Feathers Finely Aflutther

FEATHERS FINELY AFLUTTHER ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING FEATURES of the quarrel between the Abbey Theatre directors and Sean O'Casey over The Silver Tassie in 1928 was the reaction of the directors to O'Casey's behaviour. They were surprised, even upset when the playwright, far from meekly accepting (as they expected) their adverse opinions on his play, turned round on each of them from Yeats to Lennox Robinson and rent their criticisms into pieces in a series of public attacks unmatched for ferocity and sheer pugnacious brilliance. Today it is difficult to understand how Yeats and, in particular, Lady Gregory could have so completely misunderstood the essential nature of O'Casey's character . Not that they needs must have accepted the play, but that their rejection should really have been more tactfully-and honestlyconducted . Yeats was, I feel sure, only trying to help a still struggling writer when he suggested that the playwright should "excuse" the Abbey's rejection by saying that he (O'Casey) had withdrawn the play for "revision." Instead, O'Casey scorned excuses and explanations , told the public that the Abbey had refused his play because it was considered a bad play whereas he, the author, still thought it a fine one. From then on, the battle lines were drawn. But strife was nothing new to O'Casey. His first published article, "Sound the Loud Trumpet" (1907), was an onslaught on the educational policies of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell; his latest essay, "Purple Dust in Their Eyes" (1963), is a counterattack on the leading London drama critics, Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson. O'Casey has been fighting battles of one kind or another all his life. Indeed, two-thirds of the recently published anthology of his early writings (Feathers from the Green Crow: Sean O'Casey~ I905-I925~ edited by Robert Hogan, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1962) documents vigorously the many national and politicial disputes in which his pen was trenchantly engaged in the years before his first play graced the Abbey boards. It is easy for us to have such hindsight into O'Casey's contentious character. The world of revolutionary action and controversy to which we are introduced in the autobiographical Mirror in My House and in Feathers from the Green Crow is a side to O'Casey's life of which the Abbey directors were but dimly aware in 1928. 13S 136 MODERN DRAMA September Lady Gregory was his best friend on the theatre's board. She befriended O'Casey from the time his The Shadow of a Gunman was accepted by her little theatre in 1923. Yet, although he stayed with her at Coole Park and though she recorded in her Journals many conversations with O'Casey in which he related experiences from his early life and work as a building labourer, she obviously had little real knowledge of his literary activities before his Abbey advent. Several of O'Cathasaigh's songs and ballads, including his Songs of the Wren (also printed in Hogan's collection), were very popular among all classes of Dublin society particularly during the later years of the First World War. On the title page of Songs of the Wren., published in. 1918, was the inscription, "By Sean O'Cathasaigh, Author of 'The Grand OuI' Dame Britannia:" which shows how popular was that particular anti-recruiting song. Yet, as Hogan notes, when Lady Gregory printed a version of the poem in her Kiltartan History Book in 1926 she did not connect its author with her friend, the creator of Juno! And, for all her sympathy with O'Casey's struggle for self-expression, she obviously had little insight into his way of thinking about proletarian art. We remember, for instance, that when he was staying with her at Coole she began to read aloud to him-·as he recollects in Inishfallen., Fare Thee Well-a Labour play called Singing Jail Birds., to him "the worst play ever written signifying its sympathy with the workers." Because its author was sympathetic to the workers, Lady Gregory expected the play to interest O'Casey. Instead, as we might expect from the kind of man and writer...