Irish Plays and Playwrights | Page 7

amateurs were poor
and crude beside those great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but
they followed them as well as they could, and got an audience of
artisans, for the most part, to admire them for doing it.
With these words of Mr. Yeats, written ten years ago, in my memory, it
was arresting to hear ten years later a somewhat similar comparison of

the acting of the Irish Players to the acting of yesterday on the French
stage. A man who in the late eighties and early nineties had spent seven
years as an art student in Paris saw the Abbey Players in Boston. In
Paris he had gone frequently to the Théâtre Français, and only there, he
said, before he saw the Irish Players, had he seen acting so full of
dignity, but never at all before acting so natural.
There is possible, too, however, a native origin for this repose of
manner, or perhaps it would be truest to say that it is a blending, like
the dramas themselves, of native and foreign elements. Speaking of
"Cathleen ni Houlihan" in the notes to his "Collected Works" of 1908,
Mr. Yeats says, "I cannot imagine this play, or any folk-play of our
school, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of the
awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plow, or too
lacking in humility to copy these things without convention or
caricature." Here, too, he refers to the "quiet movement and careful
speech which has given our players some little fame" as "arising partly
out of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of the players."
Undoubtedly Mr. Fay knew the still ways of the peasant, and I do not
doubt that he was influenced by such knowledge and did in some
degree train his actors to bring their movements on the stage in accord
with the "awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the
plow." But since there are ways of the peasant that are far from still, it
is likely, too, that he was led to select such movements, instead of the
vehement gesture and lively facial expression that are just as
characteristic of the peasant, by a memory of the restrained acting of
the French stage. It is likely, too, that the very inexperience and lack of
knowledge of artifice to which Mr. Yeats refers was an element in
making the art of the company what it became. But it is not altogether
impossible that certain traditions of the English stage--of the statuesque
acting of the Kembles, for instance--had come down into the time of
Mr. Fay's stage experience, to those days before he became stage
manager of the performances of "The Daughters of Erin" in 1900, and
that these traditions influenced his training of the company that was to
attain to a new art of the stage.

Before this there had been two series of performances in Dublin, each
of a week's duration, by "The Irish Literary Theatre," one in 1899, and
the other in 1900, with English actors gathered together in London by
Mr. George Moore; and another week's series followed in 1901 by the
Benson Company and some amateurs of the Gaelic League under the
leadership of Dr. Douglas Hyde. It was the performances of "The
Countess Cathleen" of Mr. Yeats and of "The Heather Field" of Mr.
Martyn at the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, respectively May 8
and 9, 1899, by "The Irish Literary Theatre," that inaugurated the
drama of the Celtic Renaissance, fully a year before there came into
being the group of amateurs that were to bring that drama home to
Ireland as no players who inherited the standards and conventions of
the English stage could possibly have brought it home.
It is Mr. Fay's distinction to have been, as I have intimated, the leader
who started these players on the long way to their new art. Such
leadership his record hardly augered. It was in the very lowest forms of
vaudeville, in what is the analogue abroad of our negro minstrelsy, that
Mr. Fay had his stage experience, a stage experience that had made him
well enough known in burlesque rôles to make it difficult for him to
assume with success serious rôles in the early years of the National
Dramatic Company. Because of this old association, Dublin audiences
insisted in 1902 in seeing humor in his Peter Gillane in "Cathleen ni
Houlihan." For all this past, however, Mr. Fay was intent on serious
drama, and, with the precept and example of Mr. Russell and Mr. Yeats
always present to him in the early days of the National Theatre
Company, and with what he had gathered from the experimental
performance of Irish plays by "The Irish Literary Theatre," he advanced