Culture ShockYeats expected George Fitzmaurice's first play to cause riots - but unfortunately for the writer's future career, the audience loved it
Collateral damage can happen in the theatre as well as in war. One of the strangest cases is that of George Fitzmaurice, the playwright who was written out of Abbey history for many decades and who continues to haunt the theatre's conscience.
Daring, imaginative, formally adventurous, yet grounded in the world and language of his native north Kerry, Fitzmaurice should have been one of the great finds of the national theatre movement. He was exactly what WB Yeats and Augusta Gregory hoped for, a vernacular dramatist arising from rural Ireland who was also artistically ambitious and highly sophisticated. That he became instead a pathetically isolated figure owed much to the bizarre logic of collateral damage. His misfortune was that his one big hit, The Country Dressmaker, which had its premiere 100 years ago next month, was popular at a time when, in the wake of The Playboy of the Western World, Yeats equated popularity with cravenness.
As Fiona Brennan, author of the groundbreaking Fitzmaurice biography, Wild in His Own Way, will point out in a pre-show talk at the Abbey on Tuesday evening, The Country Dressmakerwas a godsend for the Abbey at a time when The Playboy had alienated much of its core audience. Its naturalistic form and veneer of comedy made it much more acceptable than Synge's startling masterpiece. In a period when the Abbey typically ran new plays for no more than a week, it was immediately revived for a second week in October 1907, and went on to play 137 times between 1907 and 1925. (It was revived again with great success in 1949.) It was also the centrepiece of the Abbey's tour of England and Scotland in November and December 1907, where it was presented alongside Synge's Riders to the Sea. A century ago, therefore, it would have seemed obvious that when people in 2007 wrote about "Abbey playwrights", Fitzmaurice would be one of them.
Instead, Fitzmaurice was the Trotsky of the Irish theatrical revolution, painted out of the heroic pictures. And this happened in spite of the fact that he actually got much better after The Country Dressmaker. His move away from the well-made three-act comedy and into short, surreal fantasies made him a genuinely avant-garde figure, exploring illusion, obsession and psychological breakdown with vividness, humour and tremendous theatrical and linguistic energy. The Dandy Dolls, which was given a superb production by Conall Morrison in 2004 as one of the highlights of the theatre's centenary celebrations, still seems far-out in the 21st century. But it was rejected by Yeats in 1913, and Fitzmaurice ended up back in his old job as a junior clerk in the Land Commission.
What happened was complicated. Brennan points out that Fitzmaurice was caught up in the power struggle at the Abbey between Yeats and Gregory on the one side and the Fay brothers on the other. The Country Dressmakerwas seen as a Fay production and when the Fays were ousted, Fitzmaurice was part of the baggage to be dumped. But there was another, stranger, factor. The Abbey's stance in 1907 was gloriously embattled, with Yeats and Synge taking arms against the philistines who attacked The Playboy. Since the philistines evidently loved The Country Dressmaker, it had to be the kind of thing the Abbey shouldn't give them.
This wouldn't have mattered if the play was, indeed, the kind of harmless dross that audiences tended to value more highly than the genius of Synge. But it's actually a tough critique of rural Ireland that shares The Playboy'sconcerns with fantasy and reality in a stultifying little world. The eponymous dressmaker, Julia Shea, is pining for her young love, Pats Connor, who has been in America for 10 years. Her vision of Pats is shaped both by her reading of romantic fiction and by a fantasy of America, and when he arrives home she has to deal with who he really is, as well as with the greedy manoeuvres of the locals.
The irony is that, before the play proved to be a hit, Yeats and Gregory expected it to cause trouble. When it was submitted, Gregory wrote to Yeats that it was "really good" but "rather harsh" and "won't make us loved". Yeats expected riots again and described the play to John Quinn as "a harsh, strong, ugly comedy. It really gives a much worse view of the people than The Playboy". Alas for Fitzmaurice, the people, having vented their fury at Synge, declined to be offended by him. Had The Country Dressmakercaused the anticipated ructions, Fitzmaurice would undoubtedly have been defended by Yeats as a genius, and The Country Dressmakerwould have joined The Playboyand The Plough and the Starsas an emblem of the Abbey's courage.
But the play was too subtle and too funny, and it lacked the glorious up-front outrageousness of Synge's great comedy. As Yeats himself noted, "they don't mind Fitzmaurice because they don't think he is at anything, but they shrink from Synge's harsh, independent, heroical . . . view of things". Perversely, Yeats came to blame Fitzmaurice for the audience's failure to get what he was at and be angered by it. He must be the only playwright in modern theatre history whose career was destroyed by the fact that audiences loved his work.
