No More Learning

'

The habit of writing for the stage, even when it is not country people
who are the speakers, and of considering what good dialogue is, will
help to increase our feeling for style. Let us get back in everything
to the spoken word, even though we have to speak our lyrics to the
Psaltery or the Harp, for, as A. E. says, we have begun to forget that
literature is but recorded speech, and even when we write with care we
have begun 'to write with elaboration what could never be spoken. ' But
when we go back to speech let us see that it is either the idiom of
those who have rejected, or of those who have never learned, the base
idioms of the newspapers.

Mr. Martyn argued in _The United Irishman_ some months ago that
our actors should try to train themselves for the modern drama of
society. The acting of plays of heroic life or plays like _Cathleen ni
Houlihan_, with its speech of the country people, did not seem to him
a preparation. It is not; but that is as it should be. Our movement
is a return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early
seventies, and the drama of society would but magnify a condition of
life which the countryman and the artisan could but copy to their
hurt. The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure should
either tell them of their own life, or of that life of poetry where
every man can see his own image, because there alone does human nature
escape from arbitrary conditions. Plays about drawing-rooms are written
for the middle classes of great cities, for the classes who live in
drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the man of the roads you must
write about the roads, or about the people of romance, or about great
historical people. We should, of course, play every kind of good play
about Ireland that we can get, but romantic and historical plays, and
plays about the life of artisans and country people are the best worth
getting. In time, I think, we can make the poetical play a living
dramatic form again, and the training our actors will get from plays
of country life, with its unchanging outline, its abundant speech, its
extravagance of thought, will help to establish a school of imaginative
acting. The play of society, on the other hand, could but train up
realistic actors who would do badly, for the most part, what English
actors do well, and would, when at all good, drift away to wealthy
English theatres.
If, on the other hand, we busy ourselves with poetry
and the countryman, two things which have always mixed with one another
in life as on the stage, we may recover, in the course of years, a lost
art which, being an imitation of nothing English, may bring our actors
a secure fame and a sufficient livelihood.


1903

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.