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The Abbey Theatre, Dublin

From a photograph by Keogh Bros., Ireland

“August 4th. Final decision is postponed until Monday but the battle is won to all intents and purposes. There appears to be no difficulty about our getting a Patent for the plays of the Society. I sent you a paper with the report of proceedings, —— and ——, did well for us; but I must say I was rather amused at their anxiety to show that they supported us not out of love for the arts but because of our use as anti-emigration agents and the like. I think I was a bad witness. Counsel did not examine me but asked me to make a statement. The result was, having expected questions and feeling myself left to wander through an immense subject, I said very little. I was disappointed at being hardly cross-examined at all. By that time I had got excited and was thirsting for everybody’s blood. One barrister in cross-examining T. P. Gill, who came after me, tried to prove that Ibsen and Maeterlinck were immoral writers. He asked was it not true that a play by Maeterlinck called The Intruder had raised an immense outcry in London because of its immorality. Quite involuntarily I cried out, ‘My God!’ and Edward Martyn burst into a loud fit of laughter. I suppose he must have meant Monna Vanna. He also asked if the Irish National Theatre Society had not produced a play which was an attack on marriage. Somebody asked him what was the name of the play. He said it didn’t matter and dropped the subject. He had evidently heard some vague rumour about The Shadow of the Glen. I forgot to say that William Fay gave his evidence very well, as one would expect. He had the worst task of us all, for O’Shaughnessy, a brow-beating cross-examiner of the usual kind, fastened on to him. Fay, however, had his answer for everything.”

The Patent was granted to me, “Dame Augusta Gregory,” as Patentee, and in it I was amongst other things “Enjoined and commanded to gather, entertain, govern, privilege, and keep such and so many players,” and not to put on the stage any “exhibition of wild beasts or dangerous performances or to allow women or children to be hung from the flies or fixed in positions from which they cannot release themselves.” “It being our Royal will and pleasure that for the future our said theatre may be instrumental to the promotion of virtue and instruction of human life.”

The building was not ready for us until the end of the year. Mr. Yeats wrote in August: “I have just been down to see the work on the Abbey Theatre. It is all going very quickly and the company should be able to rehearse there in a month. The other day, while digging up some old rubbish in the Morgue, which is being used for dressing-rooms, they found human bones. The workmen thought they had lit on a murder, but the caretaker said, ‘Oh, I remember, we lost a body about seven years ago. When the time for the inquest came, it couldn’t be found.’”

I remembered this when Mr. Yeats wrote to me lately from the Abbey: “The other day at a performance of Countess Cathleen one of the players stopped in the midst of his speech and it was a moment or two before he could go on. He told me afterwards his shoulder had suddenly been grasped by an invisible hand.”

When the time for the opening came, I was ill and could not leave home, but had reports from him through the days before the opening. “December 24, 1904. The Company are very disappointed that you will not be up for the first night. Fay says they would all act better if you were here.”

“December 20, 1904. I hear from Robert that you may get up for a little to-day. I hope you will take a long rest. I shall see about the awning for the old woman’s stall to-night. Synge has a photograph, which will give us a picturesque form. We changed all the lighting on Saturday, and the costumes look much better now. In any case everything looks so much better on the new stage. G. came in last night with a Boer, who went to Trinity, because, so far as I could make out, he thought he would find himself among sympathetic surroundings. He and some other young Boers, including one who is said to have killed more Englishmen at Spion Kop than anybody else, had to go to a university in Europe and chose Ireland. Finding the sort of place it is, they look at the situation with amusement and are trying to get out more men of their own sort to form a rebellious coterie.... I mention G., in order to say that he wants to try his hand at translating Œdipus the King for us. To-night we go on experimenting in lighting and after that will come the great problem of keeping the bottom of the trews from standing out like frilled paper at the end of a ham bone.”

And finally on the very day of the opening: “December 27, ’04. I am confident of a fairly good start with the plays,—the stars are quiet and fairly favourable.”

Then after the first night, December 27th, I had good telegrams and then a letter: “A great success in every way. The audience seemed ‘heavy’ through the opening dialogue—Fool and Blind man—and then it woke up, applauding for a long time after the exit of the kings. There was great enthusiasm at the end. Kathleen seemed more rebellious than I ever heard it, and —— solemnly begged me to withdraw it for fear it would stir up a conspiracy and get us all into trouble. Then came your play—a success from the first. One could hardly hear for the applause. Fay was magnificent as the melancholy man. The whole play was well played all through. I don’t think I really like the stone wall wings. However, I was very near and will know better to-night. I got a beautiful light effect in Baile’s Strand, and the audience applauded the scene even before the play began. The cottage, too, with the misty blue outside its door is lovely. We never had such an audience or such enthusiasm. The pit clapped when I came in. Our success could not have been greater. Even —— admits that your comedy [Spreading the News], ‘is undoubtedly going to be very popular.’”

We worked for several years with Mr. W. Fay as producer, as manager, as chief actor. In 1903, when all his time was needed for the enterprise, we paid him enough to set him free from other work, a part coming from the earnings of the Company, a part from Mr. Yeats, and a part from myself, for we had little capital at that time, outside £50 given by our good friend Mr. John Quinn, Attorney and Counsellor in New York. But even large sums of money would have been poor payment not only for William Fay’s genius and his brother’s beautiful speaking of verse, but for their devotion to the aim and work of the theatre, its practical and its artistic side. But they left us early in 1908 at a time of disagreement with other members, and of discouragement. I am very sorry that they, who more than almost any others had laid the foundation of the Irish Theatre, did not wait with us for its success.

But building up an audience is a slow business when there is anything unusual in the methods or the work. Often near midnight, after the theatre had closed, I have gone round to the newspaper offices, asking as a favour that notices might be put in, for we could pay for but few advertisements and it was not always thought worth while to send a critic to our plays. Often I have gone out by the stage door when the curtain was up, and come round into the auditorium by the front hall, hoping that in the dimness I might pass for a new arrival and so encourage the few scattered people in the stalls. One night there were so few in any part of the house that the players were for dismissing them and giving no performance at all. But we played after all and just after the play began, three or four priests from the country came in. A friend of theirs and of the Abbey had gone beyond the truth in telling them it was not a real theatre. They came round afterwards and told us how good they thought the work and asked the Company to come down and play in the West. Very often in the green room I have quoted the homely proverb, heard I know not where, “Grip is a good dog, but Hold Fast a better”! For there is some French blood in me that keeps my spirit up, so that I see in a letter to Mr. Yeats I am indignant at some attributions of melancholy: “I who at church last Sunday, when I heard in the Psalms ‘Thou hast anointed me with the joy of gladness above my fellows’, thought it must apply to me, and that some oil of the sort must have kept me watertight among seas of trouble.” And Mr. Yeats in his turn wrote to encourage me in some time of attacks: “Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”

For there was not always peace inside the theatre, and there came from time to time that breaking and rebuilding that is in the course of nature, and one must think all for good in the end. And so I answered some one at a time of discord, “I am myself a lover of peace so long as it is not the peace of a dead body.” And to Mr. Yeats I wrote: “I am much more angry really than you are with those who have wasted so much of your time. I look on it as child-murder. Deirdre might be in existence now but for this.” And to one who left us but has since returned: “I want you to sit down and read Mr. Yeats’s notes in the last two numbers of Samhain and to ask yourself if the work he is doing is best worth helping or hindering. Remember, he has been for the last eight years working with his whole heart and soul for the creation, the furtherance, the perfecting, of what he believes will be a great dramatic movement in Ireland. I have helped him all through, but we have lost many helpers by the way. Mr. Lecky, who had served us well in getting the law passed that made these dramatic experiments possible, publicly repudiated us because of Mr. Yeats’s letter on the Queen’s visit.... Others were lost for different reasons ——, ——, all of whom had been helpful in their time. Now others are dropping off. It is always sad to lose fellow-workers, but the work must go on all the same. ‘No man putting his hand to the plough and drawing back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ He is going on with it. I am going on with it as long as life and strength are left to me.... It is hard to hold one’s own against those one is living amongst, I have found that; and I have found that peace comes, not from trying to please one’s neighbours but in making up one’s own mind what is the right path and in then keeping to it. And so God save Ireland, and believe me your sincere friend.”

This now, according to my memory, is how I came to work for a National Theatre in Ireland and how that Theatre began.