The actors, antipathetic to the abrasive language, now rebelled at some of the coarser expressions and gestures. The newly wed Eileen Crowe objected to her line, as Mrs Gogan, “any kid, livin’ or dead, that Jinnie Gogan’s had … was got between th’ bordhers of the Ten Commandments”;[353] her husband, cast as Clitheroe, disliked saying the word “snotty”; he and others balked at “bum”, “bastard”, and “lousy”. Even the brave Ria Mooney, risking her reputation by playing Rosie Redmond, complained to Robinson about “the horror of her part”.
O’Casey rejected their views. “Were corrections of this kind to be suffered,” he said, “the work would be one of fear, for everyone would start a canonical pruning”,[354] and threatened to withdraw the play. Yeats backed up O’Casey, and Eileen Crowe was replaced as Mrs Gogan by May Craig; O’Casey had in the first instance refused to countenance her in the part, although he later described her playing of it as “perfection”.
The pressure put on the pro-O’Casey actors, in particular Ria Mooney and Fitzgerald, made the atmosphere uneasy. Fallon begged to be released from playing Peter Flynn, and wanted to do Captain Brennan instead: this was allowed. Ria Mooney responded to the hostility with typical O’Casey defiance, putting more fire into the part of Rosie because of the opposition, but Fitzgerald grew “more nervous than ever, for he had none of the arrogant courage, and none of the jovial determination, which, under different conditions, might have made a great man of Fluther”. For Robinson, too, the rehearsals became a strain, for one day when Sean ventured to suggest the kind of instrument needed for some offstage effect, he burst out, “Oh, shut up, for Christ’s sake, man! I’ve got enough to do to deal with the cast!”[355]
The tension did not escape O’Casey, whose eyes worsened before the first night; this time ingrowing eyelashes “pricked like red-hot needles”.[356] Dr Cummins, his strangely fastidious and sensitive eye doctor — an odd companion, as he thought, for his rough-and-ready proletarian self — ameliorated his condition.
The indefatigable diarist, Holloway, was now shifting fast to the anti-O’Casey camp: a queer fish, O’Casey had called him once, to his face: “You are hard to understand.” He commented on the dress rehearsal of The Plough and the Stars, held on Sunday, 7 February 1926, and which lasted over four hours:
The last act will save the play; the second … is quite unnecessary. On the whole, I imagine, as far as I can judge from such a performance, [it] is not nearly as interesting and gripping a piece as Juno and the Paycock. Will Shields [Barry Fitzgerald, i.e. Fluther] was most indistinct in his utterance. May Craig was consistently good, and Shelah Richards promises to be a big success … Ria Mooney’s part, a prostitute, in Act II, is quite unnecessary; and the incident in Act I about the naked female on the calendar [Giorgione’s Venus] is lugged in for nastiness’ sake alone …
Robinson mostly reviewed the rehearsal from the pit, going up on stage every now and then to tell the players what he wanted them to do with this or that situation, and always giving them effective advice … O’Casey was about on the stage between acts and seated alone in the front row of the stalls, and later on with some of the players in the stalls. He seemed anxious, but not excited. He wore his cloth cap and trench coat.
[357]
*
In the meantime, Yeats, shrewdly, had created a great deal of advance publicity: he had spotted another possibility of making his cockpit, Ireland, and its microcosm, the Abbey, the centre of world attention: the achievement of national independence had been succeeded by dullness. Like O’Casey, Yeats had himself known these leaders of the Easter Rebellion, and found them little more than ordinary — especially MacBride, “the drunken, vainglorious lout”, his rival who had won Maud Gonne (although not for long, for they separated). He was long past his moment of fervid eulogy —
I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born[358]
— and was now more responsive to shock, bitterness, caricature of those same heroes. He hired men to carry sandwich boards and splashed out on posters and newspaper advertising, hoping to make as big a stir as possible.
By the opening night the word had certainly got around: Holloway reported on Monday, 8 February:
There was electricity in the air before and behind the curtain at The Abbey tonight when Sean O’Casey’s play The Plough and the Stars was first produced. The theatre was thronged with distinguished people, and before the doors opened the queues to the pit entrance extended past old Abbey Street — not a quarter of them got in. The play was followed with feverish interest, and the players being called and recalled at the end of the piece. Loud calls for “Author!” brought O’Casey on the stage, and he received an ovation. Monty [James Montgomery, the Irish film censor] said after Act II, “I’m glad I’m off duty.”[359]
Holloway changed his tune about Act II — although it “carries realism to extremes”[360] — when Rosie and the two women were long applauded.
O’Casey, before the performance, showed animation (if not anxiety), with his eyes all screwed up, and once it was under way, because of his painful lashes, found it hard to keep his eyes focused on the “bright zone” of the stage, although he was delighted with the way the actors gave of their best: indeed, given the ill omens, the evening passed very well. The applause was sustained and tumultuous. And while O’Casey found F. J. McCormick as the tragic hero a bit on the reluctant side — he mumbled the word “snotty”, although Shelah Richards as Nora, when she had to repeat it after him, made a point of making it heard — he singled out Ria Mooney for particular praise.
“Afterwards I met him,” she said later. “I was going home and you had to cross over the stage … Well the stage was empty and Sean was coming over from the other side and … his face was white, expressionless … He stopped me and thanked me for the way I played Rosie. He said I saved his play. If the people had disliked Rosie the other two acts would have failed.”[361] This episode shows the depth of commitment O’Casey felt for the character of Rosie: as the woman taken in adultery, about to be stoned by the Pharisees, had excited Christ’s compassion and drawn from him his most profound judgment, so had O’Casey, with his deep and early absorption of biblical stories, provided an image with which to confront the Irish people. As word of the play spread, most Dubliners were outraged, and could find little self-identification, for as one Cumann na mBan woman later told him, “I’d like you to know that there isn’t a prostitute in Ireland from one end of it to th’ other.”[362]
There was not much in the next day’s notices that the over-sensitive O’Casey could object to. The Irish Times found the play’s meaning to reside in Mollser’s line “Is there anybody goin’ with a titther o’ sense?”, while “Great events are outlined only in so far as they have had reactions on the lives of the men and women O’Casey recreates.” But he did make his audience feel the Rising was not worth it; “that one drop of human kindness is worth more than the deepest draughts of the red wine of idealism.” The Irish Independent believed that he had not taken sides: “What the play brings home is the strength of the common ties that bind humanity.” It predicted, rightly as it was to turn out, that this would become O’Casey’s most popular play. The Irish Statesman’s reviewer, Dr Walter Starkie, soon to become a director of the Abbey and as such to have a crucial influence on O’Casey’s future, wrote that although O’Casey pardons all, “He never fails to expose hypocrites and evil to the gaze of humanity … we have rarely seen an audience more moved than in the last act.”[363]
*
From the reviews it began to look as if O’Casey’s deliberate act of desecration, his flagrant irreverence, would fail to make the impact both he and Yeats had hoped, and his insult would have the halo of “artistic masterpiece” conferred on it, to float abo
ve and give it protection. As Holloway forcefully told George O’Brien during the show, Abbey audiences would suffer the devils in hell to exhibit their worst pranks sooner than by their disapproval give another objectionable play like The Playboy of the Western World the advantage of notoriety.
But Irish womanhood was made of sterner stuff. On Tuesday half a dozen young women — one of them the sister of a noted volunteer captured by the Tans in 1920, tortured (the details of this taken down in a sworn statement before a JP) and finally hanged in Mountjoy Gaol — began hissing in the pit when the Plough and Stars flag was brought into the pub in Act II. They were ignored, although more hissing and moaning from the pit followed on Wednesday night at the same moment, and Arthur Shields, playing Langon, made a point of unfolding his tricolour in a defiant way — “He’s usually out for cheap notoriety,” said Holloway.
On Tuesday O’Casey was blithely signing autographs for female admirers, but turning down young men, saying, “I only do so for young and pretty girls.”[364] But on Thursday night the protesters gathered in force, and began interrupting during the first act; mostly they were members of Cumann na mBan — the Society of Women, or “Women Squealers” as O’Casey called them. Prominent among them were the widows of his former heroes, Padraic Pearse and Tom Clarke, while, paradoxically, their leader was the fifty-year-old Mrs Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, widow of the gentle pacifist who had been sadistically tortured and then executed in 1916. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington had been strongly opposed to the Rising, and so earned a moving eulogy in O’Casey’s Irish Citizen Army as “the ripest ear of corn that fell in Easter Week”.[365] It could be said that The Plough and the Stars was conceived and written as fruit from Sheehy-Skeffington’s “sown body”. No wonder O’Casey contemplated his widow’s participation in the outcry against his play with rising incomprehension.
Before the beginning of Act II a student went up to Dr Larchet, conductor of the orchestra, and said, “I suppose that some of those instruments are valuable,” adding, “if I were you, I’d have them moved.”[366] “Larky” locked the piano and other musicians took away their instruments. As soon as Rosie came on a voice called out loudly from the front, “O’Casey out”, while others shouted “Honour Bright!” Fallon wrote, “I can still hear the Joxer-Daly-like accents of that fruity Dublin voice that wanted ‘that wumman taken offa th’ stay-age’.”[367] The uproar intensified throughout the whole of Act II, which went on in dumb show, with Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington screeching down from the balcony, she being abused by one man as a disgrace to her sex, and others calling out, “O’Casey the coward!” — he had not, incidentally, arrived. Other snatches of protest heard were: “We fought in 1916 and did not frequent pubs nor associate with prostitutes”, “The Government is subsidising the Abbey to malign Pearse and Connolly.”
When the curtain rose for Act III a section of the audience, about a dozen women and one or two men, invaded the stage, causing some of the cast to behave “with uncommon roughness”, or “heroically”, depending which side you were on. One young invader was pinned to the floor by two actors who sat on her chest while another was attacked by Barry Fitzgerald, who now became, according to O’Casey, “a genuine Fluther Good”, sending his enemy flying into the stalls with a “flutherian punch on the jaw”.[368] In fact Fitzgerald fell on the piano and hurt his side. McCormick led the more moderate actors, making a plea — hardly very loyal to O’Casey — that the actors should be treated as distinct from the play in which they were appearing.
Vividly though O’Casey described the “two plays” now under way, with the stink bombs, the violence, the constables flooding into the theatre to restore order, he did not take the stage and defend his play, but remained in the foyer surrounded by a crowd of questioning women to whom his attitude — according to Holloway’s now hostile view of him — was “I want to make money.”[369]
But Yeats was seen to be calling for silence from the stage; earlier he had slipped out to visit the offices of the Irish Times to deliver the text of a speech he had prepared and was intending to deliver at the appropriate moment. Nothing illustrates better Yeats’s control of the apparatus of public relations than his behaviour on this night: master of the media, he shaped the event entirely to suit his own aims. He had risen and was attempting to get a hearing above all the hullaballoo on stage and in the auditorium: of course he couldn’t, and loud though he roared, not a word he spoke could be heard by anyone. As the angry Nurse Maguire wrote in the Republican weekly An Poblacht, “Mr Yeats struck an attitude — legs wide apart — hand well raised and bent over the head — result pandemonium!”[370] This was exactly why he had absented himself earlier: he had known his words would be drowned.
Finally the demonstrators were driven out, with Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington declaiming, “We are now leaving the hall under police protection. (Cheers and jeers.) I am one of the widows of Easter Week. It is no wonder that you do not remember the men of Easter Week, because none of you fought on either side. The play is going to London soon to be advertised there because it belies Ireland. We have no quarrel with the players — we realise that they at least have to earn their bread. But I say that if they were men they would refuse to play in some of the parts. All you need do now is sing ‘God Save the King’.”[371] The performance continued quietly to the end: no serious damage was done: some sheets of music were torn, two footlights broken, while the double bass player lost the cover of his instrument.
Next morning in its description of the riot, the Irish Times “reported” what Senator Yeats had said: that he had not been heard above the storm did nothing to lessen the news impact of the event as arranged by him, or of his “stiff, pompous and furious” style, as another commentator called it:
You have disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an ever-recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius? Synge first, and then O’Casey! The news of the happenings of the past few minutes will go from country to country. Dublin has once more rocked the cradle of genius. From such a scene in this theatre went forth the fame of Synge. Equally the fame of O’Casey is born here tonight. This is his apotheosis.[372]
The Catholic press disgustedly claimed that the whole commotion was over-inflated by the “Ascendancy organ” (the Irish Times) and its “Mutual Boosters” — a magnificent opportunity for them to “throw dirt on the Catholic City of Dublin”.[373] A “shoneen” (contemptuous term for a lower-class person who puts on airs) clique in the Abbey was led by Yeats who “dictates, Mussolini-like” to a Dublin audience, complained one correspondent. Another, “For the life of me I could see no British or Free State propaganda, only much washing of our dirty linen in public (about which I rather agree with the lady — Mrs Sheehy-Skeffington). I take it O’Casey is a rather disillusioned fellow about heroes and the like.”
*
Subsequent performances were not only packed, but took place under police protection: times had changed since the captive Republicans, after the Rising, had been jeered at by crowds on the way to the deportation ships. Ria Mooney recounted the terror she lived in, and that the nationalists tried to kidnap her, Barry Fitzgerald, and Shelah Richards. “Someone came knocking at our door but I wouldn’t let me father open the door and let them in.” Barry Fitzgerald’s mother bawled out the raiders and they lost their nerve and ran away. “We had to go to the Theatre every other night by car. During my act the lights would be put on in the auditorium and the walls were lined with detectives. They threw pieces of coal, pennies, anything they had.”[374]
Yeats quarrelled with the noted gunman Dan Breen, and O’Casey with many of his former Republican friends, especially his close companion and fellow hurler, the Marxist Frank Ryan, who was twenty years his junior: he fell out as well not only with Holloway, but with some of his new literary friends, in particular Liam O’Flaherty and the poets Austin Clarke and Fred O’Higgins, and with R. M. Fox.
The dispute rumbled on for several weeks. In two long letters to the Irish Independent, Mrs She
ehy-Skeffington passionately argued her case against The Plough; in the first she decried O’Casey’s realism: “It is the realism that would paint not only the wart on Cromwell’s nose, but that would add carbuncles and running sores in a reaction against idealisation. In no country save in Ireland could a State-subsidised theatre presume on popular patience to the extent of making a mockery and a byword of a revolutionary movement on which the present structure claims to stand.” In the second she repeated this point with even greater force: “Shakespeare pandered to the prejudices of his time and country by representing Joan of Arc (in Henry IV) as a ribald, degraded camp-follower. Could one imagine his play being received with enthusiasm in the French theatre of the time, subsidised by the State?”[375]
Her attack went on to become more personal in the second letter: “Since receiving Mr Yeats’ police-protected ‘apotheosis’ Mr O’Casey appears to take himself over-seriously, not sparing those of us who decline to bow the knee before his godhead.” She attacked again the police enforcement of the production, saying Yeats had struck a blow at the freedom of the theatre in Ireland, as he had over Playboy in 1907, when Arthur Griffith wrote savagely against the police presence, “‘If squalidness, coarseness, and crime are to be found in Ireland, so are cancer, smallpox, and policemen.’”[376]
Sean O'Casey: A Life Page 24