"THE PLAYBOY" IN THE WESTERN WORLD.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1378, 2 March 1912, Page 9

"THE PLAYBOY" IN THE WESTERN WORLD.

The Irish players who have been producing "The Playboy of the Western World" have had in Philadelphia a ■worse experience than they had in New York. They were arrested on a charge of producing an "immoral" play! Mr. W. B. Yeats was interviewed about it by a Dublin correspondent. Ho could only surmise- that some Irish organisation had secured a "pull over the Philadelphia Municipal Council. 1 he only result, of course," ho Bind; will be to rive the 'Playboy' a tremendous advertisement. In Now York the action against it had this eilect, that in"tead of all our plays drawing about .finally tho 'Playboy' drew much better San any other, and pressure has been put on us from various localities to oroduce the 'Playboy' for long runs, to Fh° Susion of the rest of our repertoire This wo havo refused, o do, as £L c » vw Tfe, a w r^.^ish s ;r»^ h " Ir TlrK tAt artificial and dishonest agitation worked "Plains the "Plavbov." Mr. Yeats showed me -a JlcS of extracts from the ho. j ,le Irish-American press which ho has liau framed and hung up in >>'V%nLo s theatre, under tho heading Manners maketh man." Ho drew my at entionto a leaflet issued by ho Aloysius Irutl Society "This leaflet, you see, states b> way of showing that tin's agitation ™ not the outcome of Irish prejudice but nUeoted independent English op.nion,

that the 'Pall Mall Gazetto' had declared tho characters in tho play to be monsters of depravity. This has been emphatically repudiated by tho Tall Mall Gazette' this very evening." Mr. Yeats showed.mo an extract which had been wired to the Dublin evening papers, showing that the 'Tall Mall Gazette" has always admired the "Playboy." "Tho method has been to tear a single sentenco from its context, to pervert and in some euses absolutely to reverse its meaning. There has been widely circulated an alleged quotation of this kind from Mr. Stephen Gwynn, who has written to me," wont on Mr. Yeats, "to repudiate this uso of his name. Ho has no sympathy whatever with the agitation against the Playboy,' which ho admires much, and ho nover used anything like tho words attributed to him. Equally garbled quotations have been made from others; tho wholo campaign has been astonishingly dishonest; it has amazed mo; and all this has been forced into tho mind of tho most ignorant portion of the Irisli peoplo in America. Tho agitation has been growing, and now, apparently, it has reached the point that tho undoubtedly Irish Municipal Council of Philadelphia has either been hypnotised into believing that tho 'Playboy is immoral or else calculates that it can get some political capital by playing up to tho Irish vote." Asked if he knew tho Council to be Irish, Mr. Yeats said: "It must be; 'Philadelphia is a very Irish city. Thit any American municipality should havo condemned tho 'Playboy' without Irisli influence is unthinkable. Only in one case was there the slightest objection to our play, from a purely American source and that objection was not to tho 'Playboy.' Tho Mayor of a Western town was asked by the Irish societies to stop tho 'Playboy'; he went to see it, and arvived at the theatre in the middlo of 'Blanco Posnet,' which he mistook for tho 'Playboy,' and declared it to be so immoral that he would certainly havo prohibited it had he known in time." Passing to more general aspects of the controversies, Mr. Yeats said: "Up to the appearance of our movement there had been no educated national Ireland.. There had been an uneducated Ireland which was national and an educated Ireland which was anti-national and anti-Irish. An educated national Ireland is now developing, and is beginning to insist cm a national standard in literature as in everything else. In Ireland itself the protests of the uneducated national Ireland are growing feebler and feebler. In America there is still only the uneducated national. Ireland; the educated Irishman in America becomes absorbed in the general lifo of the country. Organised Irish lifo in America is at the stage where" Irish opinion in Ireland was twenty or thirty years ago. There are plenty of honest men among these Irish Americans, but their minds have not travelled beyond Boucicault, who, though born so much later, was the last of tho young Irelanders."