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All 26 Yeats plays come to life on NY stage

Review of the Irish Rep's Yeats Project

CAHIR O'DOHERTY

IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 12:37 PM

Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 5:23 PM

Read more: William Butler Yeats

Patrick Fitzgerald and Terry Donnelly in "The Pot of Broth," part of the Irish Rep’s Yeats Project

If the Irish Repertory Theatre were never to stage another production they should still be garlanded in olive leaves and paraded down Broadway for having the stamina and artistic daring to bring us what they are understatedly calling the "Yeats Project," a month-long festival of all 26 rarely performed plays written by Ireland’s greatest poet, William Butler Yeats.

"Project" is much too academic a word to describe their achievement with this series of plays, lectures and readings.

Between them, directors Charlotte Moore and Ciaran O’Reilly have staged no less than eight full productions of Yeats plays on the same stage in the same month with the same actors.

As a New York Times review says: “Ms. Moore and Mr. O’Reilly have set themselves a mighty challenge in making these plays sing with a fresh, compelling voice. Presenting them in simple productions with minimal scenery, in an unadorned style that Yeats would have approved of, they do their best to make a case for the plays as living works.”

Featuring haunting original scores by "Riverdance" composer Bill Whelan, and boasting spellbinding choreography by Barry McNabb, each of the new productions are thrilling to look and have been brought vividly to life.

As the Rep’s productions make clear, Yeats was an Irish nationalist in his heart, even if his politics are often harder to discern. But like Oscar Wilde, another gifted Anglo-Irish writer, you can actually discern all the warring impulses at work in his art.

“Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?” wondered Yeats toward the end of his long life. He was contemplating the politically galvanizing response to of one of his most famous plays and it says a lot about Yeats world view that he was still in any doubt about it.

The fact is that his hard hitting play "Cathleen Ni Houlihan" is about as incendiary a piece of theatre as you’ll ever witness, and in the Irish Rep’s spirited new production Fiana Toibin is so captivating in the title role that she’ll have you reaching for your pitchforks before she’s taken her final bow.

Yeats consistently preferred myth to realism and so his association with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, which he had helped found, came to an end when his stable of writers started venturing ever closer to realistic productions. Even today there are many in Ireland and abroad who can’t abide his mighty tableaus. What, for example, is the point of singing of the peasantry if they don’t really feel like singing themselves?

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A sea change in the history of the Irish theatre came with the establishment in Dublin in 1899 of the Irish Literary Theatre, later to become the Abbey Theatre. The history of this theatre is well documented, and its importance can be seen from the list of writers whose plays were first performed here in the early days of the 20th century. These included W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, George Moore, and Sean O'Casey. The Abbey was to create a style that held a strong fascination for future dramatists of Irish plays. Indeed, it could almost be said that the Abbey created the basic elements of a national style for Irish plays. This period also saw a rise in the writing of plays in Irish, especially after the formation, in 1928, of An Taidhbhearc, a theatre dedicated to the Irish language. The Gate Theatre, also founded in 1928, introduced Irish theatre audiences to many of the classics of the European stage. The twentieth century saw a number of Irish playwrights come to prominence. Samuel Beckett is probably the most significant of these. Beckett had a long career as a novelist and poet before his first play, Waiting for Godot (1953) made him famous. This play, along with his second, Endgame, is one of the great works of absurdist theatre. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969. The Lyric Theatre, founded in 1944 by Austin Clarke was based in the Abbey until 1951 and produced many of Clarke's own verse plays. From the mid 1950s, the Unitarian Church at St Stephen's Green, Dublin was home to Amharclann an Damer/The Damer Theatre. The Damer produced both professional and amateur Irish plays. The world premier of Brendan Behan's An Giall (The Hostage) took place here in 1958. Behan went on to be an extremely popular dramatist, particularly through his work with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London. But in general, the Abbey was the dominant influence in Irish theatre across the 20th century. Beckett's example has been almost entirely ignored in Irish theatre, although his plays are regularly performed on the Irish stage. Behan, in his use of song and direct address to the audience, was influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Denis Johnston, and used modernist techniques including found texts and collage, but their works had little impact on later Irish plays. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of Irish theatre companies emerged to challenge the Abbey's dominance and introduce different styles and approaches with regard to Irish plays. These included Focus Theatre, The Children's T Company, the Project Theatre Company, Red Kettle, Druid Theatre, TEAM and Field Day. These companies nurtured a number of writers, actors, and directors who went on to be successful in London, Broadway and Hollywood or in other literary fields. These include Joe O Byrne, Peter Sheridan, Brian Friel, Stephen Rea, Garry Hynes, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Marina Carr, Jimmy Murphy, Billy Roche and Gabriel Byrne. In the 1990s and 2000s a new wave of Irish theatre companies arrived. These include: Bedrock, Blue Raincoat, B*spoke, The Corn Exchange, Corcadorca, Fishamble, Pan Pan, Playgroup, Raw, Rough Magic, and Tardy Lasso.

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All 26 Yeats plays come to life on NY stage

Review of the Irish Rep's Yeats Project

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