An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  I don’t think he understood that I admitted the tradition as much as he did, but in the circumstances of the theatre I thought he was going the wrong way about saving it. Coriolanus might be a dramatic gesture, but there is a difference between that and drama. Besides, with Spain bleeding to death, my judgement as a theatre man was influenced by not wanting to have any part in Fascist propaganda. I refused to agree to its being produced in coloured shirts, so Hunt finally produced the play in Renaissance costume. This saved a riot maybe, but it lost the theatre a lot of money, and I practically finished the job of bankrupting it.

  After that, the New Abbey Policy was not heard of again till I went to the first performance of a nice little play about the poet James Clarence Mangan, and saw a Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins, which had not been in the original manuscript. I realized that Hunt simply could not stand those beautiful and expensive masks that had been made for Dr Faustus lying around unused, and had induced the author to write a scene about them. Poor Mangan! Later, when I came to write a study of Macbeth this enabled me to understand why Macbeth’s death scene had been omitted and his head brought in on a pole instead. The stage director of Shakespeare’s company had a head available, as we had masks for the Seven Deadly Sins. Theatre people are like that – even Hunt. Not economical – definitely not economical – but very conscious that use can be made of the stuff that is lying about the theatre.

  Meanwhile, though Robinson had blown cold on our two best plays – Carroll’s Shadow and Substance and Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche – we produced new plays and recovered lost ground. I had gone the rounds begging for plays and had a few promises, one from Sean O’Faolain and another from Brinsley MacNamara. Then Hunt had the idea of dramatizing a story of mine called ‘In the Train’, and, with the threat of Dr Faustus hanging over me, I jumped at the chance. I disliked Hunt’s method of dramatization, which had choruses in the manner of a German impressionist play, with invisible groups chanting in the rhythm of the train. ‘To Stop the Train Pull Down the Chain – PULL – DOWN – THE CHAIN – Pull Down the Chain.’ But the performance proved that Hunt was the very man we needed to put new life into the tradition. The curtain went up and there was an Irish railway carriage, lovingly re-created in every particular, and a group of Irish villagers – not Abbey comics – who were involved in a murder trial the significance of which they could not apprehend. The whole performance was drawn to a fourth of the scale usual in Abbey productions, but every detail was in focus and exquisitely rendered, and one could hear from the audience little chuckles of delighted recognition, as when one of the policemen pulled down his greatcoat to use as a card table. The most beautiful performance was that by Denis O’Dea, whose voice and build have kept him cast as the stage Irish policeman, and who there, for a few minutes, created a gentle timid country boy in uniform that I have never been able to forget. I knew that night that Hunt could give us the thing I had dreamed of for years, a theatre that could express the poetic realism that I admitted in Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faolain and Peadar O’Donnell.

  As I rushed round to the green-room to congratulate the players I bumped into Yeats, who was equally excited, but for a different reason. ‘O’Connor, you have made a terrible mistake. You should have explained in the first scene that the woman was the murderess. You must never, NEVER, keep a secret from your audience.’ He said it in the tone of an American television announcer telling you you may never drive a car without consulting your local agent, but though I fancy I swore under my breath, I knew he was right again. Fictional irony and dramatic irony have nothing in common. It was one of the occasions when I got a hint of what a really great man of the theatre Yeats was, far greater than Robinson, who had the reputation.

  Yeats had a fixation on the well-made play and the functional type of production which he passed on to Robinson. ‘A play is two chairs and a passion,’ Robinson would quote, and Yeats went one better by quoting enthusiastically a story of Salvini. Salvini was rehearsing on a stage that was empty but for one chair, and finally he could stand it no longer and asked, ‘When do I break the chair?’ I saw Yeats’ original production of his own translation of Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus hardly changed his position from beginning to end of the play, and for once I wanted to scream. Years later I saw Laurence Olivier’s production of the same version, and Laurence, remembering that ‘Oedipus’ means ‘clubfoot’, demonstrated the fact by jumping nimbly up and down boxes until I wanted to cry: ‘Is there an orthopedic surgeon in the house?’ That, it seems to me, is the weakness of the Shakespearean convention; it runs to irrelevant bits of business that merely distract attention from the eternal words.

  Admittedly, if he was bored, Yeats could be worse than useless as a critic, and even dangerous. Once he went to see Cartney and Keaveney, a popular play of George Shiels, which had been in the repertory for several years, and insisted on its being removed. His reasons might have been those of Dr Johnson; the principal characters in the play glorified idleness and irresponsibility, and this was an improper moral lesson to teach our audience. Long before I joined the theatre we had an argument about Teresa Deevy, whose plays I admired. ‘She might have been a good playwright if only she let me reconstruct her plays,’ said Yeats, and even for Robinson, who was listening, this was too much. ‘A play of Teresa Deevy’s reconstructed by you would be rather like a play of Chekhov’s reconstructed by Scribe,’ he said tartly.

  But when Yeats was excited he never missed a point. Once – it was the time after Higgins had already ousted Robinson from first place in Yeats’ confidence and esteem – we did a revival of Robinson’s early play The Lost Leader. It dealt with the idea that Parnell, the greatest of Irish leaders, had not died, but, suffering from amnesia, had lived on as porter in a small West of Ireland hotel. A hypnotist from London breaks down the old man’s secret. It is a good dramatic gimmick, and, as usual with gimmicks, there was a masterly first act, a weak second act and a silly third act – in which Parnell, having delivered a typical Robinsonian appeal to love and good fellowship in Ireland, is killed by a stone thrown by a blind man. Hunt made a beautiful production of it, and the opening of the third act is the only occasion I recall of a décor being applauded in its own right.

  The lead was played by an established London actor, and, as usual, Yeats couldn’t stand him. We spent the interval together, and Yeats embarrassed me in the foyer by illustrating how he felt the Englishman acted. ‘When he should have been calling down the thunderbolt,’ he said, reaching towards the ceiling, ‘he was picking up matches,’ and the tall figure bent and groped on the floor. But during the last act Yeats’ imagination was working overtime; he had his old affection for Robinson, and nothing could keep him from rewriting the works of people he liked. When I went up to the boardroom later, Robinson was sitting with his head in his hands while Yeats strode up and down in a frenzy, lecturing him. ‘Tell him, O’Connor,’ he snorted at me when I entered. ‘When Parnell has to tell the mob what to do, he must tell them only what has already happened. There must be no abstractions. Everything must be concrete. He must tell them to do only what the audience knows they themselves have already done.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Robinson said, looking at the floor. ‘I disagree.’

  God knows I sympathized with Robinson, being lectured like a schoolboy on his first night, because I had been lectured myself in my time and hadn’t liked it, but I knew Yeats was right again. Nothing could have rescued that feeble last act but some such impudent piece of theatrical dexterity.

  It was a grave mistake not to take up Yeats on those wild ideas of his, for, apart from anything else, if you couldn’t do the job yourself, he was only too pleased to do it for you. He had the ultimate brazenness of the great performer, the man to whom the audience was merely an instrument, and any refusal to use the instrument he regarded as ‘barren pride’ – the phrase he used when dismissing a friend of mine who had refused to accept any suggestions for the improvement of his play. He was not
afraid to accept suggestions himself – ‘She might be that stately girl that was trodden by a bird’ is supposed to be the suggestion of a poet he particularly disliked – though he did kick up a great pother before accepting them. He hissed with rage when I told him that ‘Made Plato’s tolerance in vain’ was not English, but all the subsequent editions have ‘Made the Platonic tolerance vain, and vain the Doric discipline’, in spite of the nasty assonance.

  In plays that nominally are not his, one can sometimes see his workmanship in the ‘properties’, the things that are actually on the stage when the play opens – Salvini’s ‘chair’. In On Baile’ Strand they are the cooking-pot and the stool. Once he told me how he and Lady Gregory had worked on The Rising of the Moon until he was exhausted and sank on to a piano stool. That gave him the idea. ‘A barrel!’ he cried. ‘We must have a barrel!’

  Towards the end of his life a young dramatist submitted a bad play on a theme that seemed inspired. A party of pilgrims is setting out from an Irish provincial town on foot to an Italian hill-shrine when the father of one of the girl pilgrims falls ill and she has to stay behind to nurse him. She makes the pilgrimage, walking about the sickroom, but when the pilgrims reach the shrine they find her there before them, kneeling at the altar. Yeats was ill at the time, so I went to his house to talk the play over with him, and as we talked the old man’s mask was dropped and I saw the face of the boy behind. It was astonishing to see the reserve of energy he could throw into any literary project: of course the energy was nervous, not physical, and left him exhausted, and one felt guilty at having excited it, but less guilty than when, as sometimes happened, one felt one was boring him. The finest scene he planned took place outside the heroine’s house while she made her pilgrimage round the room, unaware of being watched, while the awed villagers interpreted every movement of hers in terms of a real landscape. ‘Now she’s climbing a hill. It’s a steep hill. Now she is stopping and pulling up her skirt. It must be a mountain stream she is crossing.’ As he described it, I could even see an Italian landscape emerging.

  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it was the only sort of play that made any profound appeal to Yeats. It was a mystery, and all the great early plays of the Abbey Theatre – with the solitary exception of Colum’s – were mysteries.

  Now I am sorry that after that evening, with a masterpiece ‘ready made to my hand’, I got cold feet. I had a vague feeling that Yeats and I had been able to construct that scenario easily only because a better dramatist had done so already. He was so convinced of the overall importance of the fable that he once said to me, ‘When you want to write a play, write it on the back of a postcard and send it to me. I’ll tell you whether you can produce it or not.’ I had the feeling that that particular postcard had already been written and mailed. I lunched with the author and begged her to tell me whether she might have read it. She couldn’t remember, but thought it might have been in a book of Chinese fairytales she had read when she was a child. This gave me new hope and I read every book of Chinese stories I could lay my hands on without finding it. Indeed, it was only long after I had left the theatre that I found it described in a book of Nora Waln’s as one of the masterpieces of the Chinese theatre. The curious orientalism of the whole Abbey Theatre movement was visible that evening when an Anglo-Irishman and a mere Irishman tried to compose the scenario of a great modern Irish play round the theme of a great ancient Chinese play whose existence we didn’t know of.

  19

  By this time, I am afraid, I had been led into spiritual pride, as Catholics like myself called it. I had always known that with economy and hard work the theatre could be made self-supporting, but even then we should have nothing to set against a run of bad luck. In a bad week we could lose a couple of hundred pounds, but in a good one we could rarely make more than twenty-five. All that could be changed if only we had a hundred extra seats, and the only hope of fitting these in was to buy the hardware store next door.

  I explained to the Board that if the proprietors of the hardware store knew that instead of their going into bankruptcy, the theatre was proposing to buy them out, they would raise the price beyond anything we could afford to borrow from the bank. Then one evening I went to a Board meeting and saw Higgins with a long face. Robinson had sent the stage carpenter round to the hardware store to inquire the price.

  I think it was that evening that I lost my head and stamped out of the boardroom to the little office where Hunt was nervously waiting his summons and asked him angrily, ‘Will you accept a contract as manager for the next two years?’ He blushed and stammered, ‘I suppose so, if it’s offered to me.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry; it will be’, and I returned to the boardroom and drafted the resolution appointing him. It is one of the few decisions I have never regretted, because for two years he ran that theatre as it had not been run since Lady Gregory’s day. Soon we had new plays and money in the bank. Though Yeats gave me the credit, it was mainly Hunt’s doing.

  One evening, when Yeats was in attendance, the Secretary, before reading out the bank statement, grinned and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, I have some good news for you. For the first time in years the theatre has a credit balance.’ The credit balance was only three shillings and sixpence, but it meant we need not worry about letters from the bank, threatening to close us down. The directors applauded, and as we left the meeting Yeats asked me to walk with him. When we were approaching O’Connell Bridge, where he was to get his bus, he stopped and made one of his formal little speeches. These, like his reminiscences of people he hadn’t met for twenty years, were part of his dramatic stock-in-trade, and had the same childlike quality. I wish I could recall its perfection of phrasing; it had obviously been thought out, because as so often with that strange, romantic man, self-accusation blended with congratulation of someone else. It was something like this.

  ‘There’s something I wanted to say to you, O’Connor. You may not have realized that I was watching what you did, because I have had to oppose so many of the things you have done, but all the same, I knew they had to be done. Thirty years ago I should have done them myself, but now I am an old man and have too many emotional associations. Thank you.’

  But I had my emotional associations as well as Yeats. I knew that Hunt was the one man who could save the theatre at the time, but I also knew that giving him the opportunity had left Lennox Robinson as jobless and penniless as he had found me in Cork a few years before, and it was too neat an example of the classical peripeteia to cast myself for a part in it. I also remembered that when I came to Dublin Robinson was the first to invite me to his house. After a sleepless night I took him to lunch. It is a task I would not wish on anybody. To speak about his drunkness to an older and more distinguished man is a task for one who in Standish O’Grady’s phrase is ‘not only brazen-faced, but copper-bottomed’, and I am lacking in brass. I asked what I could do to help him and he replied quite simply, ‘Get me a job.’ That was a tall enough order in itself, for the theatre does not run to jobs in which a man can drink himself to death without doing any harm to the institution. ‘And if I can get you a job, will you agree to go to a specialist – the theatre will pay.’ ‘Yes, yes, anything you like,’ he said wearily, ‘but I must have work.’

  There the man was in all his strength and weakness – he could not fight back. If I offered him a job as uniformed doorkeeper he would have accepted it – and later shown me off the premises with perfect courtesy. What I did not recognize then, what Yeats never recognized (though I suspect that Lady Gregory had her suspicions), was the immense power behind that inertia, fed as it was by masochism and accepting without complaint, rebuke, humiliation and even insult. For even if I had understood it then as I understand it now I should still have lacked the ability of the old society woman to shut it out altogether from my mind.

  There was only one thing for me to do. A few days before the scene at the Board meeting I had pressed for the appointment of Shelah Richards as Director of the Abb
ey School of Acting, so I went straight to her and asked to be released from my offer. ‘If you want the job for Lennox Robinson, you’re welcome,’ she said without hesitation. The theatre is a cut-throat business, and actors are of necessity a thankless lot, but not, it seemed, where Robinson was concerned. I only wished I could attract the same sort of devotion. Unfortunately, within a month or two Robinson was turning up drunk to classes, or not turning up at all, and the School of Acting was in as big a mess as the theatre had been.

  Meanwhile the final quarrel in the theatre was being staged between Yeats and Higgins on the one hand and Hunt and myself on the other. ‘Why do you support Hunt?’ Yeats asked me bluntly one night. For want of anything better to say I replied, ‘Because we must have a competent man in the theatre.’ Yeats drew himself together like an old grandfather clock preparing to strike, and, as he always did whenever he wanted to say something crushing without being personal, told a story. ‘My mad brother’ (sometimes it was ‘my father’ and sometimes ‘an old aunt of mine’) ‘once said to me: “What does an artist have to do with competence?” ’