"Nannie's Night Out"

"NANNIE'S NIGHT OUT" SEAN O'CASEY is surely wise in preferring "Kathleen Listens In" to "Nannie's Night Out," though it is an exaggeration for him to declare to Robert Hoganl that the latter play is "rather negligible" as drama. Compared to such imaginative essays in the one-act form as "Time To Go" and "Hall of Healing," however, it is not difficult to see why the author is perhaps overcritical of his earlier effort. My purpose here is to examine "Nannie's Night Out" in more detail than Dr. Hogan could do in his recent article, showing in particular the playas a link between O'Casey's earlier and his later plays. Dr. Hogan provides a good deal of useful background to the original Abbey Theatre production of "Nannie's Night Out." He quotes from the extensive diaries of Joseph Holloway, a Dublin playgoer who attended the theater almost every night for the first three decades of the century, during which period the Abbey attained and maintained its peak of artistic achievement. Holloway was a Puritan and a Philistine with little or no literary or theatrical sensibility: his diaries are only of interest for the gossip in them. But what gossip it wast He saw and spoke to most of the prominent people who attended the theater either as spectators or the artists who wrote, acted, or directed for the Abbey Company. As Dr. Hogan says, Holloway records (Oct. 4, 1924) that the "doll incident" actually occurred to O'Casey when in a shop and that the playwright had based the shopkeeper, Polly Pender, and her three elderly and decrepit admirers on Dublin people whom he knew. Holloway writes (Oct. 4) that O'Casey had heard that "'Mrs. Polly' was at the performance on Monday and one of the our fellas'''; and later (Oct. 29) he says that the author told him that three of the actual people on whom he modelled his "stage types sat in front on the opening night of 'Nannie's Night Out:" Holloway's observations on the first night of the play (Sept. 29) are most interesting: I saw Sean O'Casey in [the] front row of [the] stalls and he with his eyes screwed up quizzically as he smiled benignly as the piece proceeded. . . . The audience was amused by the piece. [T. C.] Murray2 said to me on Nannie's exit, that he felt the character as repulsive as he would in seeing such as she on the street-the realism of the acting repelled just as nature would in 1. "O'Casey's Dramatic Apprenticeship,"Modem DTama (December, 1961), p. 250. 2. The Irish playwright, author of such plays as Autumn FiTe and Maurice Harte, and a friend of Holloway. 154 1962 "NANNIE'g NIGIIT OUT" 155 this case. There was nothing to laugh at in seeing such a poor wreck of humanity ... on the stage. "The Wooing of Polly" would be a more fitting name for O'Casey's farce than the one given it. Nannie only flits in and out of the piece, but the wooers are ever present. Murray's suggestion of an alternative title is especially enlightening in view of the fact that when O'Casey first conceived the play, it was the drama of Polly and her three suitors which was to have been the main theme of the play while Nannie herself was to be merely a minor figure supplying comic relief. Raymond Brugere, of whom Gabriel Fallon records an amusing recollection,3 gives us the following account of the first draft of the play which was then entitled "The Lovers of Penelope." As Fallon relates in his autobiographical fragment , Brugere was a close friend of O'Casey for a short period at this time, and as the article from which this extract is taken was written less than eighteen months after the production of the play, it is almost certain that, allowing for the extravagant sentiments and somewhat pretentious critical terminology of the critic, his description is accurate in its details. In the article Brugere declared that: Une autre creation d'O'Casey qui n'est pas indigne d'etre comparee aJunon, c'est...