Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland

7. Irish Stage Censorship from Salome through Roly Poly

7 Irish Stage Censorship from Salome through Roly Poly All censorship is political censorship. —William Seagle, Cato 127 Proponents took pains to characterize the 1929 Censorship Act as other than a literary censorship, but in practice, it quickly became exactly that. Within three years, the Censorship Board banned serious literary works and expanded its remit to enact literary censorship predicated not on “the general tendency of the work” but on isolated passages. Yeats and Shaw, in the second sentence of their announcement of the Irish Academy of Letters, lamented : “There is in Ireland an official censorship possessing, and actively exercising, powers of suppression which may at any moment confine an Irish author to the British and American market, and thereby make it impossible for him to live by distinctly Irish literature .”1 Critics like Terence Brown and Paul Scott Stanfield emblematize the cultural stagnation, repression, and isolationism of the 1930s and 1940s in its censorship: “[T]he Irish writer was so hampered by the official censorship of the state and the unofficial censorship of various religious and political watchdog associations . . . [that] Irish spirituality seemed confined to Jansenistical piety and commercialised pilgrimages.”2 Irish theatre, as well as creative works critical of censorship and periodicals like the Irish Statesman (1923– 30), Ireland To-Day (1936–37), and the Bell (1940–54), resisted and challenged the literary censorship. With Lynn Doyle’s resignation and the exposure of the actual procedures of the Censorship Board in 1937 and the banning of literary works by a who’s who of Irish writers, censorship remained a hotly contested subject.3 Concurrent with the drafting of the 1929 censorship legislation, Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir founded the Gate Theatre “for the production of modern and progressive plays.”4 With few resources and no subsidy, the Gate management was, of necessity, culturally sensitive and usually very astute in its management decisions. Mac Liammóir, a man who reinvented himself from Alfie Wilmore of Wilsenden Green, was acutely aware of the power of image. The conundrums of identity were never more convoluted than in the life of a gay man from North London who became a matinee idol and passed himself off as a native Irish speaker. What Oscar Wilde had done for London society when he first came down from Oxford, Mac Liammóir did for himself in the Dublin theatre world—both were outsiders who transformed themselves into the apotheosis of their adopted worlds. With Diarmuid agus Grainne, Mac Liammóir first established himself as an Irish-language playwright at an Taibhdhearc in Galway. He fooled everyone. The Gate came into existence the same year the Dublin Drama League ceased operation. Lennox Robinson argues that “the League had prepared a path for them [the Gate] . . . and the League, not being a money-making concern, gladly stepped aside to make room for the Edwards-Mac Liammóir Company.”5 Unlike the Dublin Drama League, the Gate strategically included Irish as well as international plays in its repertory. Since 1923 the Abbey had been producing many more international plays—Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, and even Shakespeare—but as Peter Kavanagh notes, “foreign classics were abandoned [by the Abbey] in 1928, when the Gate Theatre Company was founded in Dublin with the specific object of producing them.”6 In selecting the plays for the inaugural season of the Dublin Gate Theatre at the Peacock, Edwards and Mac Liammóir first chose Peer Gynt, for which the ratio of audience members in a full house to 128 Riot and Great Anger 129 Salome through Roly Poly scripted characters would be two to one—an undertaking as astonishing as it was financially risky. Press releases in September 1928 announced a double bill of two short plays by Nicholas Evreinov, but those plans were changed to make room for what the Gate pointedly identified as “an Irish play” by Oscar Wilde.7 Salome offered two obvious footholds for publicity: first, it was written by an Irishman whose Irishness was rarely celebrated. In its first twenty-five years of operation, the Abbey had produced only one play by Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest in 1926. The very antithesis of Abbey Theatre’s sense of what an Irish play was, Salome was a stylized parable of decadence. The Gate would in later years become Dublin’s...