NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 6, 11 February 1925, Page 34

NOTES

By Eileen Duggan

An Irish Play Many Irish plays are finding their way into this country. It is surprising that more dramatic societies are not formed here. In the country or the city, these plays with a little censoring perhaps could 'be performed. Dramatic talent is a curious thing. It lies hidden in unexpected persons. Only practice of a play will bring it out. If the first performance be disappointing the performers must not bo discouraged. Perhaps in a different type of play they will succeed. Comedies arc the safest beginning. Mistakes are hidden in the merciful laughter of indulgent audiences. If one had the.time it would lie worth while to start a crusade for the plays. At every concert there are songs, recitations, and. dances. What a change it would be to bear as part of the programme the whole or a portion of a- good play, Enr the children it is a- far more exciting form of entertainment than the usual -declamatory recitation that is mouthed time after time. But in most of the schools now plays are performed so that it is the grown-ups who are in need of the plays most. If it is found to be impossible to stage the play, a reading of it is better than nothing. Usually there is the difficulty of equipment. Young people must be made to look like old people, a bare stage must blossom into a Louis Seize apartment. Reading is a poor substitute but it is the best in the circumstances. Reading excludes action, mu' of the most natural forms of human expression, but it trains the novice in voiceinflection, and so is a preparation for something better. There arc plays of all nations that are worth the reading, and -that, abridged, can be made to suit the -most critical of audiences, and no audiences are more critical than those to which the performers are known in everyday life. But the Irish plays come into one’s mind partly from reasons of race, partly from pride in the wonderful burgeoning of Irish drama in the last few years. The Abbey Theatre has been much criticised. Synge is dead, but Yeats is still under fire. .It is true he is no longer the Yeats of the pure and drowsy Innisfree; he has wandered into the occult, but as date as the Paris Conference, be was still Yeats enough to say that Padraic Pearse’s “Wayfarer” was the best Anglo-Irish poem of modern years. Synge has been much criticised for “The Playboy.” There were sore hearts and sore heads over that bewildering, whimsical production. In Ireland pride of race is a torment, a tumult,- a passion. Elmar O’Duffy in an exceedingly clever, though hitter, book. The Wasted Island, comments on this soreness, this sensitiveness. No Englishman, he says, thinks of himself if he sees an unpleasing Englishman portrayed, hut -to an Irishman, one bad Irishman portrayed is an insult to Ireland from Ana Lifl’ey to the Galtees. Well if it’s a fault, it's a fair fault. It proves that Ireland is more than a State, it is a family State, and where one’s family is concerned the lance

I should not grow rusty in the sheath. So y ’ Ireland had a right to ding her rage on Synge when he wrote “The Playboy,” but she had a right to forgive him forever when he wrote “The Riders to the Sea.” Riders to the Sea” It’s a short thing after all, this play, that is one of the wonders of modern literature. So groat is it in its stern, simple terror and grandeur that a prose description of it seems something very like presumption. Who could describe it Some one who saw it played in Ireland by a wonderful band of Irish actors broke down during his description at the mere memory of it. Another who had no love for Ireland found it so piercing that he could scarcely bear to read the end. The characters briefly are jManyra, an old peasant woman of one of the bleak western islands. Hartley her son, Cathleen her daughter, and Nora- the younger daughter. The play opens with Cathleen spinning. The. old woman is resting. One of the sons is missing. This is part of the conversation between the two girls . . . the priest has brought them clothes to identify. Cathleen : “How would they be Michael’s, Nora? How would he go the length of that way to the far north?” Nora: “The young priest says he’s known the like of it. 1 If it's Michael's they are,’ says he, ‘ yon can tell herself he’s got clean burial, by the grace of Cod, and if they’re not- his, let no one say a word about them, for she’ll be getting her death,’ he says, S ‘ crying and lamenting!’ ” \ The clothes were Michael’s, and Bartley, the other son, has to go that very day on the water. Bartley comes in and old Mauyra hobbles out, sad and querulous to beg him not to go. . . “If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only.” In her anger she lets him go without a blessing, and then broken-hearted hobbles off to give it to him as he rounds the bend. She comes back keening, having had a sudden vision of his end. Very soon he is carried back to her from the sea. At the . end we are left with the spectacle of the young women weeping; and the old woman with that sudden, deadly stillness of resignation that falls on the aged at the sight of death. When one expects them to keen and to cry they are calm with the windless calm that cores the hurricane. “They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me. . . . I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks in the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one "1 / on the other. ... hT> They’re all together this time, and the end is come. May the Almighty God have mercy on Bartley’s soul, and on Michael’s soul, and on the souls of Shamus and Patch,

and Stephen and Shawn. Michael will have a clean burial in the far north by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want j than that? No man at all can he living forever, and we must be satisfied.” v Is there anything in your vaunted Greek tragedies that for towering grandeur of resignation can equal those few simple awful words. “No man at all can be living forever.” The truth that we clothe in delicate shadows brought out to the bare day! Alortality, immortality! The sea has taken and tossed in turn the flesh, of her flesh, Bartley, Alichael, Shamus, Patch, Shawn, and Stephen , yet at the end there is for her nothing but praise to God that they are home to Him now from the sea, from the lashing sea, and herself home to Him too from the • tearing sea of sorrow. Sorrow and praise, the straightest paths to eternal peace !