FROM THE ARCHIVES:A series of articles in 1976 on "The Playwright in Ireland Today" included this no-holds-barred contribution by John O'Donovan.
THE SUBSIDISED Irish theatre is the Bangladesh of the Irish playwright. The Government’s much-vaunted financial support of the art of drama has been confined to subsidising the actor and securing the livelihood of the stage carpenter, the designer, the costumier, the electrician.
The playwrights, the people to whom not alone the Irish Drama solely owe its international fame, but upon whose creative ability the whole structure of theatre rests, are being starved out of existence through being denied access to the professional stage by entrepreneurs, careerists, artistic directors, dramaturgical consultants, administrators, anonymous play readers, and that host of persons of imposing title and obscure function that cluster parasitically around organisations which handle large sums of money – all of them like the eunuchs who know all about it but can’t do it . . .
A very obvious conclusion is to be drawn from the following facts of history. The Rotunda Hospital achieved world-wide fame when run by a succession of carefully-chosen gynaecologists and the Abbey Theatre put itself on the map when run by three playwrights, Augusta Gregory, Synge and Yeats. The Rotunda, still run by gynaecologists, can still hold its head high. The Abbey sank into contempt and disgrace when removed from the control of the playwrights.
The present Abbey does not deny its debt to Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory. On the contrary, its demand for a survival grant from the taxpayer runs in counterpoint with loud invocations of that blessed trinity, the names of whom were known even to the senior officer of the Department of Finance with whom I discussed the question of a Government subvention of the Society of Irish Playwrights. The officer said to me that the scandal would be too great of not supporting the theatre of Y, S G. I pointed out to him that Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory had been dead for many years and that to think of the Abbey as THEIR theatre was like expecting to find Wolfe Tone, Connolly and Pearse sitting in at the Government’s Tuesday meetings.
Michael Judge, talking shop with James Douglas in Wednesday’s article, shot down in one deadly sentence the claims of artistic directors to be adequately qualified judges of the artistic worth of new plays. He quoted the declaration of one that he would not put on new plays at the Abbey by Irish authors unless these reached the standard of the great European classics.
To aim at the level of the great European classics, says Michael Judge, is highly commendable – provided an artistic director “has the aesthetic equipment to make the evaluation”.
It is hardly necessary to add that Irish playwrights are by no means convinced that this essential condition has been met by any of the Abbey’s artistic directors in recent years.
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