Theatre as Dream: Yeats's Stagecraft

Theatre as Dream: Yeats's Stagecraft WARREN LEAMON YEATS WAS A LYRIC POET who desired to return poetry to the stage. Consequently his own plays- and in particular his attempts to stage them- are the result of the same motive which lay behind his poetry: an attempt to reduce the accidents of character and surface reality to their proper place in relation to the unchanging reality of the soul (or, to use a term central to the plays, personality). This is a commonplace which one should not lose sight of in discussing the specifics of his stagecraft, for it determined from the beginning that Yeats would never succeed in mastering the demands of a popular theatre. His earliest plays, though of little interest in regard to the development of modern drama, are important in that they exhibit his desire to make action barely more than an ornament for the poetry, a desire he never really abandoned. In both The Land of Heart's Desire and The Countess Cathleen the action, because it is hardly more than a metaphor for a personal conflict, is undramatic. And the history of the various drafts of The Shadowy Waters' gives us the best record of Yeats's early unsuccessful attempts to fuse the emotionalism of lyric poetry and drama into a convincing unity. Yet Yeats located the heart of drama precisely in a personal conflict, in the struggle of the soul against its own greatest weakness: a willingness to abandon a vision of unchanging reality for the transient affairs of men. Such a conflict characterized the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century, and Yeats's treatment of it would be of little interest in histories of the theatre had he not given up- for a while at least- coterie drama for the popular stage. His efforts to 145 146 WARREN LEAMON translate his essentially lyric obsessions into plays for a "national" theatre become of interest primarily for what they tell us about the very real and often ignored difference between poetic and dramatic imagination.2 The problem resulting from the difference is apparent in the stage directions to The Countess Cathleen. Yeats wished the opening scene to "have the effect of a missal painting," scene two to contain a "distant view of turreted house," scene three "an oratory with steps leading up to it," "a tapestried wall," "two or more arches through which one can see dimly the trees of the garden." Presumably (though he did not say so in the set directions to scene three) all scenes are bound together by "a diapered or gold background," against which the views of wood and house are painted in "flat colour." The scenery is obviously designed to reinforce both the poetry and essentially religious theme without becoming obtrusive, but it actually enhances the vagueness of the play. In the tradition of symbolist drama, Yeats sought to minimize the importance of specific time and place in favor of archetypal evocations: ruined towers, dim woods, foggy waters, twilight fading into night. But The Countess Cathleen wavers between a conventional religious theme and an intensely personal symbolism, and the scenery, dividing the audience's consideration between one kind of imagery which reinforces the symbolism and another which reinforces the religious theme, serves to emphasize the confusion of the play itself. In addition, the scenery is by no means as simple as Yeats's comments on the subject would lead us to expect. There are at least three changes of scene to distract the attention of the audience away from action and poetry; and houses, gardens, and woods painted against a gold background are perhaps not as unobtrusive as he thought. He was always preoccupied with symbolic painting, and as a novice playwright, he oversimplified the relationship between visual and oral art, an oversimplification rooted in something deeper and not so easily resolved through experience and training: the poet's absolute faith in the power of the imagination to transform action into image. The early plays, not surprisingly since they were written by a man who greatly admired Axel, attempt to reduce action, along with scenery, to a backdrop for the symbolism, But constant revising of The Countess...