by Ultan Macken
My dear Pegsi,
It’s Tuesday morning and I can give you all the news, reactions, etc., after the first night. I couldn’t get a moment to write yesterday or Sunday and anyhow, I felt all googly as you know. On Sunday morning, I went to ten mass in St Malachi’s church. It’s a very peculiar church, balcony all around on top, not a very big crowd at mass but I gather that 11 and 12 are the most popular masses – as they are in Galway.
After mass we had a rehearsal at 12 which lasted until 4.30. I thought they would never have the stage ready for the show at all. After tea, I spent the rest of the night with Clopet looking at the Variety acts. (There are Variety acts on with the play.) I got to bed early. Got up next morning and spent it wandering around the theatre until lunch, then back to make-up. The play started at 2.30. It was a peculiar audience but the play went down well. I thought I was forcing it a bit and decided to improve in the night show. Back for the tea and who walked into the Hotel but Joe Mullen, a Galway boy, I don’t know if you know him. He is in the Fire Service here and he tells me that Sonny Hynes (Molly’s brother [a Galway friend]) is up here with him too, so I am looking forward to seeing both of them – they will be a hell of a relief from the Carl Clopet Company.
They remind me very forcefully of the bad old days in the Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe when Dermody and intrigues were rampant. They do nothing but back-bite one another and talk about one another and be jealous of one another until you’d wonder how the hell they can stand it at all. As far as I can see the fair Diana Romney is really the moving force behind it all. She tells people (for their own good) what the other fellow is saying. I will enlarge on this when I see you but now it is for the private ear. They have tried to pull me in to it. Some of them, tuppenny halfpenny actors, got annoyed at the show because the audience was laughing at me during their dialogue. Can you beat it! When I see the last of them, I will breathe a long sigh of relief.
It will be a pleasure to be home in Galway – because I am dying to see you darling – and my beautiful Wally Óg. What I would give for a sit in my garden now is nobody’s business. Playing the big-time in Belfast has done one thing for me – it has killed my ambition to be a star. Oh I long for the peaceful worry of my little Taibhdhearc with the tiny audience. There were about 2,300 of an audience in the Hippodrome last night and I would have given the whole of them for just six Taibhdhearcites. From all of which you may think that the play is a flop. Actually it isn’t, it’s an enormous success but I’m fed-up. Funny isn’t it, often when playing to an empty house in Galway, you’d say, ‘If only I was acting in a decent theatre with a big audience, how different it would be.’
Funny isn’t it that I don’t feel anyway different in the Hippodrome. No matter how I try, I don’t seem to be able to get a kick out of it that I thought would. That’s life all over, isn’t it? Thank God, I see the grand life we have in Galway – a wife, a child, a house and a job, what the hell more could the heart desire, all that and to win £100 for my play in Irish! [There is no record of what this prize was for.] There you are!
We got one thing, we long for one another. It makes you laugh. I feel in good humour this morning all the same darling because I love you and although the week is crawling to its end, I will soon be home to you. I will regale you at length with the experience of a bumpkin in the specious metropolis of Ireland. I wouldn’t take them on a plate. They are as foreign to my nature as goat’s milk is to a cow.
God bless yourself darling and mind yourself until I come home to you. I love you more than anything this life could ever give to us. I think of you often and I know I am never far from your thoughts. Don’t miss me too much but miss me just enough so that you will be hopping with delight when I come back to you. I got your letter yesterday (my birthday), a better present than a £1,000 or even £100 from an Irish play. Mind yourself and keep loving me.
Your adoring husband,
Wally
The next letter also comes from Belfast:
Thursday 5 p.m.
6th May 1943
My own darling Peggi,
We’re on the last lap at last thanks be to God – just 5 more shows and then I will be on the way home. It’s bloody awful, having to do two shows a day of a big long play. My voice is beginning to fail, I’m afraid. I’m dosing it with TCP and hoping that it will last it out. I won’t tell you all about the show, etc., until I get home, when I will have gathered my impressions together, etc. In a way I’m sorry that I ever came at all but that’s nearly done now, Thank God and I’ll soon be home with my beautiful wife and son. I will be home Tuesday definitely and may yet be able to make it on Monday. It all depends on what trains are leaving on Sunday if any, etc.
I was over with Paddy Hynes [a friend from Galway] this morning at the place where he is working, there are a terrible lot of southern Irish here. A chap called Higgins, a Corkonian said he met you one time. Poor old Wally and school, I had to laugh today when I got your letter. Imagine him and his being a school boy. I’m absolutely dying to see him and yourself darling. It won’t be long now, Thank God. If I can’t get home on Monday, I will ring Tommie in the morning in the Taibhdhearc. Tell him not to leave the place between 11 a.m. and one. I will tell him what time I want you to ring up Dublin. If I do manage to get down on Monday I will either send a telegram or get Sonny to ring the Taibhdhearc and let you know.
Your lonely husband,
Wally
He also wrote a short note to Wally Óg:
Dear Wally Óg,
I am very glad to hear that you like school and that you have a grand schoolbag. I will soon be home now to see you and the bag and then you can tell me all about it. I love you over to Mexico and I am dying for a hug and a kiss.
Xxx your loving Daddy
Walter and Peggy Macken were expecting their second child in the summer of 1943. My mother was hoping I would be born on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption, but I didn’t oblige. Then she thought I would arrive on Our Lady’s Birthday, 8 September, but I still didn’t arrive. I was finally born at St Bride’s Nursing Home in Galway on Friday 10 September, weighing in at 11 lbs; a brother for Wally Óg who was then just five years and five months old. My father wrote a play to celebrate my arrival called Bhi Mac Agam Tráth (I Once Had A Son) – the play ran for one week in the Taibhdhearc in the autumn of 1943.
Later, while working as an adjudicator in Sligo, my father wrote to my mother:
Grand Hotel,
Sligo.
Monday
My dear Pegsi,
Here’s just a few lines to you to tell you what’s what. I am duly established in Sligo. So far it hasn’t been too bad. We got to Sligo about 8 o’clock on Saturday night. Talk about a bloody train journey. The train stopped at seventeen stations between Athenry and Sligo. Actually the Murphys [Professor Murphy, one of the directors of the Taibhdhearc was probably travelling with him] weren’t so boring at all.
They are quite nice at close range. I went to the hotel then. It’s quite good, old fashioned (no h & c [hot and cold running water]) but the grub appears to be good – I hope. I left at nine and went to the pictures. Murphy forgot the play [presumably the play he was going to make an adjudication on], so I had nothing to do, no books. I saw a proper stinker at the cinema. Then I went into a café and had a cup of coffee …
Sunday I went to mass at 9 and then went fishing on Lough Gill. Say fishing! Saving your presence it was pissing rain until three o’clock. I got wet right into the pelt and no fish. It is mostly a salmon lake but it is very beautiful. The rain stopped at about three o’clock and it was all right after that.
If only I didn’t have to work today. There is a fishing com-petition on the lake today. The sun is shining and there is a great breeze blowing, but duty calls. I went walking this morning with Charlie Hughes. He is the producer of the Sligo drama group. I’m going down to lunch now and then have to go off to my purgatory.
He added a brief note for the sons also:
&n
bsp; Dear Wally Óg,
I miss you very much and Ultan, I’m crazy about you,
Your Dad
As well as these jobs outside Galway, my father threw himself into the job at the Taibhdhearc from the moment he arrived, working like a Trojan. He organised the translations of various classical theatre works into Irish and gathered a group of young men and women to form the casts of these classic plays. Over the course of eight years, between 1940–48, he produced about seventy individual plays, many of which he translated himself. Although his Irish was reasonably fluent by this time, my father himself said that he didn’t believe that anyone could learn Irish completely unless they spent many years in the Gaeltacht. When translating the plays he nearly always called on the help of a native speaker, such as Tomás Ó Maille, Professor of Irish at University College, Galway, and a director of the Taibhdhearc. One of his first productions was a translation of Charley’s Aunt by the English writer Brandon Thomas.
As well as writing the basic texts, he also starred in many of them, playing the lead roles, and in many cases my mother played the female lead. Although it was difficult to build audiences, my father and the Taibhdhearc began to build a strong reputation, particularly among the Dublin media.
In 1940, when Seán O’Casey blocked the Abbey Theatre from performing any of his plays because of his dispute with W.B. Yeats, my father wrote to him looking for permission to stage The Shadow of a Gunman in Irish at the Taibhdhearc.
O’Casey gave him permission and after the production, when my father wrote again, the playwright answered with the following:
Tingrith,
Station Road,
Totnes,
Devon.
November 26th 1940
Dear Mr Macken,
French control only the Amateur rights of the plays, sold alas to them when I was on the rocks. The delay you mention doesn’t matter much. The fee for the performances of ‘The Gunman’ and for all subsequent performances, will be the ones paid by the Abbey Theatre, namely: 5% on the gross nightly receipts up to £40, over £40 up to £60, 7.5%, over £60 it would be 10%. So the fee for you will be 5% on your receipts of £10–18–00.
I hope that may be suitable.
With all good wishes,
Seán O’Casey
My father’s production of The Shadow of a Gunman was so well received that the Taibhdhearc Company was invited to bring its production to the Gate Theatre in Dublin for a number of special performances. They put together three performances: the Irish language version of The Shadow of a Gunman, a performance of Dúbhglais de hÍde’s play Ag Casadh an tSugán, and a presentation of poems presented by about ten actors. Dúbhglais de hÍde, the newly appointed president of Ireland, attended the performances. Also in attendance was Gabriel Fallon, a leading expert on O’Casey plays, and in his review he said it was the most authentic production of the play ever staged and really true to the spirit of its author. My mother told me she would never forget the way my father staged the poetry readings: ‘The actors were choreographed just like a choir, they were superb and he brought out the best in both the actors in the poetry they were reading.’
Two years later, my father again sought O’Casey’s permission to do an Irish language version of his famous play, The Plough and the Stars. The playwright replied as follows:
Tingrith,
Station Road,
Totnes, South Devon, Eng.
November 4th 1942
Dear Walter Macken,
It was interesting to hear that you are going to do ‘The Plough and the Stars in Irish’. I hope it may be a success with you. I haven’t the slightest idea what royalty was asked for, or given, on the performance of the ‘Gunman’. I daresay it was 5% on the gross receipts. I don’t see how I could ask for more from the slender audiences the plays in Irish bring together. Say 7% then, if you think the first is too small.
Anyway, in these days (and before them, I’m never likely to make even a tiny fortune out of what I write), with three chiselurs, and things as they are, everything helps my lad; so however wee the cheque may be, it will be welcomed with thanks. I’m sure you’re up against a big thing trying to get drama in Irish over to the people. Indeed the work of Gaelicising Éire is as we say in Dublin, a job and a half. They didn’t go about it the right way from the start.
They kept it too much of a respectable middle-class movement. All the tony [snobbish] persons swept into the Ard Craobh and the Keating Branch of Dublin, and let the poorer branches go to hell. I remember proposing to the Dublin Coiste Ceantar – Seán T. O’Kelly – in the chair – that all Gaelic Leaguers should be required to become members, and regularly attend, and help in every way, the branch that worked in the district where they lived. That didn’t go down well.
In the branch that I was attached to then – Drumcondra – the boys and girls of Hollybank Road, St Alphonsus Road, Home Farm Road, and the like, went to these branches, and we hadn’t one member from these tony localities in our branch, save a President, F.J. Thunder, an old man of ninety-nine, who came once a year to say – a cáirde go léir – I wrote an article in the ‘Irish Peasant’ then edited by Liam P. Ó Riain, about the whole question, a rambling article, but to the point; so much so that I was rebuked by no less a person than Mrs de Valera – then of course Sinéad Ní Flannagáin.
These two tony branches were top-heavy, and the rest dwindled away. That must be at least 30 years ago. Between ourselves Hyde wasn’t much of a leader, O’Hickey [a well-known member of the Gaelic League] would have made a much better one.
Reading the ‘Irish Press’ Irish articles daily, one hears all the old things said over and over again as they were being said thirty years ago. Only the other day, a speaker, the Gaelic League Tánaiste, I think, told his hearers that the Gaeilge was the one shield between Christianity and Paganism. As a Catholic, that fellow is very close to the sin of despair. And me just after reading in a Catholic journal that each Sacrament has an Archangel to take care of it! I’d love to have a chat with you sometime.
Ever yours,
Seán O’Casey
Although he was writing in Irish both for the Taibhdhearc and with a view to publishing, eventually my father came to realise that there was no future in writing in Irish in terms of earning a living from it. He hoped his Irish language writing could help him establish himself as a writer, but on the other hand, he realised quite soon that publishing plays in Irish would earn him very little money. So, according to my mother, he made a plan: ‘I’m going to write a play at first and then a novel and then I will submit them to a major English publisher.’
Although he had submitted one or two plays to the Abbey Theatre before this, using the pseudonym Nicholas Retlaw, none had been accepted. Here is a letter of rejection for one from the Abbey Theatre:
Nicholas Retlaw Esq.,
2 Whitestrand House, Galway.
7th February 1942
Dear Sir,
I return herewith your play ‘Rude Forefathers’. For your information I append below criticisms of it which have been furnished to the Directors.
Yours faithfully,
Ernest Blythe/Manager
1. I considered the first play by this author a very successful attempt at a farce – with the conception of a play realised as something apart from a comedy. What I meant was the kind of thing that Edward McNulty could occasionally write so well. This play, although it is in the same manner does not seem to me to improve on the first one. It has a good deal of the same crude laughter-making quality, but has not quite the same richness of comic invention. One realises the same machinery [is] in motion once more, but the movement of it is not so deft or successful this time. One finds in it just a variation of the comic crook play of other lands, although the characters are to a large extent the author’s own.
2. It would seem a pity to discourage him, but at the same time it seems a pity that he seems unable to conceive of a larger framework for his wit. He may of course be only a
one-play man, and that this is the only way he can do it. This notion would be supported by the fact that this second play is, in its essentials the first one all over again, only less good.
3. Vulgar and ridiculous – Curtain according to the author goes down on ‘gales of laughter’. It hardly raised a smile for me.
This is the kind of criticism which my father, like all writers, had to endure.
8
FIRST PLAYS AND NOVELS PUBLISHED
My father had stated a plan and he stuck rigidly to it – to write a play in English and then tackle a novel. He based the play on the lives of people he knew very well and had lived among as a child, the dockers. These men lived in the tenement buildings in the centre of Galway city and some of them lived opposite the Taibhdhearc. One family, the Murrays, were I think the inspiration for some of the characters of this first play, Mungo’s Mansion (originally called Mungo and the Mowleogs). There were eleven children and this was a normal-sized family among the working class of Galway at that time. He drew on other characters he knew in Galway as well. Many people who saw the play remember there was a real character called Mowleogs and also thought they recognised some of the other characters when the play was performed. But my father always said: ‘I never use real people, each character in my plays, novels or short stories is an amalgam of a range of characters.’
The characters he created in Mungo’s Mansion come to life even on the page. Mungo, the principal character, is a docker who has broken his leg at the beginning of Act I. He’s confined to his bedroom and all the action in the play takes place in this one room. Downstairs there is constant chaos as Mungo’s wife tries to control the children. Mungo is sitting on a chair, with his broken leg in plaster and the characters come in and out of Mungo’s room, talking to him. My father drew on all his experience as an actor and theatre director in writing his plays, and for the dialogue in this play and in Vacant Possession, my father emphasised in his notes that the characters must speak with a ‘ferocious’ Galway accent.