Irish Plays and Playwrights | Page 8

surely in his art until his withdrawal from the company in January,
1908. His loss was compensated for only by the results of his training
of other actors, such as Miss Sara Allgood and Mr. Arthur Sinclair,
who on certain roads have outrun their master. When I saw Mr. Fay in
1902, in the little hall in Camden Street, Dublin, with no knowledge of
what his stage experience had been, I accepted him at once for what he
was, a finished "character" actor of poise and confidence, a dignified
figure for all his stature and his predilection for comedy, and the
possessor of a speaking voice whose natural pleasantness he had made

into something higher than pleasantness by his art in the use of it, if it
never attained the resonance and nobility of phrasing of that of his
brother, Mr. Frank J. Fay. It was a memorable experience to me, that of
that August evening in 1902 on which I was taken to Camden Street to
a rehearsal of the Irish National Dramatic Company. Our guide was Mr.
James H. Cousins, whose "Racing Lug" and "Connla" were among the
plays produced in the following autumn and which that night were in
rehearsal. He piloted us to an entranceway by the side of a produce
shop. We knocked on the door and waited, and waited. We knocked
again, and at last heard steps coming nearer and nearer. The door
opened and revealed a young man in work-a-day black suit and derby,
with a candle in one hand and a property spear in the other. He
conducted us down a narrow, drafty hallway, into a hall in which were
wooden benches as rude as those in the bandstand of a backwoods
country fair in the States, and a slightly raised platform at the farther
end. We were soon in eager conversation with young store clerks and
typists and artisans who were about to set to work at that in which their
hearts lay, the interpreting of plays out of Ireland's heart. It was good
talk we listened to from those young men and women, boys and girls
all of them in their fervor and zest and high aim. Their enthusiasm
carried through "Connla," "The Racing Lug," and "Deirdre" with real
impressiveness. Of Mr. Cousins's two plays one was realistic of the
north of Ireland shore life of to-day, and the other, "Connla," like Mr.
Russell's "Deirdre," made out of Ireland's heroic age.
Of the actors we met that night, but Miss Walker (Maire ni Shiubhlaigh)
was with the Irish Players on their American tour of 1911-12, and even
she has not been continuously with them since 1902. The amateurs had
then but begun, under the direction of Mr. Fay, on the slow fashioning
of themselves into the finished folk-actors they proved themselves in
America. But even this acting, so little removed from that of amateurs
at these rehearsals, had distinction, the distinction of fidelity to life in
"The Racing Lug," the distinction of possession by dream in "Deirdre";
and let it be remembered, too, that it was a rehearsal without costume,
and that one had to be carried away from the conventional dress of the
Dublin streets, and had to be made to feel that the characters in "The
Racing Lug" were primitive fishermen, and the people of "Connla" and

"Deirdre" the people of Ireland's Homeric age.
Miss Maire T. Quinn, Mr. T. Dudley Digges, Mr. P.J. Kelly, with Miss
Walker and the brothers Fay,--Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J.
Fay,--were then the leading actors of the company. The playwrights,
too, took part in their own or their fellows' plays in the lesser rôles, Mr.
Russell sometimes playing the druid in his "Deirdre" and Mr. Colum
carrying a spear or wearing a pea-jacket as need was. One circumstance
or another, politics or need, gradually lost the company every one of
these actors that took part in its first performances in 1902. There were
comparatively few changes, though, until 1904, the year in which Miss
Horniman, "a generous English friend," took for them the old Mechanic
Institute Theatre and, rebuilding it in part, turned it over to the Irish
National Dramatic Company for six years. Up to this time the actors
had received no pay, giving their services for love of country and of art,
but with the more frequent performances and their attendant rehearsals
it became necessary to take a large part of the time of the leading men
and women, and then, of course, they had to be paid. Before the
opening of the Abbey Theatre, three of the chief actors, Miss Quinn
and Mr. Digges and Mr. Kelly, came to this country to appear in Irish
plays in the Irish Section of the St. Louis Fair. The public that gathered