“No. Why? Has it failed?” Mr. Shaw answered.
“Quite the contrary,” he was assured.
“Oh, in that case why should I hear about it?” he said. “Success is the usual thing with my plays; it is what I write them for. I only hear about them when something goes wrong.”
“But are you not interested in the success of the Irish Players? Or was that a matter of course too?”
“By no means,” Mr. Shaw answered. “I warned Lady Gregory that America was an extremely dangerous country to take a real Irish company to.”
“But why? Surely America, with its immense Irish element——”
“Rubbish! There are not half a dozen real Irishmen in America outside that company of actors!” he exclaimed. “You don’t suppose that all these Murphys and Doolans and Donovans and Farrells and Caseys and O’Connells who call themselves by romantic names like the Clan-na-Gael and the like are Irishmen! You know the sort of people I mean. They call Ireland the Old Country....
“Shall I tell you what they did in Dublin to the Irish Players? There was a very great Irish dramatic poet, who died young, named John Synge—a real Irish name—just the sort of name the Clan-na-Gael never think of.
“Well, John Synge wrote a wonderful play called The Playboy of the Western World, which is now a classic. This play was not about an Irish peculiarity, but about a universal weakness of mankind: the habit of admiring bold scoundrels. Most of the heroes of history are bold scoundrels, you will notice. English and American boys read stories about Charles Peace, the burglar, and Ned Kelly, the highwayman, and even about Teddy Roosevelt, the rough-rider. The Playboy is a young man who brags of having killed his father, and is made almost as great a hero as if he were an Italian general who had killed several thousand other people’s fathers. Synge satirises this like another Swift, but with a joyousness and a wild wealth of poetic imagery that Swift never achieved. Well, sir, if you please, this silly Dublin Clan-na-Gael, or whatever it called itself, suddenly struck out the brilliant idea that to satirise the follies of humanity is to insult the Irish nation, because the Irish nation is, in fact, the human race and has no follies, and stands there pure and beautiful and saintly to be eternally oppressed by England and collected for by the Clan. There were just enough of them to fill the Abbey Street Theatre for a night or two to the exclusion of the real Irish people, who simply get sick when they hear this sort of balderdash talked about Ireland. Instead of listening to a great play by a great Irishman they bawled and whistled and sang ‘God Save Ireland’ (not without reason, by the way), and prevented themselves from hearing a word of the performance....”