Savagery & Fine Words
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The Abbey Theatre, which will celebrate its centenary on December 27 of this year, and which will be presenting a performance this week in New York City, had its first uncertain beginnings on a wet summer afternoon in 1897 in County Clare. There, at Duras, the summer home of the extravagantly named Florimand Comte de Basterot, Augusta Gregory and William Butler Yeats spent an afternoon discussing the need for a national Irish theater. Both were skeptical of success, but by the end of their talks, they had convinced each other that such a theater could be launched. Lady Gregory pledged L25 on the spot (equivalent to about L2,500 or $4,600 today).
No doubt their mutual enthusiasm had been fired as much by the friendship that sprang up between them on that windy day as by the idea of a theater. Lady Gregory was to become Yeats’s truest and staunchest friend, ally, and theatrical collaborator for decades to come. The poet would regard her estate of Coole, which inspired some of his best poems, as both a lifelong refuge and a majestic symbol of all he thought worth praising and preserving in the Irish tradition.
Yeats and Gregory envisioned a national theater as a means of forging Irish identity. The crucial element for both was language; that is, not the stilted, unnatural stage-language of the English theater, which still dominated Dublin productions, but a language reflective of Irish accents, intonations, and cadences. In a 1903 manifesto, Yeats would declare that “one must be able to make a king of Faery or an old countryman or a modern lover speak that language which is his and nobody else’s, and speak it with so much of emotional subtlety that the hearer may find it hard to know whether it is the thought or the word that has moved him, or whether these could be separated at all.” He went on to state that “we must make speech even more important than gesture upon the stage.”
This is a tricky proposition. By a peculiar effect of augmentation, words that are lusterless in common speech assume an intensified aura when uttered beyond the footlights. To hear our unadorned everyday lingo in the mouths of actors can be thrilling, but it can also be unsettling. To give one extreme example from the other side of the world: When Egyptian playwrights such as Tewfik al-Hakim began writing plays in dialect in early-20th-century Cairo, the performances created havoc; the effect on playgoers was to prove deeply embarrassing. This was, after all, the intimate language of the home, the kitchen, the bedroom, shamelessly paraded on the public stage.
Yeats, Gregory, and, later, John Synge faced much the same opposition in their quite different context. At one extreme certain playgoers dismissed their dramas on the (actually rather plausible) ground that they could hear people talking that way on the common street; why should they flock to the theater to hear the same things on stage? Others, however, whether extreme nationalists or vigilant Catholics, found the language of the plays as offensive as their content.
The Abbey Theatre was officially inaugurated in Dublin in 1904. The first plays on that occasion were Yeats’s “On Baile’s Strand” and Gregory’s “Spreading the News. “To us, 100 years later, the language of these dramas sounds highly lyrical and not at all like “common speech.” We have difficulty recovering the shock and dismay that attended performances of such Synge masterpieces as “Riders to the Sea” in 1904 or “The Playboy of the Western World” in 1907.
The latter play occasioned particularly violent reactions. One objection, to be sure, had to do with the play’s subject. Patricide is not generally treated with such robust and jocular elan as Synge brought to his drama. That the supposed murderer of his father, Christy Mahon, is practically acclaimed a hero when he blurts out his deed (and is even offered a job on the spot at a tavern) could hardly help but offend Irish sensibilities. Nor did it mollify playgoers that the “murdered” father, boisterous and thoroughly disreputable, keeps popping up, like some indestructible Finnegan, with his skull laid bare and his venomously lyrical tongue forever awag (indeed, he is given some of the most amazing lines in the play).
Even so, the language of the play was what most incensed the audience at that uproarious premiere. When Christy, mad with love for Pegeen, declares, “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?” the word “shift” horrified spectators. Lady Gregory at once telegraphed Yeats, then at Aberdeen, with the message “Audience broke up in disorder at the word ‘shift.'”
“The Playboy of the Western World” is one of the most gorgeously written plays in the language; simply to read it, let alone to hear it performed by gifted actors, is to feel oneself lifted into another dimension of speech. When Pegeen rejects the sanctimonious Shawn, she cries out, “Wouldn’t it be a bitter thing for a girl to go marrying the like of Shaneen, and he a middling kind of a scarecrow, with no savagery or fine words in him at all?” Savagery and fine words – what fitter phrase could there be for what Yeats and Gregory and Synge were struggling to achieve?
But Synge commanded far greater moments than this. The dialogue between Christy and Pegeen, in which each strives to outdo the other with ever grander and more extravagant endearments, represents one of the most extraordinary love duets in English drama. Here is one exchange:
Pegeen: Yourself and me would shelter easy in a narrow bush, but we’re only talking, maybe, for this would be a poor, thatched place to hold a fine lad is the like of you.
Christy: If I wasn’t a good Christian, it’s on my naked knees I’d be saying my prayers and paters to every jackstraw you have roofing your head, and every stony pebble is paving the laneway to your door.
As Robert Welch has astutely pointed out in his fine history “The Abbey Theatre, 1899-1999” (Oxford University Press, 280 pages, L65), Synge slyly adapted Gaelic rhythms and turns-of-phrase to his English to reproduce the speech he had heard with his own ears in the Aran Islands and other wilder districts of Ireland. This, too, won him no plaudits at the time.
Currently we have a different problem with the plays of Synge and Yeats and Gregory. Too often those lilting and lyrical speeches sound overblown. Is there any more painful theatrical experience than to witness some ponderous production of “Playboy” or “Riders to the Sea” replete with stage-brogues and blowsy poeticism (and not only, alas, amateur productions)? What Synge crafted to be the very antithesis of sentimentality now, thanks to clumsy acting, often has a false and maudlin ring. Yeats, as usual, saw the danger, formulating it this way: “An actor should understand how so to discriminate cadence from cadence, and so to cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose that he delights the ear with a continually varied music.”
The Abbey Theatre has become not simply a theater of voice but one of the finest and most magical troupes now active. Yet I think it’s fair to say that the spellbinding power its actors can exert on audiences first makes its impact through the exceptional subtlety and range of their diction and intonations. Even better, this is an aural impact that lingers in the ear of memory long after.
Perhaps this distinctive quality has to do with the fact that some of the greatest actors among them came from a Gaelic tradition. The incomparable Siobhan McKenna, for example, started out as Siobhan NicCionnaith and gave her first performance in English at the Abbey in 1944. (I can’t resist noting that, as Mr. Welch recounts, another Irish actor of the same background was Sean MacLabhraidh, who ended up playing Tarzan on television and made a habit of chatting up the jungle animals in his native Gaelic.) Irish English is, as it were, haunted by another possibility, and this may cultivate a more natural attentiveness to the supple possibilities of the spoken phrase.
Yeats and Gregory, who dominated the Abbey for almost 40 years, saw it as a “tragic stage.” Through “tragic art, passionate art,” Yeats proclaimed, “the persons upon the stage greaten till they are humanity itself.” To its credit, the Abbey has rarely, if ever, ossified into a shrine of national piety; to the contrary, native orneriness and the love of a good rumpus have kept it from turning bland.
When Sean O’ Casey, that other great genius of the Irish theater, appeared on the scene and his “The Plough and the Stars” was performed in 1926, the play (which dared to satirize the “martyrs” of the 1916 Rising) opened old wounds and made them bleed afresh. Right now Ireland is enjoying a period of unaccustomed affluence, and I wonder: Can a theatre founded on “tragic vision,” and which has survived civil war and the Black and Tans and the horrors of the Troubles, survive prosperity? Surely it can if in the next 100 years it preserves its fine cantankerous spirit, its robust impiety, and the sweet astringency of its incomparable voice.