Quote of the Day (Enda Walsh, on Why ‘The Irish Play Tradition is Not Sociological Drama’)

“I come from the Irish tradition and the Irish play tradition is not sociological drama. In Britain there are wonderful writers who write about politics, about where we're at. Whereas as an Irish playwright — I guess our background is poetry. So we see theatre in terms of dream and in terms of form. [The plays] are based in the real world but the real world is not as we know it and see it….The inner workings of a person permeate whatever play I'm writing.” —Irish playwright Enda Walsh quoted in Sarah Hemming, “Love and Biscuits,” The Financial Times, July 31-Aug. 1, 2021

The image accompanying this post, of Enda Walsh at Berlinale 2024, was taken Jan. 15, 2024.

Theater Review: Teresa Deevy’s ‘The Suitcase Under the Bed,’ From the Mint Theater

Although its mandate to rediscover long-neglected works has primarily covered the U.S. and Great Britain, the Mint Theater has also brought welcomed renewed attention to notable past Irish playwrights, such as Lennox Robinson (Is Life Worth Living?, reviewed here), Hazel Ellis (Women Without Men), and today’s case in point, Teresa Deevy (1894-1963). 

It is one of the anomalies of the theater world that Deevy, a playwright with such an acute ear for characters’ speech, struggled for virtually her entire adult life with the burden of deafness.

Remarkably, Deevy succeeded in getting six of her plays produced in the 1930s by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. But by the middle of that decade, with the company leaving the orbit of founders Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats, she ran afoul of the literary politics of the time and could no longer get her work performed there.  For most of the rest of her productive working life, then, she turned to the radio, producing a dozen original works for the B.B.C. and Radio Éireann, in addition to adapting some of her other works for broadcasting.

After being elected to the Irish Academy of Letters, Ireland’s highest literary honor, Deevy went pretty much from here to obscurity. Then, seven years ago, the Mint Theater made her an object of serious re-evaluation with its production of Wife to James Whelan, the play rejected by the Abbey in 1936.

The title The Suitcase Under the Bed refers to where all of Teresa Deevy’s writing was stored for decades. Deevy’s grandniece showed them to the Mint Theater’s Artistic Director, Jonathan Bank, who ended up staging the world premiere of three of them—Strange Birth, Holiday House, and In the Cellar of My Friend—along with her best-known one-act, The King of Spain’s Daughter, staged by the Abbey in 1935.

Not all the plays work effectively, but collectively they testify to Deevy’s willingness to try new forms—and to the Mint acting company’s versatility in playing different characters in the same evening.

The most impressive of the discoveries, Holiday House, is the kind of light-as-air comedy that Noel Coward might have tried if he had ever spent substantial time in Ireland. A family gathers at their mother’s seaside home for a late summer holiday. Derek, married for a few years, finds his carefully cultivated savoir-faire sorely tested as he copes with unsettled business involving ex-fiancee Doris (Ellen Adair); her haughty, jealous husband, Derek’s brother (Aidan Redmond); and Derek’s rattled wife Jil (Gina Costigan). Witty repartee flies back and forth, as the quartet try to remain civilized even as they veer inevitably toward verbal sniping.

Redmond had other opportunities to shine, too. In The King of Spain’s Daughter, he masterfully depicted an authoritarian patriarchal figure who gave his daughter Annie a choice: wed his younger coworker, Jim (A.J. Shively), or work in a factory. (The play evoked a time when women—particularly high-spirited rebels like Annie (played with willful, headlong romanticism by Sarah Nicole Denver) —had few choices in life.) And, in Strange Birth, Redmond played a thoughtful middle-aged postman proposing marriage to a skittish maid (the estimable Ellen Adair).

Holiday House and The King of Spain’s Daughter were more memorable than Strange Birth and the remaining one-act play, In the Cellar of My Friend. But the Mint troupe managed to spin multiple subtle variations on the theme of marriage, and the distinctive voice of Deevy was heard once again—and now, one hopes, it will continue to reverberate in rediscovery mode.

The Suitcase Under the Bed closed at the end of September. But I couldn’t let the opportunity go to review it before The Mint Theater starts another season.

Flashback, December 1936: Ford’s Irish Project, ‘Plough and the Stars,’ Misfires

Eighty years ago this week, RKO released the passion project of one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded directors, starring one of its best young actresses. But The Plough and the Stars, once highly anticipated, pleased none of the principals involved: the studio, director John Ford, star Barbara Stanwyck, and the Irish playwright whose work was adapted, Sean O’Casey. It raised legitimate questions over how faithfully the film industry would treat complex, provocative subject matter.

Probably Ford’s most famous utterance, at a legendary 1950 Screen Directors Guild showdown over the blacklist (“I am John Ford and I make Westerns”), could just as truly have been rephrased as “I am John Ford and I am Irish-American.” Ireland was second only to the West as a favorite subject.

In the mid-1930s, his most recent Irish project had given him a virtually unrivaled reputation as an artist. The Informer, adapted from the Liam O’Flaherty novel, not only brought him a Best Director Oscar but, for a few decades, a distinction that has since gone to the likes of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: critical acclamation as the greatest film of all time.

In other words, he was now close to the hottest director in Hollywood. Within the strict bounds of the studio system of the time, his RKO bosses wanted to make him happy.

From the first, everyone should have known that problems would need to be surmounted in translating the material from stage to screen. The Plough and the Stars, like the other parts of the “Dublin Trilogy” by Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, is a tragicomedy about boastful, cowardly or delusional men and their long-suffering women, set in the tenements of Ireland’s largest city amid the nation’s war of independence and civil war.

The Irish themselves were divided over the meaning of the play, as indicated by a riot during its initial 1926 run at the Abbey Theatre (an event described in this prior post of mine). Certain scenes—including an off-screen orator using phrases from a leader of the Easter Rising, Padraig Pearse, the Irish tricolor brought into a bar, and a prostitute soliciting business—had aroused the ire of the patriotically correct. If the Irish, the people with the most direct knowledge of the events depicted, couldn’t agree about it, how could one ever expect the band of callous outsiders in Hollywood to make sense of it?

John Ford would have none of that.   

What could go wrong? As it turned out, way too much:

*Pleasing the Puritans. One source of the Dublin rioters’ anger was O’Casey’s prostitute character Rosie Redmond. Such fallen women, they complained, were not emblematic of Irish womanhood. No matter how much O’Casey complained about these critics and the censorship they advocated, however, they did not succeed in significantly diluting Rosie’s depiction on stage; only Hollywood managed to do so. It might be argued that this did not affect the political stance of the movie. But it did soften the Marxist O’Casey’s picture of the desperate lengths to which Dublin’s tenement dwellers would go in order to live to tomorrow. Nor was the cantankerous playwright happy about satisfying British censors who requested the removal of any references to God.

*Miscasting of leads. Ford got his wish to hire four members of the Abbey Theatre (including Barry Fitzgerald, who would go on to an Oscar-winning career of his own as a character actor). In return, however, RKO insisted that he hire American stars for the leads in order to assure some box-office revenues. The result was two markedly different acting styles: the stage-based, naturalistic emoting of the Abbey players, vs. the broader manner, honed for the big screen, of Barbara Stanwyck and Preston Foster as, respectively, Nora and Jack Clitheroe. Stanwyck looked particularly out of place, despite the fact that, consummate pro that she was, she threw herself into the role, including trying to get her Irish accent just right. But, according to her biographer Victoria Wilson: “One night, in the projection room, one of the producers decided that somebody had to be understood. The Abbey players couldn’t change their dialect. Barbara was chosen, but the early sequences in which she used a heavy brogue were never reshot.”

*Disagreement over politics. Playwright, director and studio held sharply different views on the justice and effectiveness of the Easter Rising, leaving the point of view of the finished film a muddled mess. O’Casey, at one point a member of the Irish Citizens Army, eventually parted ways with the republican movement for putting nationalist goals above socialist ones. Surviving family members of Irish executed during the rising believed he was ridiculing the patriot cause. On the other hand, the opportunity to plead that cause was part of what drew Ford to the project. His nocturnal scene of Irish soldiers listening to their commander lent the troops an ineradicable dignity. “Events and actions which are only reported in the play (the meeting, the occupation of the GPO) all now appear on the screen,” observe Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill in their 1987 study, Cinema and Ireland. “Inevitably, these additions undermine the importance of the domestic sphere as the central site for action and with it the virtues that are to be found there.” But Ford’s views clashed with Sam Briskin, RKO’s recently hired production chief, who couldn’t understand what the Irish wanted in the fight. To Ford’s reply—“What did George Washington want? They wanted liberty”—Briskin responded in a way that could only have made Ford bristle: “They’ve got liberty.” In the end, Hollywood’s requirement for a happy ending made a hash of O’Casey’s point about the futility of Pearse’s “blood sacrifice” for nationalism when ordinary human needs for food, shelter and dignity went unmet.

*An ornery director. “Terse, pithy, to the point,” actress Mary Astor once characterized Ford’s directing style. “Very Irish, a dark personality, a sensitivity which he did everything to conceal.” Astor understood him well, and Katharine Hepburn, whom he had directed earlier in 1936 in Mary of Scotland, did more than that: she loved him. Stanwyck did neither. Her early remark about her role—that it was so insubstantial that she could “walk through” it—led Ford to continually taunt her later on with, “Come on, Barbara, and walk through.” After filming was completed, Ford departed for his boat and refused to come back to supervise any additions. That opened the door to Briskin, never comfortable with such a political picture, to changing Jack and Nora Clitheroe from a married couple to lovers, necessitating additional scenes shot without Ford’s approval.

According to Scott Eyman’s biography of Ford, Print the Legend, the movie cost nearly a half-million dollars but only grossed three-quarters of that. That failure made the studio reluctant to take on future potentially prestigious projects, even low-budget ones, if they couldn’t promise a predictable revenue stream. (One of those was another O’Casey masterpiece that had caught Ford’s eye, Juno and the Paycock.) RKO’s post-production alterations led Ford both to depart for Twentieth Century Fox, where he would have a somewhat freer hand, and to become a driving force at the Screen Directors Guild (later the Directors Guild of America) as a counterweight against studio interference.

Ford was in no way done with Irish subject matter, however. In 1940, he wove several Eugene O’Neill one-act plays into The Long Voyage Home. Throughout his Westerns of the 1940s, Irish characters frequently appear as soldiers who perform lonely and dangerous duty on the American frontier. And, in the same year he suffered through one of his most frustrating projects because of his passion for an explicitly Celtic subject, he optioned another short story that, when he finally filmed it 15 years later, netted him his fourth and final Best Director Oscar: The Quiet Man.

Amazingly, for all his negative experience with The Plough and the Stars, he wasn’t done with O’Casey, either. Shortly before the latter’s death in 1964, the playwright agreed to allow filming proceed on the portion of his autobiography dealing with his early life. Unfortunately, Ford could not bring his vision to pass in this case, either. When he fell ill, Young Cassidy fell into the hands of cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Ford, in declining health, made only one other movie thereafter.

Theater Review: ‘Women Without Men,’ From the Mint Theater, NYC

Imagine the viperish ladies of Clare Booth Luce’s The Women confined to the school in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour and you might get an idea of the frustrations and cattiness unleashed in Women Without Men, which concluded its two-month run at New York’s Mint Theater last weekend.

This 1938 dramedy of fierce wit and refusal to settle for easy characterizations came from Hazel Ellis, who, having made her name as an actress with the Gate Theatre in Dublin, turned to writing two critically acclaimed plays of her own in the 1930s. All the more regrettable, then, that this second one would be her last, the result of her decision to forsake writing for matrimony and motherhood. 

All the more power, too, to the Mint Theater for giving the play—and its juicy parts for an all-female cast of 11—its New York premiere, as part of its mission to spotlight unjustly neglected vintage works.

Unlike most Irish schools, which after separation from Britain were largely run by the Roman Catholic Church, Malyn Park in the play, like the one Ellis attended growing up, is a privately operated Protestant boarding school for girls. It is, then, doubly insular—not just gender-based but operated by a religious minority in a country making its way gingerly out of the enormous British shadow, narrowing all the more the career and personal options of its faculty.

That atmosphere of toxic frustration explodes with new faculty arrival Jean Wade (played by Emily Walton). While her youth, enthusiasm and idealism establish instant rapport with her young charges, they also bring to the surface tensions among her colleagues. Though ranging in age from very young to late middle-aged, they have all grown scarred and cynical about their profession, their environment and their limited emotional involvements (none are married or with children). The storm outside their seemingly cozy faculty room also symbolizes what takes place as they interact with each other

We quickly understand why female students nickname this “The Tyrants’ Den” when the manuscript of one teacher—whose literary ambition is indirectly proportional to her talent—is defaced. Lies and destroyed reputations become the fruit of jealousy and petty quarrels over trifles. Or, in the words of one faculty veteran teacher, Miss Strong (played by Mary Bacon), who has maintained a smidgen of sanity by remaining coolly aloof and neutral: “What else would you expect? A small group of women all cooped up together with no release from each other save in the privacy of our bedrooms. Women brought together not by choice, not by liking, but by the necessity of earning our living.”

It was Ms. Ellis’ considerable skill that gave each of these lives fading into the Celtic twilight their own individuality, and Jenn Thompson’s adeptness that allowed each member of this very fine ensemble to shine. Kellie Overbey was appropriately bitter and brittle as Miss Wade’s principal faculty adversary, Miss Connor. Dee Pelletier gave pungency to the most conspicuous fish out of water among the faculty, the lone foreigner, Mademoiselle Vernier. Kate Middleton and Aedin Moloney brought comic gusto to the roles of the young, flighty Ruby Ridgeway and her older, more staid roommate, Miss Willoughby.

Especially good are Miss Walton and Miss Bacon, depicting a subtle relationship filled with strong undercurrents—two women that, in the end, may be less friends than allies linked by mutual disdain for this breeding ground of insecurity, false accusation, self-sacrifice and gratitude that deteriorates into buried resentment.

Women Without Men is only the latest example of how, whether by conscious design or merely inclination, the Mint Theater has carved out an alternative path from much of New York theater. While the last half-dozen years have brought bitter complaints about female underrepresentation in the New York theater world, the Mint has made it a point to unearth fine plays by Ellis, fellow Irishwoman Teresa Deavy, Susan Glaspell, Martha Gellhorn and Rachel Crothers. In opening a window into the past, it has shown how to carve a new path into the future.

This production also marked the Mint’s transfer from its longtime West 43^rd Street home to a new venue, at City Center 12 blocks up in Manhattan. The move was the product of necessity: Midtown’s real estate boom, which resulted in the sale of the 43^rd Street building twice in three years. Time will tell whether or not the Mint has truly found a home congenial to its staging and administrative needs. (After leaving its longtime St. Mark’s Place home, another Off-Broadway company, the Pearl Theatre Company, stayed in City Center for only three years before decamping to another space on West 42^nd Street.) Nevertheless, the increased leg room in the aisles and unobstructed sight lines already spell an improvement for the Mint’s small but devoted tribe of fans in City Center.

This Day in Theater History (Friel’s Bloody Sunday Play Sparks Critical Donnybrook)

February 23, 1974—The Freedom of the City only lasted nine performances on Broadway before closing at the Alvin Theatre, but not before setting off hackles over how accurately Brian Friel (pictured) had depicted British control of his native Ulster. Reaction to the play where it had been presented previously, in Dublin and Chicago, had already been polarized.

But the Broadway production turned out to be a virtual Rorschach test. The most prominent New York theater critic of the time complained that the playwright had examined the treatment of civil-rights activists to the disadvantage of British authorities, while Friel’s supporters observed that the play itself was being criticized unfairly by people who brought their own naivete and even prejudice into the theater.

The play premiered still relatively early in the Ulster "Troubles," the period from 1969 to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, when 3,000 lives were lost in the six disputed provinces under British control. The passage of four decades confirms that Friel was not only not a simplistic propagandist, but also that British security forces’ responsibility for human-rights violations had been as rigorously whitewashed as he had shown.

Friel’s chief antagonist in the New York critical establishment was Clive Barnes, then at the peak of his power as theater and dance critic at The New York Times. In the last decades of the 20^th century, shows without a star or “brand-name” composer depended for its run on the imprimatur of the Newspaper of Record. Friel’s play, like many others in Barnes’ time at the paper, did not win the critic’s approbation.

But there was excellent reason to question how much Barnes’ negative opinion really derived from aesthetic reasons, for the review of the London-born critic reeked of disbelief that that Her Majesty’s forces could have reacted with anything other than restraint in a region that had been a tinderbox over the last half-dozen years.

Barnes might have, with justice, pointed out that much of any tension in the play was gone from the moment the curtain rose to reveal the corpses of two young men and a middle-aged woman in Guildhall at Derry, the city in which Friel was born.

But Barnes moved in a different direction, claiming that the events subsequently depicted—the British authorities’ ludicrous misreading of the three Catholic victims as terrorists (not as they were-- civil-rights marchers who, under the pressure of tear gas, tumbled by mistake into the mayor’s office) and the subsequent judicial whitewashing—were “luridly fictionalized,” “far-fetched” and “impossible.” In particular, he asked: “Can we really be expected to believe that the British Army would mobilize against these three people 22 tanks, two dozen armored cars, four water cannon and a ‘modicum of air cover’?”

New York City Council President Paul O’Dwyer, born in the Republic of Ireland and by this time a fierce opponent of British policy in Ulster, wrote a letter to the Times saying Barnes defended “The Empire” more than he had reviewed the play. But there was an even more cogent point to make: that Barnes was oblivious to the situation on the ground that Friel, a direct witness in the civil-rights marches, knew firsthand.

Actually, what the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland had already lived through was far from “impossible.” The play is set in 1970, perhaps as acknowledging when Friel first took up the pen to examine the dynamics of a region that, even as a child raised Catholic, had left him in fear for his life. But he worked on the play even more fervently after “Bloody Sunday” in January 1972, when British paratroopers, thwarting a civil-rights march intended for Guildhall Square, opened fire, killing 13 and wounding 13 others.

If Barnes felt that a British inquiry could never be guilty of whitewashing security abuses, he evidently did not pay much attention to the report by Lord John Widgery, which not only claimed the soldiers were justified in firing but also threw suspicion on the deceased (“there is a strong suspicion that some others had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon and that yet others had been closely supporting them”). The “paraffin test,” used in the play to cast aspersions on the deceased, also figured crucially in the report.

It was not until 1999 before British Prime Minister Tony Blair reopened the inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Bloody Sunday, and yet another decade would pass before this latter investigation, this time by Lord Saville, absolved the victims of responsibility for their own deaths and new Prime Minister David Cameron apologized for the affair as “unjustified and unjustifiable."

After encouraging reviews of the play in Chicago, the producers of the drama had decided to make the move to Broadway, despite Friel’s misgivings. The reaction of Barnes, and the show’s quick closing, proved that he had a better sense of events than they did. (It should be said that Barnes’ opinion, though decisive, was hardly unanimous about the drama’s merits. Richard Watts of the New York Post called it “a genuine masterpiece.” That, of course, was before Rupert Murdoch moved the tabloid from its tamely liberal stance to its current conservative tone, including aggressive cheerleading of the official government line in the U.K. concerning Ulster.)

Though the play might be faulted, to some extent, on dramatic grounds, it was not really the nationalist agitprop of the imagination of Barnes and his ilk. Other parties in the drama—not just the British judge tasked with determining the truth of the case, but also a Catholic priest and an American academic spouting “culture of poverty” theories—reduce the three victims to their own preconceived notions. But Friel gives each of the victims a habitation, a name, and idiosyncrasies that render them fully human.

In the 1990s, New York’s estimable Irish Repertory Theatre approached Friel about mounting the play at its Off-Broadway venue. At that point, the playwright was reluctant to grant approval, as he did not want anything to interfere with the delicate negotiations toward resolving the Troubles. In 2012, however, with the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement and more than a decade of progress toward justice and peace in Northern Ireland, the company put on its production with Friel’s permission.

By this time, with plays such as Dancing at Lughnasa to his credit, Friel could be seen as he desired: a playwright with far more than political concerns on his mind. Those with open minds, on both sides of the Atlantic, could also see—not only because of the new findings on Bloody Sunday, but also because of the Guildford Four and John Stalker inquiries—that the rights of civilians had been frequently violated by the military and law enforcement in Ulster. This production ended up being well received critically. (See, for instance, this piece in the Huffington Post by Wilborn Hampton.)