“During the interval Mr. Pearse will deliver a short address on the Irish Style of Dramatic Speaking. The address will be illustrated by the performance of the only surviving fragment of an Irish drama prior to the language revival. The fragment was taken down in County Kerry in 1898, and is part of a play that was enacted among the people up to sixty or seventy years ago. The subject is the hero Dunlaing and his Fairy Lover, and the action takes place just before the Battle of Clontarf.”
The play was originally performed by the students in St. Enda’s School in 1910 and then staged by the Irish Theatre in 1915. It is set in Ireland at the time of Christian evangelization. Actions unfolds when in “a cloister in a wood” a missionary named Ciaran (the master) teaches a group of boys the precepts of the new faith but is put to the test by an evil king who ends up killing one of the master’s favourite pupils. James Moran notes that the production of the play was concomitant to Pearse’s organisation of a large military parade of Dublin Irish Volunteers in Limerick―a parade which included “musical accompaniment, carefully coordinated movements, and an address from Pearse.” The St. Enda’s performers included Mary and Eamon Bulfin, children of the Irish Argentinean nationalist William Bulfin who despite living in Buenos Aires sent his children to boarding school in Ireland. Almost the entire cast of the original production was involved in the Easter Rising (Moran).
Source
Moran, James. “Introduction.” Four Irish Rebel Plays. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. 1-41. Print.
]]>“During the interval Mr. Pearse will deliver a short address on the Irish Style of Dramatic Speaking. The address will be illustrated by the performance of the only surviving fragment of an Irish drama prior to the language revival. The fragment was taken down in County Kerry in 1898, and is part of a play that was enacted among the people up to sixty or seventy years ago. The subject is the hero Dunlaing and his Fairy Lover, and the action takes place just before the Battle of Clontarf.”
The play was originally performed by the students in St. Enda’s School in 1910 and then staged by the Irish Theatre in 1915. It is set in Ireland at the time of Christian evangelization. Actions unfolds when in “a cloister in a wood” a missionary named Ciaran (the master) teaches a group of boys the precepts of the new faith but is put to the test by an evil king who ends up killing one of the master’s favourite pupils. James Moran notes that the production of the play was concomitant to Pearse’s organisation of a large military parade of Dublin Irish Volunteers in Limerick―a parade which included “musical accompaniment, carefully coordinated movements, and an address from Pearse.” The St. Enda’s performers included Mary and Eamon Bulfin, children of the Irish Argentinean nationalist William Bulfin who despite living in Buenos Aires sent his children to boarding school in Ireland. Almost the entire cast of the original production was involved in the Easter Rising (Moran).
Source
Moran, James. “Introduction.” Four Irish Rebel Plays. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. 1-41. Print.
The play was performed in Hardwicke Street for six nights from 28 June to 4 July 1915. Checkov along with Ibsen, Maeterlink, Strindberg were among the authors favoured by the directorate of the Irish Theatre, set up with the intent to offer an alternative to the peasant drama of the Abbey by staging “Irish language plays, contemporary continental masterpieces, and works by Irish writers who dealt with urban and upper-middle class life” (Feeney).
Sources:
Feeney, William. ‘Irish Theatre, The (1914-1920)’. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan. London: Aldwych Press, 1996. Print.
]]>Playbill of the Irish Theatre in Harwicke Street (June-July 1915) for Uncle Vanya Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts by Anton Tchekoff.
Playbill of the Irish Theatre in Harwicke Street (June-July 1915) for Uncle Vanya Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts by Anton Tchekoff.
The play was performed in Hardwicke Street for six nights from 28 June to 4 July 1915. Checkov along with Ibsen, Maeterlink, Strindberg were among the authors favoured by the directorate of the Irish Theatre, set up with the intent to offer an alternative to the peasant drama of the Abbey by staging “Irish language plays, contemporary continental masterpieces, and works by Irish writers who dealt with urban and upper-middle class life” (Feeney).
Sources:
Feeney, William. ‘Irish Theatre, The (1914-1920)’. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan. London: Aldwych Press, 1996. Print.
Both plays were produced for the first time in 1915. Pagans will only be published in book form in 1920, whereas Eimar O’Duffy’s The Walls of Athens appeared in The Irish Review in June 1914 and was published in book form in 1915 “on sale at the Irish Theatre” for the price of one shilling net. The setting of Pagans, a drawing room in the Dublin house of Mrs Fitzmaurice is in the Ibsenite style favoured by the Irish Theatre founders, whereas the historic setting of The Walls of Athens required the scenic effects of Jack Morrow (an Irish painter who contributed several plates for the Irish Review) and the costumes of the Dun Emer Guild.
]]>Playbill of the Irish Theatre in Harwicke Street (April 1915) for: Pagans by Thomas MacDonagh; The Walls of Athens by Eimar O’Duffy.
Playbill of the Irish Theatre in Harwicke Street (April 1915) for: Pagans by Thomas MacDonagh; The Walls of Athens by Eimar O’Duffy.
Both plays were produced for the first time in 1915. Pagans will only be published in book form in 1920, whereas Eimar O’Duffy’s The Walls of Athens appeared in The Irish Review in June 1914 and was published in book form in 1915 “on sale at the Irish Theatre” for the price of one shilling net. The setting of Pagans, a drawing room in the Dublin house of Mrs Fitzmaurice is in the Ibsenite style favoured by the Irish Theatre founders, whereas the historic setting of The Walls of Athens required the scenic effects of Jack Morrow (an Irish painter who contributed several plates for the Irish Review) and the costumes of the Dun Emer Guild.
“My writings have been only the prelude to my other work. […] Sooner that you think, Frances, politics will be dropped here, and something better will take their place […] You will not know yourself in the Ireland that we shall make here.” (Pagans)
The character of John was played by Thomas MacDonagh’s brother John, active in the Irish Theatre as actor and manager.
Sources
MacDonagh. Thomas. Pagans. A Modern Play in Two Conversations. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1920. Print.
Norstedt, Johann A.. Thomas MacDonagh. A Critical Biography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980. Print.
White, Lawrence William. "MacDonagh, Thomas". Dictionary of Irish Biography. (Ed.) James McGuire, James Quinn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Web.
]]>Thomas MacDonagh's Third Play, Pagans (1915)
Pagans is Thomas MacDonagh’s third play after When the Dawn Has Come (1908) and Metempsychosis (1912) and was first produced in April 1915 by the Irish Theatre in Hardwicke Street for a run of six nights. It is the story of husband and wife, Mr. John Fitzmaurice and Mrs. Frances Fitzmaurice, who have been separated for three years and who reunite in her Dublin house to realize that, despite their love for eachother, they can’t make a fresh start. The play is almost a dramatic version of MacDonagh’s poem ‘John-John’ (Songs of Myself) with the protagonist’s final nationalist speech as arguably one the major structural revision (Norstedt). The play is generally read as mirroring MacDonagh’s personal transition to military separatism (White), particularly due to its epilogue when John accepts the separation from his wife from his wife and announcing how
“My writings have been only the prelude to my other work. […] Sooner that you think, Frances, politics will be dropped here, and something better will take their place […] You will not know yourself in the Ireland that we shall make here.” (Pagans)
The character of John was played by Thomas MacDonagh’s brother John, active in the Irish Theatre as actor and manager.
Sources
MacDonagh. Thomas. Pagans. A Modern Play in Two Conversations. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1920. Print.
Norstedt, Johann A.. Thomas MacDonagh. A Critical Biography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980. Print.
White, Lawrence William. "MacDonagh, Thomas". Dictionary of Irish Biography. (Ed.) James McGuire, James Quinn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Web.
Sources
MacDonagh, Thomas. “Metempsychosis: or A Mad World. A Play in One Act” The Irish Review. February 1912. 585-599. Print.
Nolan, Jerry. ‘Edward Martyn’s Struggle for an Irish National Theater, 1899-1920’. New Hibernia Review. Vol. 7, N. 2, Samhradh/Summer 2003. Print.
Norstedt, Johann A.. Thomas MacDonagh. A Critical Biography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980. Print.
White, Lawrence William. "MacDonagh, Thomas". Dictionary of Irish Biography. (Ed.) James McGuire, James Quinn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Web.
]]>Thomas MacDonagh's second play Metempsychosis (1912)
First printed in The Irish Review, the play is a satire of theosophy and occultism. It was first performed on 18,19, 20 April 1912 by the Theatre of Ireland, a company formed in 1906 from a number of intellectuals and practitioners dissatisfied with the Abbey Theatre aesthetic and including Padraic Colum, P.H. Pearse, and Edward Martyn among others. Critics often focus on the main character Earl Winton-Winton de Winton who provides a unmerciful caricature of W.B. Yeats. However, Norstedt notes how the other character ‘Stranger’ is also satirized and argues that the ‘Stranger could be seen as a parody of MacDonagh’s initial reverence for Yeats (later regretted) and of MacDonagh’s own ideas of immortality expressed in some of his poems. White also notes how the play was misinterpreted as a serious comment on the topic of transmigration of souls.
Sources
MacDonagh, Thomas. “Metempsychosis: or A Mad World. A Play in One Act” The Irish Review. February 1912. 585-599. Print.
Nolan, Jerry. ‘Edward Martyn’s Struggle for an Irish National Theater, 1899-1920’. New Hibernia Review. Vol. 7, N. 2, Samhradh/Summer 2003. Print.
Norstedt, Johann A.. Thomas MacDonagh. A Critical Biography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980. Print.
White, Lawrence William. "MacDonagh, Thomas". Dictionary of Irish Biography. (Ed.) James McGuire, James Quinn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Web.
BRUMMELL. And just when the oracle was about to culminate in some stupendous utterance—Oh! To have it ignorantly and barbarously shattered like this—!
MOON. Look here, Brummell, I can’t stand you any longer. I’ll be quite frank with you. I admit you are a very good musician, or at least you were once. But I assure you that you are at the same time the most egregious intellectual fop the world has ever seen.
BRUMMELL. What do you mean, Moon? You know you cannot compose unless the female typist is at hand to flatter and call everything you produce a masterpiece.
MOON (very excited). Not at all—you take it for granted that I am dried up like yourself.
BRUMMELL (scornfully). Magnificent insolence—! But you can only think like a child. [They shake their fists in each other’s face. MISS WHELAN drops the fragments and flies out by the door at back calling for the Police. She is quickly followed by GERRARD, and by SISTER FARNAN, who bears off Audrey. MOON seizes the washhand-stand and defends himself, as BRUMMELL raises the banjo in order to strike him.]
Interestingly, Brummell-Yeats’s comment on Moon-Moore’s typist has been rendered in one of the caricatures by Grace Gifford, published in the frontispiece of the last issue of the Irish Review (September/November 1914).
Sources:
Feeney, William. ‘Irish Theatre, The (1914-1920)’. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan. London: Aldwych Press, 1996. Print.
Martyn, Edward. The Dream Physician. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1915. Print.
Nolan, Jerry. ‘Edward Martyn’s Struggle for an Irish National Theater, 1899-1920’. New Hibernia Review. Vol. 7, N. 2, Samhradh/Summer 2003. Print.
]]>The inaugural play of the Irish Theatre, Edward Martyn's The Dream Physician (1914).
The Dream Physician was the inaugural play of the Irish Theatre a new dramatic venture set up in 1914 by Martyn, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett and ‘conceived as an alternative to the commercial playhouses and to the peasant drama of the Abbey Theatre’ (Feeney). The Dream physician was first performed in the Little Theatre in O’Connell Street from 2nd to 7th of November 1914. The play is a parody against three Irish Literary Theatre directors George Moore (‘George Augustus Moon, an old journalist’), W.B. Yeats (‘Beau Brummel, a musician’), and Augusta Gregory (‘Sister Fernan, a hospital nurse). According to Jerry Nolan, Martyn’s satire in the play was aimed a number of fixations of the literary theatre directors: ‘the cult of egotistical interpretation of events, the posturings of self appointed geniuses, poetic incantations, occult practices, Fiona McLeod-William Sharpe style of Celtic verse, and Lady Gregory Kiltartanese.’ An example of this parodic mode is the scuffle at the end of Act IV, when an improvised séance with an eighteenth century wash-hand stand and with Sister Farnan as a medium degenerates when the wash-hand stand is broken by Moon:
BRUMMELL. And just when the oracle was about to culminate in some stupendous utterance—Oh! To have it ignorantly and barbarously shattered like this—!
MOON. Look here, Brummell, I can’t stand you any longer. I’ll be quite frank with you. I admit you are a very good musician, or at least you were once. But I assure you that you are at the same time the most egregious intellectual fop the world has ever seen.
BRUMMELL. What do you mean, Moon? You know you cannot compose unless the female typist is at hand to flatter and call everything you produce a masterpiece.
MOON (very excited). Not at all—you take it for granted that I am dried up like yourself.
BRUMMELL (scornfully). Magnificent insolence—! But you can only think like a child. [They shake their fists in each other’s face. MISS WHELAN drops the fragments and flies out by the door at back calling for the Police. She is quickly followed by GERRARD, and by SISTER FARNAN, who bears off Audrey. MOON seizes the washhand-stand and defends himself, as BRUMMELL raises the banjo in order to strike him.]
Interestingly, Brummell-Yeats’s comment on Moon-Moore’s typist has been rendered in one of the caricatures by Grace Gifford, published in the frontispiece of the last issue of the Irish Review (September/November 1914).
Sources:
Feeney, William. ‘Irish Theatre, The (1914-1920)’. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan. London: Aldwych Press, 1996. Print.
Martyn, Edward. The Dream Physician. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1915. Print.
Nolan, Jerry. ‘Edward Martyn’s Struggle for an Irish National Theater, 1899-1920’. New Hibernia Review. Vol. 7, N. 2, Samhradh/Summer 2003. Print.