The Theatre
["FIGHTING THE WAVES " : A BALLET-PLAY. BY W. B. YFATs.]
THIRTY years ago Mr. W. B. Yeats founded a national Irish drama, and sought thereby to restore the symbols of ancient Gaelic epic to a ruling place in the Irish imagination. He has cause for pride to-day; for the Irish drama is famous in two hemispheres. That little theatre in Middle Abbey Street, with its Celtic mirrors of hammered copper and its armorial emblems of Ireland and of Dublin, has nourished every intellectual 'movement which has stirred the Irish people during a quarter of a century. With lively anticipation a distinguished audience thronged the theatre on August 13th for the first 'production of our poet's new "ballet-play," entitled Fighting the Waves.
Now, the significance of this curious little play lies in the theatre's history. The early heroic plays were considered by their author to have failed in their purpose. Dublin audiences failed to be stirred by haughty poetry :—
" 0 silver trumpets, be you lifted up
And cry to the great race that is to come,—" and this was hardly strange, since the mind of Dublin is out of tune with the regal imagination of the country folk. Dublin preferred a realistic and satirical drama, and crowded to "the Abbey" when Sean O'Casey held up the mirror to its meaner streets and mocked at the defilement of the nation's colours. Dr. Yeats has told how he was driven by the triumph of realism into intellectual solitude, and how he devised a new dramatic form.
This was based on the Noh plays of Japan. The poet wrote four "plays for dancers." Three of these were in the Irish heroic mood, and during ten years they have been played in various drawing-rooms and before royal audiences. The new form needs no more " properties " than can be carried in a cab, and is adapted to production in such small apartments as will accommodate select gatherings. The players speak through masks. Poetry and ritual dance are united and are addressed solely to the highly cultivated mind. The poet despaired of the multitude ; for no longer, as in Shakespeare's day, was "poetry a part of the general life." Henceforward, poetic drama must be private. "Whatever we lose in mass and in power we should recover in elegance and in subtlety."
Dr. Yeats's "ballet-play," however, is an elaborated version of one of his "plays for dancers." He has returned from the drawing-room to the stage, encouraged thereto by three circumstances. The Abbey School of Ballet, under Miss Ninette de Valois, has perfected a dancing technique. A Dutch artist, Hildo Krop, has made large, bold, fantastic masks for the Irish characters—masks fitted for the full-sized theatre. An American, Mr. George Antheil, has composed a wonderful musical setting. Add to these advantages highly imaginative settings by Miss D. Travers Smith and—what counted most of all—the consummate production by Mr. Lennox Robinson, and the "ballet play" could not fail to seize and impress the mind most potently.
In the first passage, before a curtain of huge tumbling seas, six green-veiled figures represented the flowing waters ; and against these strove, in a dance that moved through and through their ranks, the figure of the hero, Cuchulain, blade in hand. Those unwearying rhythms prevail against his failing strength, and at last he sinks, the proud white mask thrown back in agony, as they rise. The hero has been overcome in his frenzied battle with the waves.
The curtain parts. We see the sick-bed of the hero, and we are told how he had fought madly with the sea after slaying his own son. Emer, his wife, calls Eithne Inguba, his mistress, to entice him from the brink of death; • but it is the mischievous spirit of Bricriu that animates the body and glares forth in diabolic mask. Eithne flies, but Emer's eyes are touched by Bricriu, and the wraith of Cuchulain becomes visible. Fand, the sea-god's daughter—a wild, metallic creature of frantically rapid gesture—whirls noisily in and dances before the wraith, and the hero's ghost, starting up, pursues her in new desire. The stage is left with Bricriu and Emer. One thing, Bricriu says, can call Cuchulain back from that unearthly fascination beyond the grave : it is, that Emer shall renounce his love, and be content to receive back a living, but unfaithful, hus- band. After resistance, Emer consents. Bricriu sinks back behind the curtains—that is, leaves the body of Cuchulain- and now the figure on' the bed wears the mask of the live Cuchulain. It is for Eithne that he calls as he revives, and forlorn Emer stands in silent grief.
The sea-curtain of the sea closes on the scene, and now Fand is seen, her lightning movements changed to the slow, dead motions of despair ; and this is her dance of sorrow among the waves.
Let it be said that the whole performance was terribly impressive. It was regrettable that, in the gallery where this critic was seated, the lyrical commentary that is chanted by a mysterious musician could not be followed without the book, so that Dr. Yeats's best lines (for the birds of Angus still sing about him) were lost. The music, with its cunning rippling of wave on the crest of wave and its lightnings and thunderings, was the most wonderful thing of the sort ever heard in "the Abbey."
Where disappointment came was in two particulars. First, the whole drama turned upon Cuchulain as a devourer of women. He was personified and indiscriminate lust. All the heroic trappings thus were cloaked about the most paltry of emotions, and to a virile mind the flavour of the whole performance was soured. Furthermore, the masking of the figures made this animalism the more brutal, because inhuman. Masks serve to render an actor's words and actions abstract, and thus to heighten such spiritual emotions as the grief of Oedipus. To render animal desire absixact is to make it doubly ugly, as in some inexcusable, outworn roué. Secondly, the play was too brief for its elaborate setting. It lasted only half an hour, yet musician, producer, and poet had toiled to carry our imagination into an exotic world and to excite large expectations.
This brevity gave the performance the effect of a study for something greater. It was like a painter's mixture of colour upon a palette. One felt that something really tremendous, really compelling, might be achieved with such resources as here were exhibited. The splendid abstraction of the fight with the waves, and the suggestion, by poetry and strange settings, of the fisher's house to which a swooning hero is brought, the scene instinct with the excitement of oceanic Gaelic country : these things were hints of the mighty drama that might be. For its achievement, a larger action would be necessary : five minutes with the gods are not enough ; and the theme would need to be as spacious as that dynastic epic war in which Cuchulain fought, and not the vulgarity of" the
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