Abbey Theatre Drama Festival
STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
ELEVEN plays in a week, even if they are short and Irish, is at least one too many. So we must be excused for missing the performance. of The Playboy of the. Western World, with which the Abbey Theatre Festival's first week concluded, and for going over instead to see the Gaiety Revels of 1938 at a much larger and much fuller theatre. Here were Messrs. Jimmy O'Dea and Noel Purcell, Dublin's pet comedians, giving us the long and short of the city in an uproarious medley of a revue that for our delight had flying allusions to Symbolism and Kathleen ni Houlihan. This was balm to the spirit after a week of some- thing like chagrin.
Dublin is a place of contradictions and contrarieties. Your hotel-bedroom will surely have constant hot water but very inconstant cold. At breakfast you soon learn to ask for tea when you want coffee, and for coffee when your craving is for tea. The streets are a labyrinth full of mis-direction. Of the two picture-galleries the National one containing the master- pieces is atrociously designed so that you peer into major Rem- brandti and see nothing but your own face, while the Municipal one is admirably designed but contains an unconscionable amount of nineteenth-century mediocrity. Perversest of all the things in this perverse city is the Abbey Theatre itself, which has chosen to give us a fortnight's feast of its past tri- umphs and now turns out to have hardly any players fit to present them. " What's wrong with the Abbey ? " say the Dublin newspapers. The following things are wrong with it. (t) It needs Miss Allgood and Mr. Sinclair, Miss Maire O'Neill and Mr. Barry Fitzgerald, who now are lost to London or to Hollywood. (2) It needs a good all-Irish producer. (3) It needs a more numerous and a more punctual audience. Now, what is right _with the Abbey ? (t) The building, which al- though ;tiny and not over-comfortable, is wholly distinguished in the sense that it always has that air of tension which leads you to think something exciting in the way of a play or a per- formance may happen at any turn. (2) The discipline which ensures that the prompter, that hero of every London perfor- mance, is not either heard or needed. (3) The spirit, which so far as the younger players go is both zealous and sincere.
It will be gathered that there is some promise in the present company. In the case of Mr. Cyril Cusack and Miss Ria Mooney the promise is brilliant. But for Synge's Maurya and Dr. Yeats's Kathleen one must have mature achievement, else Riders to the Sea and Kathleen ni Houlihan mean nothing at all. In the present festival these lovely playlets have meant less than nothing ; neither has Lady Gregory's The Rising of the Moon. On the other hand—a phrase that has to be often used in Dublin !—Synge's Well of the Saints and Lady Gregory's Damer's Gold were delightfully resuscitated by Mr. Cusack in two performances as respectively unlike as a blind Irish beggar and the alert Irish terrier at his feet. Here again there were contributory performances which must have made those dear, dead, secondary players, Sydney Morgan and Joe O'Rourke, stir uneasily in their graves. The one good production of the week was that of Mr. Shaw's The Shewing- Up of Blanco Posnet which was brisk, pungent, and alive. But this must all be part of the occasion's general perverseness, for Mr. Shaw, though he was born in the present Synge Street in Dublin, can hardly have sought his present represen- tation there. He wrote in a recent pieface :—" To this day my sentimental regard for Ireland does not include the capital. I am not enamoured of failure, of poverty, of obscurity, and of the ostracism and contempt which these imply ; and these were all that Dublin offered to the. enormity of my unconscious ambition. The cities a man likes are the cities he has conquered." Mr. Shaw may take it that he has now conquered Dublin. So far as the Festival has gone, no one else has. In none of the purely Irish plays has there been anything like the right expressiveness in the collective playing. Of Dr. Yeats's new piece, Purgatory, least said soonest mended. It is an unsmiling symbolical fragment that gives us parricide and filicide cheek by jowl. Messrs. O'Dea and Purcell could, without adding or subtracting a word, have made it a rich and pertinent burlesque of the Abbey at its worst. ALAN DENT.
Previous page
