The Splendid Years: The Memoirs of an Abbey Actress and 1916 Rebel
by Máire Nic Shúibhlaigh with Edward Kenny, edited by David Kenny
(Dublin: New Island Books, €15.95)
Anthony Roche
This new edition of The Splendid Years has clearly been prompted by the 1916 Centenary Celebrations and the greater attention paid to the part women played in the Rising.
When, as an officer in Cumann na mBan, the author presented herself to Thomas McDonagh in Jacob’s Factory, he replied: “’My God, it’s Máire Walker! How did you get in?… We haven’t made any provision for girls here…’ I explained that we could cook for the garrison and look after casualties.”
McDonagh recognized Nic Shúibhliagh because they had both been active in Dublin’s theatrical circles prior to 1916, McDonagh as a playwright and actor, Nic Shúibhlaigh as an actress. This book shows better than most how closely revolutionary and theatrical activities were intertwined during these years.
The Splendid Years was born when writer/journalist Edward Kenny decided that the experiences of his aunt Máire Nic Shúibhliagh needed to be recorded.
As well as directly participating in the Easter Rising, she had been one of the first leading ladies of the early Irish Theatre Movement, playing the title role of Yeats and Gregory’s Kathleen ni Houlihan at the Abbey opening in 1904 and originating the role of Nora in J.M. Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen.
Conversations
Drawing on long conversations with Nic Shuiblaigh, Kenny ‘ghosted’ The Splendid Years: the result is a seamless fusion of her voice and his writing skills. Hers is the best account of the opening night of Cathleen ni Houlihan in St Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street, on 2 April 1902, when the part of Cathleen was played on this one occasion by legendary activist and Yeats muse, Maud Gonne.
Nic Shúibhlaigh describes how Gonne ‘arrived late the first night and caused a minor sensation by sweeping through the auditorium in the ghostly robes of the old woman in Kathleen ni Houlihan 10 minutes before we were due to begin’.
The theatre was so small that the stage could only be approached through the auditorium; the other actors arrived an hour earlier; but Madame Gonne needed to make an entrance.
Nic Shúibhlaigh was a leading light in the little company of actors run by Frank and Willie Fay. It is doubtful that Yeats, Gregory and Synge could have founded their national theatre without this Irish company to perform their plays. But this was a nationalist group, proud of its amateur status and resolutely run along democratic lines.
Yeats soon moved to get power into the writers’ hands and to make it professional. There was an almighty row, very little of which makes it into the memoir. But David Kenny, the son of Edward Kenny, gives a full account of what Michael Yeats describes as the “dreadful row” between his father and Kenny’s grand-aunt in his invaluable prefatory material.
He describes how Yeats “fought all its battles and denounced its [the Abbey’s] enemies and critics with a vigour almost terrifying in its finality… I have frequently seen him shaken by fits of the most uncontrollable rage”.
Lady Gregory proves condescending. She praises Synge’s art of dramatic construction and, despite her nationalism, does not join in the condemnation of Nora in Shadow of the Glen which led Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith to leave the movement; perhaps because Máire herself played the part.
There is great deal else in this book to value: the work with Theatre of Ireland that she and the other nationalist amateurs who left the Abbey put on between 1906 and 1912; her return to the Abbey to appear in the controversial American tours of 1911-1912; the theatrical collaboration with Thomas and John McDonagh in the Irish Theatre in Hardwicke Street right up to 1916; and the full account of her involvement in the Easter Rising.
This is a fascinating account of these tumultuous years.
Professor Anthony Roche teaches in the Department of English, Drama and Film, UCD