Events.

Irish dramatic enterprise apart from our own company. Rivalry should be a help in matters of art, for every good work increases the public interest in all similar work. This hope has only been fulfilled by the two visits of the Ulster Literary Theatre, which have given us a very great pleasure. I was away at the time of their last visit, but I remember vividly in the performance of a year ago the absence of the ordinary conventions, the novelty of movement and intonation. I saw a play of Cockney life the other day. The actors were incomparably more experienced, the playwright was one of ihe new school who go directly to life, and one felt that the players were conscientious enough to do their best to go to life also. But I felt that though there was observation in detail, there was in every case a traditional representation in the player's mind. He hung his observation about some old type as a dressmaker hangs a new dress upon the Mannequin d'Osier that is in every dressmaker’s room. I believe, furthermore, that these Ulster players, like ourselves, are doing something to bring to an end the charlatanism of International acting. I saw a while ago a performance of The Corsican Brothers, which, but for its Corsican peasantry, had been excellent. The Brothers themselves, essentially traditional types of romance, were played with sincerity, but when the other Corsicans began to quarrel, I went straight back to the days when my uncles and aunts helped me to dress up in old tablecloths. When we have a sincere dramatic art there will be in every country actors who have made a study of the characteristics of its different classes. This will make “ adaptions from the French,” let us say, more difficult, but not more than the translation of a fine poem, which somebody says is impossible. You can re-create it, making an English poem of a French or a German, and in the same way it will be necessary to re-create drama as we do when we play Le Medecin Malgre Lui in “ Kiltartanese.” The inaccuracy of detail, the persistence of conventional types, has ^ arisen from the same causes, which have destroyed in modern drama eloquence, poetry, beauty, and all the reveries of wisdom, and given us in their place a more or less logical mechanism. When I saw the Ulster players, upon the

* ** The Ulster Players are the only dramatic society, apart from our own,

which is doing serious artistic work. Two other performances were lamentable ; that of the Independent Theatre Society showed little sign of work or purpose. One or two of the players had a gift for acting, and working upon new material among hard workers might have struck out something new and forcible. But the performance as a whole made me wonder why so much trouble was taken to put on something not finer at its finest moments and much worse at every other moment than a third-rate touring company. The Theatre of Ireland made me indignant, because although the playwrights had found more of themselves than Count Markiewicz struggling with the difficulties of a strange language and strange circumstance, there was even less evidence of work and purpose. Such adventures can do nothing but injury to the drama in Ireland. They all show talent here and there, for Ireland has talent in plenty, but it is brought to nothing by lack of work and lack of subordination to a single aim. Though I used to speak with the greatest freedom of the performances given by the Gaelic League, I have not hitherto touched upon the work of these societies, and would not now, but for my real pleasure in the Ulster Theatre. One feels that in a country like this, where there is so little criticism with any special knowledge behind it, it is a wrong to the few fine workers to omit anything that may help to separate them from the triflers. I have a right to speak, for I asked our own company to give up two of our Saturday performances that we might give the Independent Theatre and the Theatre of Ireland the most popular days. I see some talk in the papers of those two societies uniting. If they do so, there is only one means of success, the appointment of some competent man who will be able to cast parts with no thought but efficiency, and to insist upon regular attendance at rehearsals. The Gaelic League companies must do the same if they would raise the Gaelic drama out of its present decline, for theatres cannot be democracies. The Gaelic League has difficulties one must respect, for the Gaelic League can hardly spare many of its thoughts for any art till its battle is more nearly won, and this single purpose gives to even their most clumsy performance a little simplicity and entire lack of pretence. The same excuse applies to the National Players, whose representation of Robert Emmet in St. Cecilia's Hall some years ago, interested me and touched me. It was frankly propagandist, had the dignity of a long national tradition, and carried my imagination to Davis and to Mitchel. All work which is done without selfishness for something beyond one’s self has moral beauty.