A Player's Reflections on Playboy

A PLAYER'S REFLECTIONS ON PLAYBOY I WRITE PRIMAIlILY AS AN ACTOR, which must at once set up a suspicion that what I say will be considerably coloured with ego and possible bias. So be it: I write out of my experience of playing Synge, and in particular the role of Christopher Mahon, which I have played over a period of just on twenty years-from 1936 to 1955-ranging from Dublin, through the Irish provinces, to London and Paris. It is the one of all his characters through which, to my mind, almost to the point of identification a player may reach closest to the essential Synge, the playwright in search of himself. When first I joined the Abbey Theatre, at its old Marlborough Street house, in 1932, the Synge repertoire was staling into a collection of museum pieces. No longer did The Playboy of the Western World conjure up a popular reaction of any kind. (I can recollect only a sentimental salute of applause for the love-scene-at the height of the tourist season.) Its audiences sat, thin and depressingly inert, present, as it were, behind a stifled yawn, some from a dutiful habit of playgoing , some out of academic or literary interest, others from sentiment or curiosity-a wordless contradiction of the wordy tales of riots and ructions in the Abbey's early years. Within the Theatre itself, however, amongst both directors and players Playboy still could arouse enthusiasm, occasionally even tempers , but referring mainly to the manner in which the play should be presented and acted, rather as if they were holding up the mirror to some far glory that was past. Introduced as 'prentice-player to the Synge drama I was at once made aware it required a "traditional" style of acting, with a strong insistence from the "traditionalists" on special rhythms and emphases in speech-delivery. It is true to say that already there existed in the Abbey, though a comparatively young theatre in the history of drama, a sense of tradition, but there was a tendency with some to hug it to death, forgetful of the fact that tradition , in order to remain vital, must draw upon the present as well as from the past. I approached my initiation with all due reverence. Having myself, as a child-actor, emerged from the school of melodrama associated with Boucicault and the despised "stage-lrishman"which , from Lady Gregory's pronunciamento, the Abbey was pledged to replace with indigenous theatre-I recognised the true theatrical quality of Synge. At the same time, instinctively I felt the necessity of 300 1961 AcroR's PLAYBOY 301 relating the work to reality-as I knew it- and what I then understood as "reality" was drawn from my observation of Irish speech and character through a touring childhood. So, though I was ignorant of the fact that the dramatist had, as he tells us, composed his dialogue in phrases culled directly from the mouths of the people, without being fully conscious of what I was doing I set out to play in a "style" compounded of the purely theatrical with a form of naturalism perilously near to being simply representational, two apparently conflicting elements which nevertheless are present and compatible in the work of Synge. Needless to say, there was no great novelty in this, as I was to discover in my subsequent association abroad with many of the first generation Abbey players, of whose work in exile, even through an overlay of commercial theatre, I have had privileged glimpses; I would see that already had been achieved that fine balance of naturalism with the theatrical which was the ideal of Irish acting but which had fallen away, on the one hand into the near vaudevillian method demanded of the Irish actor by foreign commercial managements, and, on the other, into the false convention contrived by some of the later resident disciples of the Abbey tradition, or the pseudo-naturalism, later still, of younger reactionaries. With the early disappearance from the Irish stage of Frank and W. G. Fay, who might be termed the Theatre's actor-founders, and-because of aims and views conflicting with those of...