The Splendid Years

The Memoirs of an Abbey Actress and 1916 Rebel

Maire Nic Shuibhlaigh, David Kenny

• Publisher: New Island
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781848405097
• eBook ISBN: 9781848405103
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh was a founder actress of the Abbey Theatre and its first leading lady on its opening in 1904, when she played the title role in W. B. Yeats's Kathleen Ni Houlihan. On that night, five members of her family were acting and working in the theatre. Her beauty and talent captivated audiences and critics at home and abroad. Portrait artists queued up to paint her. Revolutionaries and poets wrote plays for her. The Pearse brothers, AE, Countess Markievicz, Maud Gonne, J. M. Synge and John B. Yeats counted among her admirers.

The Splendid Years – with a foreword by Padraic Colum – is Maire's first-hand account of some of the momentous events that shaped Irish history: including the establishment of the Abbey Theatre and her role as leader of the Cumann na mBan 'girls' in Jacob's Biscuit Factory during the Rising. Withdrawn from print just weeks after its initial publication in the 1950s, the story of this remarkable and inspiring Irishwoman is available again, with new and never-before-seen material.

Here we have Pearse imitating Yeats onstage; J. M. Synge rolling cigarettes for his actors; Maire's aged father printing the War News in 1916; her marriage to Major General Bob Price, and a lost portion of her story, detailing her childhood in Carlow before her rebellious, Parnellite family was run out of town by the clergy.

Part One

The Irish National Theatre Society

Chapter One

1900–1901
The Curtain Stirs

LOOKING BACK now it seems a strange thing to say that, for many of us who were closely involved in it, the beginning of the Irish theatre came as something of a surprise. Before 1902, when the Irish National Theatre Society was established, few of us who made up the original company of Irish players had much general experience of the stage. Most of us were young folk—the eldest amongst us would have been no more than thirty—and none of us, apart from W. G. Fay, who was responsible for our appearance together, had ever acted professionally. We knew little of the drama apart from what we had read or been told of dramatic movements on the Continent, or what we saw for ourselves in theatres in Dublin.

There was little to indicate that our first appearance as a company of amateur players, producing two Irish plays in a small Dublin concert hall, would begin a movement that would change in many ways the course of theatrical history. We were all quite unknown; young Dubliners, drawn into the company partly because of an interest in acting, partly because of an interest in Irish nationalism. Most of us came out of nationalist clubs in Dublin, or were connected in some fashion with the nationalist movement. Almost everyone in the Irish theatre was during its first years.

Remembering this simple beginning, the excitement of what was my first important appearance on a stage, I find that my memory of the occasion is still quite clear when other more recent events have passed from my mind. But this is not strange. There are outstanding events in everyone’s life. Small memories of the occasion stand out quite clearly, little irrelevant recollections of people and of the small mishaps that always occur behind the scenes when any little group of inexperienced players anywhere prepares for a first performance. Quite easily I can remember my surprise at the sight of A. E. dressed in strange Celtic robes for the small part he was taking in his own play, Deirdre, standing calmly behind the little stage, displaying none of the agitation one would expect of a man awaiting the production of his first play, and looking rather odd in Druid’s costume with the steel-rimmed spectacles he was wearing, while he held a script for someone uncertain of lines. And Willie Fay being very important as producer and actor, making sure that everything was all right while Frank, his brother, was just as nervous then as he always was in later years before a new play began.

And I can remember the response of the audience later in the evening when Maud Gonne played the woman in Kathleen Ni Houlihan, and the applause, which lasted long after the curtain had finally fallen. It was all very wonderful. It may be of course that the passage of years and the excitement of the time can magnify the memory of such an event out of all proportion, yet I think not. It would be stranger if memories of this occasion were not so clear. The production of these two plays was to mean much for all of us who helped with them. It was the prelude to many things.

For most of us it had begun quite simply a few years earlier, in what was at that time one of the smaller nationalist clubs working in Dublin: Inghinidhe na hÉireann (The Daughters of Ireland). Inghinidhe na hÉireann was a politico-cultural society of young women founded by Maud Gonne as an auxiliary of the old Celtic Literary Society, of which Arthur Griffith and William Rooney were then members. It was probably the only organisation of its kind working in Dublin at the time that offered young women an opportunity to take part in national work. It had a wide following amongst young girls all over the city. Like most other little Irish clubs of the time, its activities were varied. Politically, it was something of a thorn in the side of the administration; culturally, it did much good work. We used to hold classes and debates, encouraging the study of Irish history, music, literature and art, and for those of us who were interested in acting there was a small dramatic company.

At the time this was producing tableaux vivants at the Antient Concert Rooms, a small theatre in Brunswick Street—‘living pictures’, very popular just then, showing a scene from some period in Irish history or illustrating some legend or patriotic melody: William Rooney’s Dear Dark Head, or perhaps something out of Moore’s Rich and Rare in which would appear a lady, richly bejewelled and garbed in silks, wooed by a glittering Sir Knight to the accompaniment of appropriate choral music. The director was Alice Milligan, who also wrote some of the plays later produced by the company, The Harp that Once and The Deliverance of Red Hugh, and some members of the Celtic Literary Society contributed pieces of their own in the years that followed: Padraic Colum gave The Children of Lir and The Saxon Shillin’, two of his first works for the theatre. The little group produced full-length plays only occasionally then, but its object was to encourage young Dubliners to write for the stage and to establish the nucleus of a national dramatic company that would run in conjunction with nationalist organisations in the city.

This was 1900. In Dublin these were the great days of the Gaelic League, of innumerable little clubs and societies, of diverse movements, aimed at the establishment of a new national order. The revival had just begun to gather momentum. Dublin bristled with little national movements of every conceivable kind: cultural, artistic, literary, theatrical or political. I suppose a generation arriving amidst the bickerings of Parliamentarians, of Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, had turned from politics and begun at last to seek national expression elsewhere. Everyone was discussing literature and the arts, the new literature that was emerging. Everywhere, in the streets, at ceilidhs and national concerts, anywhere that crowds gathered one met enthusiasts, young people drawn from every side of the city’s life, leaders or followers of all the little clubs and societies that were appearing every day. The parent group was the Gaelic League, which was non-political and non-sectarian and strove principally for the revival of the language, but there were other bodies like Cumann na nGaedheal, the immediate forerunner of Sinn Féin, whose leader was Arthur Griffith, as well as smaller clubs that combined social with political activities, circles devoted to industrial and agricultural development, and from the beginning there had been societies for the foundation of an Irish theatre.

In these first years the most important of the latter groups was the Irish Literary Theatre, founded by a few of the older writers, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, for the production of Irish plays in Dublin by Irish writers. The Literary Theatre was influenced partly by conditions in Ireland at the time and partly by the new dramatic movement that was sweeping across Europe in revolt against the commercialism and artificiality of the professional theatre.

Just before 1900, Yeats and Martyn had begun to write new and original plays, producing them in Dublin at the Antient Concert Rooms and the Gaiety Theatre, but they had made the mistake of employing English players for the work. After a short and stormy career, their enterprise had died. They found that English voices, no matter how well trained, could never lend themselves effectively to the expression of Irish idioms. Their productions in three years included Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen; Edward Martyn’s The Heather Field and Maeve; George Moore’s The Bending of the Bough and Alice Milligan’s The Last Feast of the Fianna. Dublin received these at first with loud protests—some of the plays were sufficiently in advance of their time to arouse bitter controversies—and then, what was worse, with a lack of interest. Admitting defeat after the failure of Diarmuid and Gráinne, the final production, Yeats said: ‘There was always something incongruous between Irish words and an English accent.’ The Irish Literary Theatre had died in early 1901. Its failure had meant the cessation until capable Irish players were available of any really important movement towards the establishment of a national theatre in Ireland. Yeats, strangely enough, had made little attempt to look for Irish players; he waited until they discovered themselves. The two men responsible for us ‘finding ourselves’ were Willie and Frank Fay.

Willie first came to prominence when he was appointed producer and stage manager with Inghinidhe na hÉireann the year the Literary Theatre died. This was an honorary position to which he gave much of his time. He was the son of a Dublin civil servant, an electrician by trade, and decidedly an actor by inclination. In later years when he became better known as an Irish player, a humorous tradition grew up in Dublin that he knew more about his hobby than he did about his work. Whether there was truth in that or not may still be a matter for debate, but he certainly displayed a far greater interest in what went on behind the footlights than he did towards what might be taking place inside them. When we who formed the nucleus of the Irish National Theatre Society met him he was a young man with a rough-and-ready but surprisingly wide and practical knowledge of the theatre.

Besides touring Ireland with every conceivable kind of makeshift fit-up, playing The Shaughraun, East Lynne and all the other time-worn favourites in barns and country halls, he had found time in about 1898 to establish a small amateur theatrical company in Dublin called the Ormond Dramatic Society. With his brother, Frank—whose interest in the stage was as profound but not so spectacular—he used this to experiment with different types of popular drama in the city’s small halls and concert rooms, playing Boucicault and Whitbread to enthusiastic, although not very critical, audiences.

He was a small man of indeterminate age, slightly built, with a battered felt hat, a long mackintosh and an old briar pipe that he never seemed to take out of his mouth. Steel-rimmed spectacles perched at a dangerous angle on his thin nose. He used to cycle down to rehearsals each evening, stopping the machine carefully outside the Inghinidhe rooms, then carrying it into the hallway with him. At that time he used to tell us that he was ‘in the throes of one of his infrequent spells of inactivity,’ which meant that he was resting in a job as an electrician before travelling off across the country again with some new fit-up. Apparently, by way of an antidote to this inactivity, he was willing to divide his time between his work in the city, the Ormond Dramatic Society and Inghinidhe na hÉireann Theatrical Company. He was that sort of wanderer who cannot stay away from the stage for long, and looked as though he would never settle permanently anywhere. We used to call him a ‘professional amateur’. He became the greatest comedian the Abbey ever had, and was the theatre’s first and perhaps best producer.

In 1901 his work as producer with Inghinidhe na hÉireann was confined to those occasions upon which the company produced full-length plays. At that time our efforts in this direction were received with interest in nationalist circles in the city, and were usually well attended, but, probably because the plays were indifferent affairs, we did not have much of a following amongst regular theatregoers. The Dublin public seldom thought of going out of its way to a small hall when professional entertainments were available in the bigger and better-equipped theatres in the centre of the city. There was plenty to attract it there.

Dublin was then, as always, a sort of testing ground for visiting companies. The playgoer had the choice of anything from the Hamlet or Othello of Martin Harvey to the broadest farce or melodrama. Shakespearian stock companies paid frequent visits, and there were snatches of Goldsmith and Sheridan now and then, while the Bensons, H. B. Irving, Forbes-Robertson and Ellen Terry had appeared on the boards of the Gaiety and the old Theatre Royal from time to time. Those who liked variety or meaty melodrama could go to Dan Lowrey’s or the old Queen’s. From farther afield came the Comédie Française, with refreshingly different fare to that offered by the British visitors. The French players always excited considerable comment, and had the reputation of being pioneers of a particular form of playing. They were later mentioned as models for native Irish players.

Fay came regularly for rehearsals to the Inghinidhe na hÉireann rooms, and occasionally as a guest to the society’s monthly debates. Sometimes he brought along his brother, Frank, a slightly built man like himself who worked with a firm of accountants in the city. Frank used to sit rather uneasily in the background at these gatherings, surrounded by earnest young women who chattered incessantly at him while Willie held forth tirelessly and with the most unexpected eloquence on theatrical matters. Probably he did not like us very much, but the deference with which Willie treated him on all occasions set him high in our estimation, and he always restrained himself sufficiently to answer our questions courteously while he kept one eye fixed on the clock.

Though he was older by only a year or two than his brother, he looked nearly twice Willie’s age. His square-cut face, serious expression and deep, carefully controlled voice added years to his appearance beside the other, whose mobile, Puck-like features gave him a schoolboyish look. Willie referred to him endlessly on all subjects; if asked for an opinion while not in Frank’s company, he invariably deferred judgement until he had consulted with ‘the brother’, as he called him. Surprisingly, although nothing was done without his sanction, ‘the brother’ seldom had the last word in any matter. Whether it was because his views on all subjects were identical to Willie’s or not, it was always the younger man’s suggestions that were implemented. The latter’s judgement on most matters concerning theatrical work was unerring, and in any case he always had plenty of authoritative arguments with which to back up his theories. He would never have undertaken anything, however, without Frank’s sanction.

It was less than a year later that Frank Fay shared the position of leading Irish player with his brother. He was not, as the other had been, anything in the nature of a ‘professional’ actor, for he spurned the questionable joys of fit-up caravan travelling. He widened his knowledge of theatrical work by concentrating on the less colourful activities of the Ormond Dramatic Society, whose interests he looked after during his brother’s widespread travels in search of technical theatrical experience. He was an actor of merit, but strangely enough it was not in this respect that he shone most. His talents lay in a slightly different direction, for he was a dramatic instructor of genius. Later, when he took over the training of the first Irish theatre company, he achieved the factor essential for the production of Irish plays: proper voice control.

I doubt if any productions of Yeats’s early verse-plays could have been as effective as they were without him. He was directly responsible for bringing out the peculiar inflections of the Irish voice that are so important in plays of this sort. In preparing plays he laid the utmost emphasis on the importance of words, and made beautiful speech, whether it was the delivery of dialect or the lyrical speaking of verse, his goal. Thus he produced a company of Irish actors unique in the history of the theatre who were, as one writer later recorded, ‘in love with the voice.’ A popular error still identifies W. B. Yeats with the training of the Irish players and the establishment of the acting tradition that has kept the Abbey Theatre alive through the last fifty years. If the poet were alive now he would be the first to disagree with such a theory: to Frank Fay must go the credit of training the actors.

Without Willie Fay there might never have been an Irish theatre company; without Frank Fay there might never have been a competent one.

At about this time Frank started a small elocution class in the Coffee Palace Hall, Townsend Street, for people interested in the stage. I was one of his first pupils.

He was a painstaking teacher. Besides many long and not very comfortable sessions, which we passed learning the fundamentals of correct speech, we were taken to most productions of note on the Dublin stage. Fay believed in emphasising his teachings by comparison, and from the front row of the sixpenny gallery we watched the work of every great figure of the time while he purposefully examined each performance. He was particularly enthusiastic about the work of the French players, especially Coquelin. The latter, he claime...

Table of contents

• The Wonderful Years
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part One: The Irish National Theatre Society
• Part Two: The Theatre of Ireland
• Part Three: The Abbey in America
• Part Four: The Rising
• Appendices
• Acknowledgements