Meanwhile, across the street from the Abbey two enthusiastic penniless young actors from London, Mícheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, were filling their little theatre, the Gate, with productions of European classics like Brand, Peer Gynt and Anna Christie. When anyone mentioned their success, Yeats was furious. ‘Anything Edwards and MacLiammóir can do, Lennix and Dolly’ (later Mrs Robinson) ‘can do better,’ he told me, but he didn’t really believe it. He reconstituted the Board of Directors of the Abbey and brought on Higgins, Brinsley MacNamara and Ernest Blythe, the ex-Minister for Finance to whom the theatre owed its little subsidy of eight hundred pounds. The last appointment was typical of Yeats, who never forgot a rebuke or an obligation.
But the eight hundred pounds a year gave the Irish Government the right to appoint its own representative on the Board. The Cosgrave governments had exercised this right discreetly by appointing people like George O’Brien and Walter Starkie, of whom Yeats approved; but de Valera’s government refused to reappoint Starkie and appointed instead a notorious and unscrupulous politician named Magennis. Yeats, who knew the man of old (everyone in Dublin seemed to know Magennis of old), reappointed Starkie as an ordinary member of the Board, refused to sanction the Government nominee and threatened to close the theatre instead. He then learned that before being offered to Magennis the seat had been offered to and refused by Hayes in his usual petulant way. Yeats rushed round to my flat to ask me to intercede with Hayes to withdraw his refusal. By this time I knew enough about Hayes’ vanity to realize that the appeal would be much more effective if Yeats himself made it, and we took a taxi to Hayes’ house in Sandymount.
Hayes’ manners were even more formal than Yeats’, and when I introduced them there was a pretty competition in elegance, which I enjoyed. Yeats made a brief passionate speech, appealing to Hayes on behalf of his theatre. It was only one of the many I heard him make, yet it was only when he was dead that I realized how urgent they all were. He was appealing for something that to him was perhaps the most important part of his life’s work, something that must be passed on to future generations as he, Synge and Lady Gregory had fashioned it.
Hayes rose and stood before the fire with his hands behind his back.
‘Mr Yeats,’ he said loftily, ‘I have no interest in the theatre. I have no knowledge of the theatre. I can be of no help to you there, but if I can be of any assistance to you in keeping that ruffian out, I shall be glad to accept.’
So ‘that ruffian’ was bought off with a seat in the Senate, which carried a salary, where later he was de Valera’s principal spokesman in the attack on the old Tailor of Gougane Barra and his wife. Through my friendship with Hayes I became an intimate observer of the workings of a theatre which I had attacked again and again and whose policy I disapproved of.
I had also, without realizing it, put a large nail in the coffin of Yeats’ life work.
The new Board, to show how up-to-date it was, decided to compete with Edwards and MacLiammóir by producing European classics also. I doubt if it ever crossed their minds that what attracted younger people like myself to that pair of rascals was not that they had discovered the key to wealth, but that they were nearly as crazy as Yeats himself had been in his youth and produced what they wanted to produce regardless of anyone’s opinion.
So the first thing the new Board did, just as Hayes joined it, was to import a young English director named Hugh Hunt and a young English stage designer called Tanya Moiseiwitsch, to balance Edwards and MacLiammóir, and set them to producing a rigmarole of ‘European’ plays like Noah, Coriolanus and Dr Faustus. Meanwhile, Robinson went on with his productions of Irish plays, though he did take over from Hunt a scurvy piece of French religiosity about St Ignatius Loyola. The division shows a split personality on the Board, though I suspect that the split was in Yeats rather than in the Board, which did not seem to have any particular personality to split. Yeats prided himself on his subtlety, though as theatre manager he was very unhappy. If the current of opinion was in favour of European masterpieces – which bored him – he would have European masterpieces, but he would not have any damn English director tinkering with the sort of plays that had been written by himself, Synge and Lady Gregory, and producing them in a theatrical idiom he did not like. Though he was responsible for Mrs Pat Campbell, his whole attitude to English directors and players could be summed up in Synge’s comment on Mrs Pat as Deirdre of the Sorrows: ‘She’ll turn it into The Second Mrs Conchobhar.’ The theatre now had two producers, though it could not afford to pay the salary of one.
However, the new policy had scarcely been announced than Brinsley MacNamara, in a fit of pique, issued a personal prornunciamento against O’Casey, the greatest of contemporary Irish dramatists, and the other members of the Board in another fit of pique demanded his resignation. They invited me to take his place, and though I admired MacNamara as the ablest of the directors, after Yeats, and thought the Board’s attitude to him absurd, I agreed. I entered the boardroom for the first time, seeing nothing but the figures of John Synge and Augusta Gregory, and trusting they would inspire me, but their inspiration was similar to that of the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin in earlier days when I couldn’t do my lessons or my work.
I knew nothing about the theatre, and so asked the advice of my best friend among the players, Arthur Shields, as to what I should do, and his advice was so extraordinary that I took it as a good joke until I noticed that I was creating chaos in the theatre. ‘Treat us as though we were children,’ he said shortly. ‘Nice children, of course, children that you’re fond of, but not as grown-ups. And for God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t praise us. That drives us mad.’ It is the best advice that was ever given to a man of the theatre, if only he could be intelligent enough to appreciate it. I wasn’t; not for a long time. Arthur never made a great reputation as an actor; he was far too discerning for that; and it was only when I had almost wrecked the company that I realized how discerning he was.
18
For much of the time during his last years Yeats did not attend meetings of the Abbey Board at all. Either he was abroad or he was at home and didn’t feel strong enough to face the trip into town. Initially, not being observant, I got the impression that he was only vaguely interested. I should have remembered the evenings at his home when Robinson dropped in late to report on the takings and the other evening when Higgins had telephoned him after the meeting of the Academy of Letters to report on what O’Faolain and I had said. The old watchdog never relaxed his vigilance, and after every Board meeting Higgins called, telephoned or wrote to recount every word that had been said – rarely in a favourable way, if I knew Higgins.
Yeats was one of the most devious men I have ever known, and I deliberately mocked at his deviousness as he mocked at my simple-mindedness, probably with equal justification. He was taken aback at the trustfulness I showed towards my fellow-directors, and he once hinted as much to me. ‘Well, I can’t treat them as if they were a gang of masked conspirators,’ I said irritably, and he replied with great unction, ‘No, you remind me of a character in a Victorian novel by a lady that I once read – someone who believes that for most of the time the vast majority of people do not intend much harm to the others.’ That description of my own character delighted me so much that I didn’t even notice the pinch till I got home. In the light of later events he was putting it mildly.
The best example of his deviousness I remember was in the last years of his life, at a time when I felt that at last he and I were on the point of an understanding. By this time, like the two kings in The Herne’s Egg, we had fought so long and so hard that there didn’t seem to be much left to us except to become close friends. Paul Vincent Carroll had written a play which offended some members of the Board and, instead of sending it along to Yeats and me in the ordinary way, they had returned the play to the author with an exceedingly insulting letter. When the Secretary showed me the letter I grew furiously angry. Quite apart from the fact
that Carroll was a distinguished playwright who had earned a good deal of money for the theatre, I felt that no writer should be treated with such discourtesy, so I wrote to Carroll, asking him to submit the play again to Yeats and myself. He did so, and Yeats and I did not meet again until the Board meeting at which our two reports were read out. Yeats said, ‘All the characters in this play are corrugated iron’, but he went on in his noble way to praise Carroll’s work and volunteered to contribute fifty pounds from his own pocket (a lot of money for an old man who made manuscript copies of Innisfree for American booksellers at five pounds a time) towards its production by Edwards and MacLiammóir at the Gate or any other theatre that wanted to produce it. My report read, ‘All the characters in this play are cardboard’, and Yeats started and stared incredulously at me. Then, as my negative report went on, he began to chuckle grimly, and when it concluded he said, ‘O’Connor, I owe you an apology. I thought you’d asked the play back because Carroll was a friend of yours. It had not occurred to me that you had asked it back because you thought he had been unfairly treated. It serves me right! I’ve lost my fifty pounds.’ How could anyone not love the sort of man who said a thing like that?
Still, in the matter of deviousness, he was a child compared with Higgins. Even as I wrote down this fairly straightforward story I found myself wondering, ‘Who or what gave Yeats the notion that I was a friend of Carroll’s; above all, a friend who, right or wrong, would insist on the production of his play?’ Twenty times at least I had evidence that Higgins told Yeats things that simply weren’t true. Why had it not occurred to me that this might be another of them? The truth is that Higgins created such a miasma of intrigue about him that I look back on it as I used to look at Abbey plays of the period, wondering what exactly was going on behind it all.
Most of the time Hayes made an admirable director, warmhearted, appreciative and intelligent. I paid no attention to the old-maidish tizzies into which he worked himself occasionally about a scene or a word – generally concerning politics or religion. Usually he could be kidded out of them. Walter Starkie, the ex-Government representative whom Yeats had brought on under his own steam, was a fat amiable man, as amiable as Higgins, but with none of Higgins’ intolerable treachery. Starkie took little part in meetings or discussion, although once – it was the time of the Civil War in Spain – when I came into the boardroom late with an evening paper and said, ‘Well, boys, we’ve got the Alcazar,’ he became very voluble. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I cannot understand how people who knew nothing of Spain can speak like that of this terrible Civil War.’ (He later became the British Council representative to Madrid.) Robinson had what no other Board member had, an immense capacity for silent, despondent resistance. He merely sat back in his chair, sucked his pipe and replied in monosyllables. If I had known that Ernest Blythe was the man who would outlast us all I should have paid more attention to him than I did. He looked like a Buddha in grey plaster, and spent most of his time doodling on his pad. Then someone would use a specialized polysyllabic word and immediately a great change came over Blythe. Pencil poised on paper, he waited for inspiration, and then would write down a Gaelic equivalent. Then there was a further pause and he wrote down an alternative. He was genuinely attached to the Irish language and anxious to revive it, but in his wise way he realized that it was lacking in polysyllabic words. He believed that the language could be revived if only people could be induced to sing popular songs in it. His collected poems contain his translation of ‘The Beautiful Isle of Capri’ and American songs like ‘I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo’ in his peculiar version of the Irish language. One might call Blythe a single-minded man if the adjective did not raise the question of whether or not it was a contradiction in terms.
Hugh Hunt got off on the wrong foot by wearing a red, white and blue rosette in the theatre on some English state occasion (King George V’s jubilee I, imagine), which infuriated Higgins. Higgins’ dislike of Hunt had turned to a persecution mania when Hunt gave an interview to some English weekly paper in which he spoke of his difficulties and described Higgins and myself as Red revolutionaries, determined on turning the theatre towards our own political aims. Higgins, having at last unmasked a genuine plot, demanded his immediate dismissal; Hayes was fearfully upset because he didn’t want ‘that charming boy’ dismissed over an indiscretion. I had conceived an admiration for Hunt that has outlasted our theatrical relationship, and was delighted at Hunt’s display of independence. When he came before the Board to explain that he had never said those dreadful things – and I’m sure they were exaggerated in the news report – I interrupted to say that of course he had, but in future would he mind not saying them before newspapermen.
At the same time I found myself engaged in a long battle with Robinson which was to go on until I resigned. I had come on the Board as his friend, but it didn’t take long to realize that the theatre had been mismanaged for years and that most of the mismanagement could be traced to him. When the bank threatened to close down the theatre, he merely shrugged and said, ‘Every theatre in the world carries an overdraft.’ We had two producers, Robinson for Irish plays and Hunt for European ones, and two secretaries, Eric Gorman for correspondence and Robinson’s brother, Tom, for accounts. The presence of Robinson’s brother at Board meetings made another difficulty, for it meant that even when Robinson was absent there could be no confidential criticism of his work. The directors groused among themselves, but nothing was ever said at meetings. I asked for the exclusion of Robinson’s brother from Board meetings. Soon afterwards his appointment was terminated. I regretted it, but it was difficult to see how else we were to save the Abbey. Then the company shares were redistributed to deprive Robinson of the controlling interest he would have when Yeats died.
Higgins, of course, was the most pugnacious member of our Board and criticized me to Yeats and Yeats to me and Robinson and Hunt to anyone who would listen; but he could not fight. He saw secret agents everywhere, but the vivid imagination that had created them collapsed the moment they presented themselves before him in ordinary human shapes, and at the least sign of opposition his astute criticisms turned into jokes. His very amiability prevented his fighting. I had no ability as an intriguer and could be fooled by appearances most of the time, so I had no shyness about fighting for any reasonable cause. Higgins made no secret of the fact that he used me as his muscle man – just as the Board used me in that capacity to have the shares redistributed and have Robinson’s brother removed from the room during meetings. Once, reporting in shouts of laughter to the Board how he got rid of some importunate playwright, he said, ‘I use O’Connor all the time as an excuse. You have no idea of the character that man has in Dublin! Murphy showed me his play and I couldn’t read it, so I told him it was a masterpiece, and then, when he kept persecuting me, I said O’Connor had turned it down. They’ll believe anything of him.’ He enacted these scenes with such laughter and devilment that only an out-and-out egotist could have complained, but now I wonder whether the joke was not on me and Yeats.
The New Abbey Policy of competing with Edwards and MacLiammóir I disagreed with on two grounds. One was that it seemed to require two producers when we couldn’t afford one. The other and more important reason was that, in my view, it was wrong. For years the directors had been unable to find new Irish plays, or so they said, or so Robinson had persuaded them, and later, when really interesting new plays were submitted the Board had practically decided beforehand that the plays could be no good. Even when it was working at full capacity the theatre never managed to produce more than a half-dozen new plays a year. I felt that this could be increased to nine or ten, but, allowing for the fact that some of them would have to be popular plays by established playwrights like Robinson himself. Shiels and MacNamara, the production of four or five European classics like Coriolanus and Dr Faustus would mean that there would be no opportunity for young serious dramatists. This would mean the end of the literary movement, for magazine and book publis
hers we had none.
As for the European classics, I had seen them performed as well as I was ever to do and had decided that they might not be as classical as they were generally supposed to be. Shakespeare could be boring, so could Sheridan; one could even get too much of Ibsen and Chekhov. I had not yet classified them as ‘Museum Theatre’, and in those days would probably have disputed the theory. The theory I later evolved to explain my own disillusionment I have expounded so often that I have almost ceased to believe in it myself. It seemed to me that the theatre is by its nature a contemporary art, a collaboration between author, players and audience, and once the collaboration is broken down by time it cannot be repeated.
There are exceptions, of course, particularly when an old text is rehandled by a modern writer and the staging recreated in terms of a contemporary society. Even with Hamlet one can still enable the audience to walk on the razor’s edge of real drama, but in my experience it was much easier to make them walk it with some little play by a contemporary author in a local setting. The lightest of Robinson’s own comedies had an immediacy of effect that Goethe’s Faust or Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the rival theatre did not have. If I was to work for it, the Abbey had to be an all-Irish theatre.
Yeats, too, of course, wanted a living theatre. If he had been younger and in better health he would have come to the theatre himself and insisted on it. It was he who in the middle of the New Abbey Policy was desperately holding on to Lennox Robinson and a few rough-and-ready comedies, so that when he died he might transmit some part of what he and his friends had achieved in the creation of an original repertory and an original style of acting. Nowadays when I think of what the situation really was, it is not of my work and feelings that I think, but of his. Like many a lesser man who has created some unique institution, he wanted to guarantee its continuance when he himself was dead, and did not realize that what he wanted was a miracle. His sense of urgency is evident in the dispute over the production of Coriolanus. It had just been produced in Paris in coloured shirts and caused a riot. Yeats demanded that we produce it in coloured shirts among our European classics, in the hope that, as in France, a Dublin audience might riot and he could defend the message of the play as he had defended the message of The Playboy of the Western World and The Plough and the Stars.
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