Irish Plays and Playwrights | Page 9

in St. Louis was not prepared for the new drama, being more used to
the musical play of the type Mr. Olcott has made familiar in America,
or to the Bowery Irishman of the Harrigan plays, or to the gross
caricatures, Galwayed and ape-accoutred, of the before-curtain
interlude of the variety show. As a result the former National Players
protested against the policy of the Irish Section and returned to New
York. Miss Walker was the principal actress of the company after Miss
Quinn's departure to America, and upon Miss Walker's withdrawal in
1905 the burden of the chief women's rôles fell upon Miss Allgood.
Mr. W.G. Fay and Mr. Frank J. Fay were still the leading men of the
company, creating the principal characters of all the plays of Synge and
of those of Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory that were produced before
1908. Early in this year, as I have said, Mr. and Mrs. W.G. Fay and Mr.
F.J. Fay left the company, and, coming to America in the spring, played
"The Rising of the Moon" and "A Pot of Broth" in New York. They

made, unfortunately, no great success in their appearances, as their
plays were not presented in bills devoted solely to Irish plays, but as
curtain-raisers to the usual conventional farce. Almost all the actors
whom I have mentioned as leaving the National Players eventually
found their way into the conventional plays, but almost none of them
made successes there comparable in any degree to their successes in
folk-drama or in plays out of old Irish legend. Nor can it be said that
actors trained in the dominant forms of present-day English drama,
even when so skilled as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, were wholly satisfying
in their assumption of rôles in the plays of the Renaissance. It was Miss
Allgood, chief musician in the London performances of Mr. Yeats's
"Deirdre" in 1908, who won the greatest approval from the London
critics, and not Mrs. Campbell as Deirdre herself.
[Illustration]
Miss Allgood had played principal parts with the Abbey Company
from 1904 on. In 1906, her sister, who plays under the name of Miss
Maire O'Neill, came into the company, assuming the more romantic
rôles with a success as great as that of Miss Allgood in character parts
and comedy. From 1906 they have shared the principal women's rôles,
but, owing to Miss O'Neill's inability to come to America in the fall of
1911, Miss McGee fell heir to many of her rôles. After the departure of
the Messrs. Fay, Mr. Sinclair, Mr. O'Donovan, and Mr. Kerrigan
became the leading men. It is not altogether accurate, however, to
speak of any actor or actress of the company as leading man or leading
woman, for not only is one "a leading lady" one night, as was Miss
McGee as Pegeen Mike in "The Playboy of the Western World" on the
American tour, and one of the village girls in "The Well of the Saints"
the next night, but the men and women alternate in the same parts on
different nights, as, for instance, on the American tour Cathleen ni
Houlihan was played now by Miss Allgood and now by Miss Walker.
The fact that few of the actors who have learned their art with the Irish
National Dramatic Society have achieved greatly in other drama is
perhaps a proof that their powers are limited to the folk-drama and the
legendary drama that comprises almost the entire repertoire of the

company. Miss Allgood was, it is true, lent to Mr. Poel for the
performances of "Measure for Measure" in the spring of 1908, and won
an unquestioned success as Isabella, but actors so skilled as the Messrs.
Fay have attained no notable success in other than Irish plays. During
the American tour of 1911-12 both Mr. Sinclair and Miss Allgood were
much importuned by the managers to accept American engagements,
and it is hardly to be doubted but that both could win success in
conventional comedy. And yet one feels it was the part of wisdom as
well as of loyalty for them to withstand the lure.
The distinguishing characteristic of the art of the Abbey Players is
naturalness. It is not that their personalities happen to coincide with
certain types of Irish character, but that they know so well the types of
the folk-plays, and even the characters who are not types that appear in
the folk-plays, that they are able to portray them to the life. The Abbey
Players have discarded most of the tricks of the stage, or perhaps it
would be truer to say they do not inherit the tricks of the stage or any
traditional characterizations of parts. They are taught to allow their
demeanor and gesture and expression to rise out of the situation, to