Irish Plays and Playwrights | Page 7

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 Th��atre Fran?ais, 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 r?les to make it difficult for him to assume with success serious r?les 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 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