Interchapter Ii: 1940–1969
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
INTERCHAPTER II: 1940–1969 Melissa Sihra Lady Augusta Gregory died in 1932 and from that period the Abbey Theatre consisted of an all-male directorate – Yeats, Kevin O’Higgins, Ernest Blythe, Brinsley MacNamara, Lennox Robinson and Walter Starkie. Blythe, an Irish-language revivalist and politician, would now remain on the inside of the Abbey for many years to come. Issues of artistic policy remained primarily within Yeats’s domain, but with his death in 1939 the position of power was open and Blythe took over as Managing Director in 1941, remaining in that post until 1967. Earnán de Blaghd, as he preferred to be known, espoused a conser- vative ethos and the board as a whole was highly restrictive artist- ically. While the work of a significant number of women dramat- ists was produced during these decades (see Appendix pp. 223–4), this period in the Abbey’s history is associated predominantly ‘with kitchen farce, unspeakably bad Gaelic pantomimes, compulsory Irish and insensitive bureaucracy’.1 The move from the 1930s into the 1940s saw the consolidation of Éamon De Valera’s Fianna Fáil administra- tion. Bunreacht na hÉireann (The Irish Constitution) was established in 1937, the same year that Samuel Beckett moved to Paris. During this time women activists sought political representation and equal rights as citizens of the Irish Free State, particularly with regard to the 1932 marriage bar. In 1938 Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, a prolific feminist campaigner and member of the Women’s Graduates’ Associ- ation, argued that the constitution was based on ‘a fascist model, in which women would be relegated to permanent inferiority, their avoca- tions and choice of callings limited because of an implied invalidism as the weaker sex’.2 A fully independent Republic of Ireland came into being in 1949, in a decade that was framed by De Valera’s patriotic speech: ‘The Ireland that we dreamed of’. From the shadows of World War Two, he addressed the nation on St Patrick’s Day, 1943, as ‘a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields 87 88 Women in Irish Drama and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens’.3 In this period of high unemployment and mass poverty, De Valera’s ideological tableau vivant had very little to do with the everyday realities of vulnerable and marginalized people such as orphaned children, single women, emigrants, the elderly and scrimping small farmers. Change was gradual but constant at this time. The electrification of Ireland from the 1930s onwards impacted psychologically as well as practically upon the lives of women and men, and denoted the symbolic and actual advent of modernity. This was a time when piseogs (malevolent spirits) and fairies – ‘the beyond crowd’ – still roamed the mindscape of the predominantly rural population whilst appli- ances such as refrigerators, washing machines and electric cookers were being introduced into the home. Social and political groups such as the National Council of Women, the Joint Committee of Women’s Soci- eties and Social Workers, the Irish Countrywomen’s Association and the Irish Housewives’ Association enabled some sense of a collective identity and outlet for women during these years. Diarmaid Ferriter observes: Contemporary publications aimed at women were well aware that Irish women desired modernity in a new consumer era, not just in obvious areas like electricity and running water, but in respect of recreation, appearance and relationships. The best-selling Woman’s Life magazine in the 1930s and 1940s offered as role models not only independent unmarried working women, but women in arts, culture and sport .4 While the Catholic Church promoted large families, sexuality was some- thing that was repressed and very much under the surveillance of the Church and State. As the plays by the women whose work was produced at this time show, life was extremely restrictive for the majority of the population, and women in particular. While Teresa Deevy (1894– 1963) emerged in the 1930s, her career was stifled due to rejection by the Abbey in subsequent decades, causing her to withdraw from the stage and write radio plays (even though she became completely deaf in her twenties). Deevy’s rejected play, Wife to James Whelan (written in 1937), was eventually staged in October 1956 at Madame Desirée Bannard Cogley’s Studio Theatre Club, Upper Mount Street, Dublin, and was directed by Madame Cogley. The script was missing for a number of years but finally turned up at Deevy’s family home, ‘Landscape’, Interchapter II: 1940–1969 89 Co. Waterford, and is published in a special issue of the Irish University Review.5 Fiona Becket writes: ‘In Wife to James Whelan, rejected by the Abbey in 1937, the figure of the young mother Nan Bowers repres- ents Irish women’s economic vulnerability outside the family, but also shows the modern family unit itself subject to the vicissitudes of phys- ical health and economic fortune.’6 Deevy died in 1963 and so did not live to see the revival of her best known work, Katie Roche, on the Abbey main-stage in 1975, directed by Joe Dowling with Jeananne Crowley as the eponymous heroine (see Figure 4).7 The Constitution that De Valera produced was heavily influenced by the social teachings of the Catholic Church, particularly the 1891 Figure 4 Jeananne Crowley as Katie Roche and Bill Foley as Stanislaus Gregg in the 1975 Abbey Theatre production of Katie Roche by Teresa Deevy. Photo: Courtesy of Fergus Bourke. 90 Women in Irish Drama Rerum Novarum Papal Encyclical and Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, which were fundamentally opposed to contraception. The Cath- olic Church continued to induce a palpable anxiety about sexuality and the body throughout these decades and reacted strongly to the perceived immorality of pastimes such as dancing. Myrtle Hill points out how, as recently as 1960, the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly advised dance promoters operating in his jurisdiction that: No dances should be held on Saturday nights, eves of holy days, Christmas night, or during Lent (except for St Patrick’s night for traditional Irish dancing or where dancing has already been customary on that night) Concern for the moral welfare of those who dance will surely be accepted as no more of an interference with legitimate amusement than concern for their health and physical safety.8 State oppression in the 1950s was rife with censorship laws cultiv- ating a climate of anti-intellectualism which only began to be allevi- ated in the 1960s. Church and State agendas ensured that ‘books and magazines were banned on two basic grounds – that they were “inde- cent or obscene” or that they advocated contraception and abortion.’9 One venue that was outward-looking rather than insular was Dublin’s Gate Theatre, founded in 1928 by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards. This theatre exuded an esprit of European style, modernity and visual flair which was in broad contradistinction to the Abbey, which ‘had became both narrowly national and dully ruralist’.10 Mac Liammóir and Edwards formed the Gate Theatre Company, enlisting the talents of actress Coralie Carmichael, and audiences were attracted to the sophisticated, stylish feel of the newly designed theatre in the eighteenth-century Assembly Rooms next to the Rotunda Hospital. With its thinly disguised, repainted standard kitchen box-set, the Abbey seemed regressive by comparison. Mary Manning’s (1906–1999) Youth’s the Season-? was produced at the Gate on 8 December 1931, when she was in her twenties. Robert Hogan cites Mac Liammóir, who remarked that Manning’s, ‘brain, nimble and observant as it was, could not yet keep pace with a tongue so caustic that even her native city was a little in awe of her.’ That incisive perception and satiric wit were beautifully evident in Youth’s the Season–? which still comes near to being the most Interchapter II: 1940–1969 91 sophisticated and yet poignant study of young people to come out of modern Dublin.11 Her subsequent plays, the one-act Storm Over Wicklow (1933) and Happy Family (1934), were also produced at the Gate.12 Manning was born in Dublin of an Anglo-Irish Kerry background. She studied acting at the Abbey school and performed with the Irish Players in England, and at the Abbey in Dublin, before joining the Gate. In the 1930s Manning left Ireland for America and turned to novel-writing. The Voices of Shem, her adaptation of Finnegan’s Wake, was first produced by the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1955. Hogan praises Manning’s first play effusively, while not being able to remove himself from the fact of her gender: ‘Dublin had never seen a play quite like Youth’s the Season- ?, and perhaps it has not seen one since. Such a strong and smoothly written play would have been remarkable no matter who had written it, but it was even more remarkable for a girl barely out of her teens.’13 Chairman and main financial backer of the Gate Theatre at the time was Edward Arthur Henry Packenham, the sixth Earl of Longford, who founded Longford Productions, presenting plays by both himself and his wife Christine. In 1936 Lord and Lady Longford broke away from the Gate while Mac Liammóir, Edwards and other members of the company were on a tour of Egypt. Longford Productions then played in the Dublin building for six months of the year, with Edwards and Mac Liammóir using it for the rest of the year. Christine Packenham’s (1900–1980) plays were of a superior quality to those of her husband and her works fall into three categories – adaptations of novels, such as Pride and Prejudice; spark- ling comedies satirizing Irish life such as Mr.