Irish Plays and Playwrights

by Cornelius Weygandt

MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE

Mr. St. John G. Ervine I know through two plays, "Mixed Marriage," produced at the Abbey Theatre on March 30, 1911, and "The Magnanimous Lover," produced in the same playhouse on October 17, 1912. Like his fellow from County Down, the master dramatist of the Ulster Literary Theatre, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Ervine excels in characterization. You remember his people, even after one reading of the plays, so clearly are they distinguished, so definite are their personalities. With the five men and women of "The Magnanimous Lover," you pass but a few minutes, as it is only a one-act play, but you remember them as well as you do the six of "Mixed Marriage," though you follow their fortunes through four acts. All these characters are typical of the artisan class of the North of Ireland, the five Protestants of "The Magnanimous Lover" and the four Protestants and two Catholics of "Mixed Marriage." It is the troubles that arise from the difference in religion of the Protestant Raineys, mother, father, and the two young men; the Catholic betrothed, Nora, of the elder son Hugh; and their common friend the Catholic labor agitator, O'Hara, that are the motive forces of the latter play. Faintest etched is Tom, the younger son, and most like a stock character. Nora and O'Hara are well done, but one remembers both as stage parts rather than as characterizations. Hugh is still better done, but the two absolute creations are the father and mother. Tom Rainey, the Orangeman, forgets his bitterness against "Cathliks" for a moment to help win the strike in which his fellow workmen of Belfast, "Cathlik an' Prodesans," both are fighting side by side. He is all the more bitter, however, when he learns that his eldest son is going to marry out of his faith, and his speeches, hitherto devoted to smoothing out the troubles between the men of different faith, turn to bitter denunciations of the strike as "a Popish Plot." In the end Tom Rainey is responsible for riots his wild words have stirred up, the calling-out of the soldiery, and the death of Nora, who is shot down by a volley as she runs out of the Rainey house into the rioting street. On the stage, of course, Mrs. Rainey is the more sympathetic character, her tolerance, her tact, her humor, her infinite kindliness winning an audience as it is given to few characters to win it. She is less like a type, too, than her husband, but for all, I cannot but think he is better drawn.

Mr. Ervine has not a style like Mr. Mayne, nor such a rhythm to his prose, but he has more humor, and it is natural humor, a humor that arises out of the situation and is not simply dragged in for the purposes of comic relief. Mr. Ervine evidently knows the life he depicts in and out. He ought to know it, for he was born to it, being the son of a workingman in the shipyards of Belfast. And knowing it well he finds it far from hopeless. It is a pleasure to come upon a play of the North written in a spirit other than that of revolt against its Puritanism. There are "kindly Irish of the Irish" in the Black North as well as in the three other provinces, but most of the authors of the North are content to picture its hardness, its hypocrisy, its bigotry, its love of wife and child remorselessly concealed as a weakness of the flesh.

It is to this darker picturing of the North, however, that Mr. Ervine turns in "The Magnanimous Lover," which indicts the self-righteousness of the Ulster Protestant with a severity such as is possible only to a man bitter against a weakness of his own people. It is an old theme Mr. Ervine has to handle, the refusal of the wronged woman to wed her betrayer, when, after years of disloyalty, he is willing, by marrying her, to make her again an "honest woman." To speak only of recent plays of similar plot, there is "The Last of the De Mullens" of St. John Hankin, and "A Woman of No Importance" of Wilde. Mr. Ervine, it is true, handles the theme freshly, but the real power of the play is in his creation of the heroine, Maggie Cather. The danger with such a character is that it will be only a mouthpiece for woman's demand for a common moral standard for men and women; but Maggie is not a mouthpiece but a real woman, triumphantly alive, with hot anger in her heart at the injustice of the world, and at the "unco guidness" of her old-time lover, Henry Hinde. Ten years before the time of the action of the play Henry Hinde had fled, just as her child was to be born, to Liverpool, and there he has prospered, and so risen in the world that it is possible for him to wed a minister's daughter. Fear of God's wrath has now driven him home to make such amends as he can, but there is in him no pity for the woman or love for his child. Maggie has faced it out alone all these years in the seaside village of Down as Hester faced it out in the seaside village of Massachusetts, while Henry forgot it all until he was "saved" and "convicted of sin." If no more cowardly than Dimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed,—as he confesses, in "the devil's grip." And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to the life that he is depicting, a life at once passionate and prosaic, that he makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry as effective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect and right feeling. It is a "big" part that Mr. Ervine has created for the leading actress, and though the story is unequivocally "unpleasant" and may prevent "The Magnanimous Lover" from being a favorite play, there can be no two minds as to its success as drama. It is very real drama, of elemental human emotion all unveiled. With such a play as this, and with "Mixed Marriage" to his credit, I look forward eagerly to the promised production and publication of "The Eviction."

MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Another dramatist from the North and of promise is Mr. Joseph Campbell. His "Judgment" is of the northwest, however, the whole breadth of Ulster between its Donegal mountains and the Belfast of "Mixed Marriage"; and it is of the country, not of the city; and of an Ireland wholly Catholic, not of an Ireland of Protestant and Catholic at war over religion. There are moments of real drama in "Judgment," but no such inevitable rise to climax as in "Mixed Marriage." Its undoubted power is in the feeling underlying it, in its characterization, and in its style. Mr. Campbell was already known when his play was put on at the Abbey Theatre, April 15, 1912, as the author of "The Mountainy Singer" (1909), a volume of freshly felt and singing verse; and of "Mearing Stones" (1911), little prose records of things seen and of moods felt in a corner of Donegal. Many a striking phrase of "Judgment," indeed, is already written down in the paragraphs of "Mearing Stones" as actual talk heard in the roads, and several of the situations of the plays are workings-up of situations of which its author found himself a spectator on the streets of Andara or on the highway between Slieve a-Tooey and the sea.

I first came upon his verses, if I remember rightly, in "The United Irishmen," but I was first impressed by him as an illustrator, his name being always signed in those days after the Irish fashion, Seosamh MacCathmhaoil. A Dublin friend sent me at Christmas in 1907 a "Calendar of the Saints," for which Mr. Campbell did the illustrations, illustrations akin to those of Miss Althea Gyles, which so surely take one back to Ireland's heroic age, instinct as they are with the primitive aloofness of antiquity.

It is not antiquity, however, that Mr. Campbell has chosen for his play. Indeed, he rejects antiquity, deliberately "using peasants as ... protagonists instead of kings—who, like Pharaoh, are 'but a cry in Egypt,' outworn figures in these days with no beauty and no significance." "Judgment" is made out of the story of the countryside concerning "a tinker's woman," Peg Straw, and we may well believe Mr. Campbell has changed it but little, as he says, for the purposes of his play. It had been a better play, perhaps, had he changed more the facts of the story. As it stands, the first act of the play is adequate dramatically, and beautiful with that sort of wild and outworld beauty Synge brought into English literature in Ireland; and the second act beautiful with that beauty, and inadequate dramatically.

Peg Straw is an old, worn woman of the roads whom the people hold little better than a witch, even attributing to her the power fabled of the witches in folk-tales of turning themselves into hares. Her nickname "Straw" indicates the nature of the mild dementia that sets the children and the idlers at her heels. She goes about picking up "straws" until "she'd have a bunch in her hand ... every little stalk bit off as neat as neat, and it like a scrubber or dandy brush you'd put to a horse."

Peg speaks no word at all in the play, coming into sight in it only to die, but always she is in the background. Talk of her comes up early in the first act, and we learn that Nabla, the woman whose cabin is the play's first scene, has turned Peg away from the door only that morning; and from the moment we first hear of her most of the talk is of her, and the action because of her. Toward this first act's end you hear her cries as the tinkers beat her, and at its end she crawls into the cabin to die, and in dying to shock the woman of the house so that her child comes before its time. All the second act Peg lies in sight in the room just off the stage with candles stuck around her, bringing the horror and dignity of death into the wild scenes of her wake. These are wild not because of drinking for no one is drunk and only one "had drink taken," but because of the wildness of nature of these men of westernmost Europe, and because of the wildness of the roads that a "traveling man" brings with him out of the night. There is no action in this second and last act save that sprung of this stranger's entrance and quarrelsomeness, and his interruptions of an old, old man's story of what he knows of Peg's life. The stranger listens while Parry Cam tells of the cause of her madness, but when he repeats what for years has been the gossip of the countryside about her supposed killing of her babe, the "traveling man" interrupts and declares he is the son whom it was rumored she had drowned. In the end he is turned out of the house, not altogether unkindly, but as much for decency's sake as for his own. That the son, for any motive at all, should be turned out of the house where his mother lies dead, even though he had not stood by her living, is hard enough in the estimation of any people, but in the estimation of the Irish peasant it is intolerably tragic. If we realize this, the ending of the play will be on a note deeper and more significant than if we fail to realize it, but not even the utmost sympathy with the intention of the author and a full realization of the significance to Donegal peasants of the action can bring this act to an intensity comparable to that of the end of Act I, where two mysteries confront one another—"the passing of a life from this world, the coming of a life into it."