Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

Mr. Lennox Robinson, like most of the Abbey Theatre dramatists, has chosen to write about the ground under his feet. The son of a clergyman whose charges have been in the southwest of Ireland, Mr. Robinson spent his boyhood and youth in the Bandon Valley. He had been trying his hand at writing from the time that he was ten years old, editing an amateur magazine as he grew older, feeling about for the thing that he could do. A visit of the Abbey Theatre Company to Cork was the awakening. He saw a new acting, he saw a new art of the stage, and he knew as he saw that it was in drama his work lay. It was not, however, for the Cork Dramatic Society that he did his first play, but for the Abbey Theatre. "The Clancy Name" was put on on October 8, 1908, when its author was but four days past his twenty-second birthday. What this first version was like I do not know, but Mr. Robinson has reprinted the second version, put on with the full strength of the National Theatre Society at the Abbey Theatre on September 30, 1909. As printed, it is an ironic little play, recording the great day in the life of the Widow Clancy, the day on which she pays off a five years' loan and stands without a debt of any kind, her farm all her own, the Clancy name respected throughout her world. But on this day of her triumph, when she would add to her happiness by making a match for her son, John cannot rejoice with her, and on her questioning him as to his moodiness he blurts out that he is the man who killed James Power, a quiet man whose unexplained disappearance is the mystery of the countryside. Worse yet, John insists that he will give himself up to the authorities. It is terrible to know one's son a murderer; it is intolerable to think of a Clancy being hanged and of the glory of the name forever departed. She persuades him finally not to tell, but he fears he will, so, when the chance comes, he finds the only way out, the way of peace for his mother and peace for himself. A car driven by a drunken neighbor is threatening the life of a little child playing in the middle of the road. John Clancy pushes him out of the way and allows himself to be driven down. They bring him to his mother's house still alive and raving incoherently of the murder, but he dies before he tells his secret and the Clancy name is saved. It is not a very gripping theme, but the play brings to us an acute character study of the typical managing woman of the small farmer class. We feel her tireless energy, her drive, her high pride, assets of worth in the fight to live. There is a little humor, natural and unforced, some picturesqueness of phrase, a revelation of knowledge of life in one corner of Ireland. There is nothing, however, in the play to make it comparable with the three that followed it on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, "The Crossroads" (1909); "Harvest" (1910); and "Patriots" (1912). "The Lesson of Life," a little one-act comedy, presented at the Dun Theatre, Cork, December 2, 1909, Mr. Robinson has disowned. Why I do not know, though the fact that it was not produced at the Abbey may indicate that even at the time of its production he felt that it was not up to the level of his work. Mr. Robinson has not republished "The Lesson of Life," but the reviews state that it was an amusing little play, though in no way a serious reading of life.

Lennox Robinson

"The Clancy Name," "The Crossroads," "Harvest," and "Patriots" are all on themes that hit home at Irish institutions, and yet it would be wrong to say any one of them is basically either satirical or propagandist. All are primarily readings of life. "The Crossroads" alone, perhaps, is more than a reading of life. Certainly, after its needless prologue, it is fine art through to the end. This scene, with its satire of Irish debating societies, is now, wisely, dropped when the play is produced. We can learn enough of Ellen in the play itself to understand why she does as she does without this picture of her in Dublin. Her story is that of a woman who hates the much talk of patriotism in Dublin and the lack of doing anything tangible for Ireland. In Dublin she has worked her way up from servant to assistant in a bookshop, but she goes back happily to the country to give her sister a chance in town such as she has had, thinking that perhaps she herself can lead her people into better ways of farming and of ordering their lives generally through the knowledge she has got in town. It is through such as Ellen that the Irish Industries Organization Society in actual life accomplishes an important part of its work.

In the first act of "The Crossroads" we find Ellen at home, in her old peasant dress, having made the hens lay so well in winter as to arouse wonder in a neighbor as to whether, "Is it right for hens to be laying that way so early in the year?" A match is being made for her by her mother with a man that has a good farm. Ellen desires the match very much, for this is just the farm on which to try the new methods that shall bring prosperity to the people of the valley and so stem the emigration to America. She does not love Tom Dempsey, this strong farmer, and she does half-love Brian Connor, whom she had known in Dublin, but now that he has come down to ask her to marry him she chooses the farmer, brutal though she knows him, because as his wife she can do the work for Ireland that she has imagined for herself. The loveless marriage, so universal an institution all over Ireland, made it nothing out of the way for Ellen to act as she did, even though at the time of the action of the play a higher ideal of marriage than that of the old matchmaking had come in. It is this institution that Mr. Robinson, from one point of view, might be thought to be attacking in the play; it is this institution, certainly, that is the theme of the play. Is it a tribute to Irishmen and Irishwomen to acknowledge that this loveless marriage has worked on the whole as well as the marriage of sentiment, or as the marriage of sexual infatuation, or as the marriage of comrade hearts that we believe we have in America? As a matter of fact there were not as many loveless marriages as might seem at first thought. The match made up between the father of the girl and the father of the boy was the usual sort of marriage among the stay-at-home Irish girls and boys up to 1880, but how many girls and boys for the past one hundred and fifty years have come to America to escape it? Look up your family traditions, you who have Irish ancestors, and find is it not true that these ancestors, whether Reeds of Down or Nolans of Meath, fled to America because they would wed the mate of their choice. Even to-day boys and girls come here from the same motive, though of course it would be preposterous to deny that to many it is rather Eldorado than the land of freedom.

Act II reveals poor Ellen seven years later. She has lost her two boys by fever; she has failed in her work on her own farm, though she has brought untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms around Ballygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom we loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is now a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended restraint, into a fight with Tom, whom but for Ellen he would have choked to death. Brian urges Ellen to go away with him, but, after a moment's faltering, she refuses to go. This is the last scene. Tom, who has heard Brian's proposal and his wife's rejection of it, comes slowly down the room.

Tom. Was it me you saved or was it the young man? When you pulled him off me, did you save me, or was it him you saved from being hung? Tell me that, Ellen McCarthy.

[Silence.

Ah! 't is aisy seen.