ABSTRACT
In early November 1947, two well-known Dublin intellectuals, the playwright and lecturer Roger McHugh and the poet Valentine Iremonger, staged a public walkout from an Abbey Theatre production of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. Their protest arose not because of an impression of O’Casey’s representation of the 1916 rebellion as objectionably unpatriotic, but because of the poor quality of the play’s acting and production (Irish Times, 10 November 1947: 4). Unlike O’Casey’s 1926 protesters, McHugh and Iremonger’s protest was bathed in the warm light of public approval. The Irish Times praised this resolute stand against Ernest Blythe’s ‘nonchalant sacrifice of the Abbey’s traditional artistic integrity on the altar of the Irish language’ and argued that the decline in standards in the NTS was due to Blythe’s policy of hiring actors exclusively on the basis of their knowledge of the Irish language (Irish Times, 10 November 1947: 4). Other media organs less prone to attack Blythe or the Fianna Fáil government’s Irish
language policy (such as the influential nationalist weekly newspaper The Leader and the liberal Catholic periodical The Irish Monthly) also applauded the theatre walkout as entirely necessary and legitimate. For The Leader it exposed the extent to which the Abbey Theatre had lost its national character (The Leader, 22 November 1947: 8), while for The Irish Monthly the incident revealed the theatre directorate’s lack of public accountability (Fallon 1948: 91). In walking out of The Plough and the Stars, McHugh and Iremonger demonstrated a widely held view that the Abbey Theatre was now suffocating under the weight of a bureaucratic theatre management (see Irish Times, 11 November 1947: 2). And while not everyone agreed with the Irish Times’s view that the declining standards of the NTS were due to Blythe’s rigid Irish-language policy, it was generally accepted that the repertoire and production standards at the Abbey had become calcified (see, for example, Irish Independent, 12 November 1947: 6; Irish Times, 10 November 1947: 5; Fallon 1948: 88-92). A former Irish language producer at the Abbey, Liam Ó Laoghaire, claimed that the problem was that the NTS had degenerated into a commercial theatre, and that it had failed to effect a transition between the formidable literary standards of its founders and the modernity of contemporary popular culture. There was a jarring discrepancy, he argued, between the portraits of Yeats and Gregory gathering dust in the foyer, and the photograph of Bing Crosby on the mantelpiece of the green room (Irish Times, 11 November 1947: 2). Having lost touch with its ‘thinking audience’, the NTS was no longer worthy of its status as a national institution.
