Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

T.C. Murray

And yet, definite as are these distinctions, life in the various parts of Ireland seems much alike, class for class, as it is represented by the many contemporaneous playwrights, whether the scenes of their plays are Down or Kerry, Galway or Wicklow. A tinker is a tinker wherever you find him, a strong farmer a strong farmer, a landlord a landlord. The same emotions dominate rival brothers in "The Turn of the Road" and in "Birthright," though the Orangeman turned actor wrote the one and the Cork schoolmaster the other. Mr. T.C. Murray is one of those to whom Mr. Yeats has given the name "Cork Realists." His first play, "The Wheel o' Fortune," was produced by the Cork Dramatic Society at the Dun, Cork, December 2, 1909. It has not been published, so far as I know, and all that I learn from the references to it in newspapers is that it is a one-act ironic comedy about matchmaking. Mr. Murray brought his next play, "Birthright," to the Abbey Theatre, where it was performed on October 27, 1910. If "Maurice Harte" (1912) stands the test of time and travel as has "Birthright," Mr. Murray has come to the Abbey Theatre to take a place of prominence among its playwrights. Some of the appeal of "Birthright" is in its story, the story of Cain and Abel, if you like, a story that is as lasting in its appeal as is "The Eternal Triangle," but there is as much appeal in the characterization, which you feel as you read almost as intimately as you come to know it on the stage. There are many plays that are altogether colorless in the reading unless you have unusual power of visualization and can see them as you sit in your study as if they were embodied before you on the stage. Such plays, visualized or unvisualized in the study, are often real enough on the stage. "Birthright," as I have said, is not one of these. It visualizes itself for you, with no effort on your part, as you read it, though of course, as every real play will, it moves you more in the playing. It was admirably cast on its first production at the Abbey Theatre, and it was just as admirably cast on the American tour of 1911-12, Miss O'Doherty's Maura and Mr. Morgan's Bat Morrissey being wonderful pictures of a doting mother and a stern father troubled by their preferences, the one for the elder, the other for the younger son. The rival sons were done to the life by Mr. O'Donovan and Mr. Kerrigan, and the neighbor of Mr. O'Rourke was, too, a complete realization of the Irish peasant of the valley of the Lee. It is a stern and patient realism this of Mr. Murray in telling of how Hughie, the elder son, the apple of his mother's eye, the idol of the parish for his hurly playing, and his verse-making, and his free and pleasant ways, is disinherited and condemned to seek his fortune in America by his father because his younger son was the better man on the farm. There was back of Bat's decision, too, his feeling that his eldest-born was more of his mother, whose blood was part gentle, than of himself, the grubber of the earth. Shane, like his father, was the peasant plowman, Hughie something of the sporting gentleman. The end of it all is murder, the younger son killing the elder with the hurly when he is accused by his brother of plotting to grab the farm. Many who saw "Birthright" in America were moved by it more than by any other play in the repertoire of the company, and I have heard more than one whose supreme interest is the theatre say that it was the best play new to America presented in America during the winter of 1911-12. I do not so hold, for "The Well of the Saints" and "In the Shadow of the Glen" were new to America in the winter of 1911-12, and "The Playboy of the Western World" was new to every city in America save to Chicago, where Mr. Hart Conway presented it at his dramatic school in the spring of 1909. I can, however, understand why "Birthright" so appealed. It is because of the theme, because of the beautiful character of Maura Morrissey, because of the absolute faithfulness to life, as all the world knows it, of the play. I have traveled the road to Macroom that these farmers traveled, and so I know the externals of the life they lead: I have known intimately and I know intimately just such people as these, Irish peasants, some of whom spoiled their children, thinking the boy they loved must not be "crossed," and some of whom preferred one child to another even to the extent of reversing the custom of primogeniture that is as fixed a rule among them as if their property was entailed, and so I can vouch for the absolute fidelity of Mr. Murray's art. It is a realism little relieved by humor; unrelieved either by any background of romance, but gaming a dignity from its intensity of conception and its simplicity of unfolding that makes you feel, as you read, or as you watch and listen, that you are in the presence of nobility. Its style, maybe, is homespun, but it is none the worse for that, and it never approaches at all to the cheap or mean.

The appeal of this realism is as poignant in "Maurice Harte" (1912) as in "Birthright," though the story of the later play is not so universal as is that of the play that brought Mr. Murray his share of fame. "Maurice Harte" tells of the disaster that comes to a young divinity student of Maynooth whose parents drive him back to college to seek ordination even after he tells them that he has no vocation for the priesthood. The curtain rises on Maurice, a youth of twenty-two, trying to tell his mother, whose youngest he is, and the child of her middle age that it would be sacrilege for him to take orders with no vocation. His courage fails him, as it had on previous occasions on which he tried to confess his agony because of his false position, and he finally begs the Parish Priest to break the desolating news to the family. They are only farmers in a small way, the Hartes: and the father and mother, the son at home, Owen, and the three older brothers in Boston, have all made sacrifices to give Maurice his education. When the priest tells of the boy's decision not to return to Maynooth, mother and father and brother all insist that he must stick to his earlier intention, vocation or no vocation.

They are in monetary difficulties because of him, and if the story went out that he was not back at Maynooth his mother declares it "wouldn't be east in Macroom when we'd have the bailiffs walking in that door." She tells him, too, his being a spoiled priest will cost his brother his bride and her fortune that would help them to pay off their debts. The boy cannot withstand their pleading, and the first act ends with his promise that he will go back to Maynooth, a promise wrung from him even though he knows at the time of its making that his return may bring him to madness in the end.

Act II, nine months later, shows us again the kitchen of the farmhouse of West Cork, with happiness in the hearts of all there, save some slight apprehension on the father's part over his new clothes and the terrors of a journey with Father Mangan to Maynooth. In this relaxing of the tension of the play humor is not out of place, and its attainment here by Mr. Murray shows that he could write comedy did he choose. We hear that the marriage settlement between Bride Burke and Owen has been made, and that Maurice is to marry them; and that he has bested all his classmates in his final examinations. Upon the pride and happiness in a son sure of a good match, and the glory of another son about to be "priested" and to say mass in the local church, breaks in word that he cannot be ordained because of illness. And close upon this bad news comes Maurice himself, broken down mentally from the strain of driving himself to do what he knows to be wrong, from the strain of committing, as he believes, sacrilege. Father and mother and brother realize that it is they who have driven him mad, but such is human nature that mother and brother, at least, have thoughts of themselves even at this moment, as well as thoughts for Maurice with "his mind that's gone." His brother fears that Bride will not come into a house so disgraced, and his mother, her years-long dream of her youngest a priest gone on the wind, is struck dumb with horror at the thought of what her life will be from this out.

The full significance of the tragedy of Maurice's fate can be realized only by those who know intimately the ambitions hugged close to heart by the Irish Catholic mother. It is more to her to have her boy a priest even than it was yesterday to the Scotch Presbyterian mother to have her boy a minister of the Kirk. It is the greatest glory that can come to such a peasant mother to give one of her sons to the priesthood.

There is, I think, no propaganda in the play, and no intentional satire, although in a way "Maurice Harte" affords a parallel to so definitely a propagandist satire as Mr. Robinson's "Harvest." It is not education that is the curse, however, in "Maurice Harte," but the belief that only priesthood in the end can justify the sacrifices without which a college education is almost impossible for an Irish peasant. Certain it is that it is only for the pride of having their boy a priest that the typical Irish Catholic peasant parents would make such sacrifices as the Hartes have made, sacrifices involving them in debt to the extent of a thousand dollars, to secure their son an education.

In a sense "Maurice Harte" is far other than the provincial study I have here outlined. Its theme is allied, unquestionably, to that theme so much larger in its relations than that of the spoiled priest, the theme of the rebellious son, the son who will live his own life no matter what may be his parents' will. It is only allied to it, however, not to be identified with it, because Maurice is too fearful of disappointing his parents, and too shrinking and ineffectual, to go against his parents' will. In Ireland, as I have said elsewhere, such parental will, by a survival of authority from the days of the clan system, was law until yesterday, and there will therefore be those, I have no doubt, who will find in the play a conflict of the old order and the new, but I do not believe such conflict was the author's intent. Indeed, the play is wholly of the old order. No love of man and woman figures as motive in it as none had figured in "Birthright." There is parental love, of course, in both plays, though in the case of both parents in "Maurice Harte" and in the father in "Birthright" parental pride is a stronger motive than parental love. Very true to Irish life is this absence of passion as a deciding factor in the fates of man and woman, this insistence upon the importance of the family, this subordination of the rights of the individual. Mr. Murray wished to write in "Maurice Harte" a play of the very heart of Irish Catholic life, and such a play he has written, a play that marks no decline, either in characterization or situation, from "Birthright," and to say that is to give "Maurice Harte" praise of the highest.

MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON