Interchapter Ii: 1940–1969
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’.
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