The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 4 (of 8): The Hour-glass. Cathleen ni Houlihan. The Golden Helmet. The Irish Dramatic MovementYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
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The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 4 (of 8): The Hour-glass. Cathleen ni Houlihan. The Golden Helmet. The Irish Dramatic Movement
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
English literature -- Irish authors
I CANNOT describe the various dramatic adventures of the year with as
much detail as I did last year, mainly because the movement has got
beyond me. The most important event of the Gaelic Theatre has been
the two series of plays produced in the Round Room of the Rotunda by
the Gaelic League. Father Dineen’s _Tobar Draoidheachta_, and Dr.
Hyde’s _An Posadh_, and a chronicle play about Hugh O’Neill, and, I
think, some other plays, were seen by immense audiences. I was not
in Ireland for these plays, but a friend tells me that he could only
get standing-room one night, and the Round Room must hold about 3,000
people. A performance of _Tobar Draoidheachta_ I saw there some months
before, was bad, but I believe there was great improvement, and that
the players who came up from somewhere in County Cork to play it at
this second series of plays were admirable. The players, too, that
brought Dr. Hyde’s _An Posadh_ from Ballaghadereen, in County Mayo,
where they had been showing it to their neighbours, were also, I am
told, careful and natural. The play-writing, always good in dialogue,
is still very poor in construction, and I still hear of plays in many
scenes, with no scene lasting longer than four or six minutes, and few
intervals shorter than nine or ten minutes, which have to be filled
up with songs. The Rotunda chronicle play seems to have been rather
of this sort, and I suspect that when I get Father Peter O’Leary’s
_Meadhbh_, a play in five acts produced at Cork, I shall find the
masterful old man, in spite of his hatred of English thought, sticking
to the Elizabethan form. I wish I could have seen it played last week,
for the spread of the Gaelic Theatre in the country is more important
than its spread in Dublin, and of all the performances in Gaelic plays
in the country during the year I have seen but one—Dr. Hyde’s new play,
_Cleamhnas_, at Galway Feis. I got there a day late for a play by the
Master of Galway Workhouse, but heard that it was well played, and
that his dialogue was as good as his construction was bad. There is
no question, however, about the performance of _Cleamhnas_ being the
worst I ever saw. I do not blame the acting, which was pleasant and
natural, in spite of insufficient rehearsal, but the stage-management.
The subject of the play was a match-making. The terms were in debate
between two old men in an inner room. An old woman, according to the
stage directions, should have listened at the door and reported what
she heard to her daughter’s suitor, who is outside the window, and to
her daughter. There was no window on the stage, and the young man stood
close enough to the door to have listened for himself. The door, where
she listened, opened now on the inner room, and now on the street,
according to the necessities of the play, and the young men who acted
the fathers of grown-up children, when they came through the door were
seen to have done nothing to disguise their twenty-five or twenty-six
birthdays.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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