Well over a century before fake news began to poison societies and imperil democracies, an absurd false rumour was the basis of a play that was staged for the first time at the opening night of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
“Aided by the infirmity of a deaf old applewoman, the story gets monstrously distorted and presently it blossoms into an accusation of wilful murder” against an innocent man, noted The Irish Times review of the premiere 120 years ago this month.
Spreading the News was the third of three one-act plays staged as the opening performances of the Irish National Theatre at the Abbey on Tuesday December 27th, 1904. It was preceded by On Baile’s Strand by William Butler Yeats and by Cathleen Ni Houlihan, by Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory – both Abbey Theatre co-founders.
“Having got a liberal instalment of serious drama, the audience were in a mood to appreciate a sprightly bit of comedy”, the review said of Spreading the News, the first play that Lady Gregory wrote on her own. “It is a tripping little piece, founded on a simple idea of modern Irish life, but yielding in its short compass abundance of rich comedy” and it was “very favourably received”, added The Irish Times review.
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Influenza prevented Lady Gregory from attending the performance, but the leading actor, Willie Fay, announced from the stage after the final curtain that she would be told of “the hearty appreciation of the audience”.
He added later that the cast had put tremendous pace into the play – “the pace of a hard football match”.
After a subsequent performance Lady Gregory thought that the audience laughed so much that they missed nearly half of the dialogue.
She said that it was the audience’s reaction, not that of the critic, that was the test of a play’s failure or success. She said that writing comedy was “a real joy” but that she did it out of necessity.
“I had been forced to write comedy because it was wanted for our theatre, to put on at the end of verse plays”, she recalled. “Comedy and not tragedy was wanted at our theatre to put beside the high poetic work ... and I let laughter have its way with the little play.”
The hearing-impaired and gullible woman whose wilful misunderstanding drives the action in Spreading the News, Mrs Tarpey, says it would be a pity if a neighbour didn’t “hear the news”. She asks: “What business would the people here have but to be minding one another’s business?” And in the final line of the first printing of the play, she anticipates today’s falsehood aggregators by more than a century, adding: “It would be a pity you to be passing, and I not to be spreading the news!”
The wife of the man falsely accused of murder asserts that “they are all liars in this place”. She tells the gossip mongers: “Shame on you forever and at the day of judgment, for the words you are saying and the lies you are telling to take away the character of my poor man, and to take the good name off of him, and to drive him to destruction! That is what you are doing!”
Lady Gregory rejected the reproach that the play’s gossip-mongering had cast a slur on Ireland. She said that the imaginary Galway village in which Spreading the News was set might just as well be Piccadilly in London.
Sean O’Casey wrote that it was Lady Gregory, more than Yeats or anyone else, who gave the Abbey Theatre “its enduring life” and its “worldwide name”.
He said that, despite venomous opposition and many competing demands, she wrote “play after play that kept life passing to and fro on the Abbey stage”.
Biographer Mary Lou Kohfeldt said that Lady Gregory’s plays were “masterpieces of abbreviated complexity” and the Dublin Magazine judged in 1933 that “Lady Gregory secured the greatest laugh of the greatest number in the Irish Theatre”.
The idea of Spreading the News first came to Lady Gregory not as a comedy, but as a tragedy, she recalled. “I kept seeing as in a picture people sitting by the roadside, and a girl passing to the market, gay and fearless”, she wrote.
“And then I saw her passing by the same place at evening, her head hanging, the heads of others turned from her, because of some sudden story that had risen out of a chance word, and had snatched away her good name.”