescendingly terms "theatrical curios" (Reviews, November 30th), is a scion of the O'Malley family which did more than any other persons to keep Yeats's plays alive at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast for over 30 years from 1955?
That Conor O'Malley has a wide and deep knowledge not only of Yeats's plays (he completed an MA on the Cuchulain plays at UCD some 20 years ago under my supervision) but of modern theatre and drama across the board? That he has directed the Yeats plays again and again, has worked on the choral work, masks and music as well as on performances for many years? Before anyone can validly dismiss Yeats's plays, a critic must know how fully immersed Yeats himself was in early 20th-century theatre.
He knew the work of the designer Gordon Craig very well, was influenced by Craig's work on masks, and got him to design screens for the Abbey for use with lighting effects showing an awareness of the experimental work of Adolphe Appia. The discovery of the Japanese Noh form in 1913 led to further innovations which took Yeats away from the Abbey. This is not to say that the new work, esoteric as it was, did not contain very exciting possibilities, some of which Yeats was later to exploit successfully in the dance plays he wrote for the Abbey.
As the great critic Eric Bentley wrote (in In Search of Theater), "Yeats was asking for something neither the Abbey Theatre nor any existing theatre could provide". Anyone interested in the possibilities of theatrical expression must take an interest in Yeats's experiments, even if they were not always successful. Conor O'Malley bravely attempts to bring Yeats's plays to audiences, not in a theatre but in a small lecture hall, where all illusion has to be created from the ground up.
Unless a reviewer understands this his review is not only irrelevant but damaging to the proper uses of theatre criticism. - Yours, etc,
CHRISTOPHER MURRAY, Watson Drive, Killiney, Co Dublin.