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I thought the costumes and scenery, which were designed by A.E. himself, good, too, though I did not think them simple enough. They were more simple than ordinary stage costumes and scenery, but I would like to see poetical drama, which tries to keep at a distance from daily life that it may keep its emotion untroubled, staged with but two or three colours. The background, especially in small theatres, where its form is broken up and lost when the stage is at all crowded, should, I think, be thought out as one thinks out the background of a portrait. One often needs nothing more than a single colour with perhaps a few shadowy forms to suggest wood or mountain. Even on a large stage one should leave the description of the poet free to call up the martlets procreant cradle or what he will. But I have written enough about decorative scenery elsewhere, and will probably lecture on that and like matters before we begin the winters work.
The performances of Deirdre and Cathleen ni Houlihan , which will be repeated in the Antient Concert Rooms, drew so many to hear them that great numbers were turned away from the doors of St. Theresas
Hall. Like the plays of the Irish Literary Theatre, they started unexpected discussion. Mr. Standish OGrady, who had done more than any other to make us know the old legends, wrote in his All Ireland Review that old legends could not be staged without danger of banishing the soul of the land. The old Irish had many wives for instance, and one had best leave their histories to the vagueness of legend. How could uneducated people understand heroes who lived amid such different circumstances? And so we were to leave heroic cycles alone, and not to bring them down to the crowd. A.E. replied in the United Irishman with an impassioned letter. The old, forgotten music he writes about in his letter is, I think, that regulated music of speech at which both he and I have been working, though on somewhat different principles. I have been working with Miss Farr and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made a psaltery for the purpose, to perfect a music of speech which can be recorded in something like ordinary musical notes; while A.E. has got a musician to record little chants with intervals much smaller than those of modern music.
After the production of these plays the most important Irish dramatic event was, no doubt, the acting of Dr. Hydes An Posadh , in Galway. Through an accident it had been very badly rehearsed, but his own acting made amends. One could hardly have had a play that grew more out of the life of the people who saw it. There may have been old men in that audience who remembered its hero the poet Raftery, and there was nobody there who had not come from hearing his poems repeated at the Galway Feis. I think from its effect upon the audience that this play in which the chief Gaelic poet of our time celebrates his forerunner in simplicity, will be better liked in Connaught at any rate than even Casadh an t-Sugain . His Tincear agus Sidheog , acted in Mr. Moores garden, at the time of the Oireachtas, is a very good play, but is, I think, the least interesting of his plays as literature. His imagination, which is essentially the folk-imagination, needs a looser construction, and probably a more crowded stage. A play that gets its effect by keeping close to one idea reminds one, when it comes from the hands of a folk-poet, of Blakes saying, that Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads are the roads of genius. The idea loses the richness of its own life, while it destroys the wayward life of his mind by bringing it under too stern a law. Nor could charming verses make amends for that second kiss in which there was profanation, and for that abounding black bottle. Did not M. Trebulet Bonhommie discover that one spot of ink would kill a swan?
Among the other plays in Irish acted during the year Father Dineens Tobar Draoidheachta is probably the best. He has given up the many scenes of his Creadeamh agus Gorta , and has written a play in one scene, which, as it can be staged without much trouble, has already been played in several places. One admires its naïveté as much as anything else. Father Dineen, who, no doubt, remembers how Finn mac Cumhal when a child was put in a field to catch hares and keep him out of mischief, has sent the rival lovers of his play when he wanted them off the scene for a moment, to catch a hare that has crossed the stage. When they return the good lover is carrying it by the heels, and modestly compares it to a lame jackass. One rather likes this bit of nonsense when one comes to it, for in that world of folk-imagination one thing seems as possible as another. On the other hand, there is a moment of beautiful dramatic tact. The lover gets a letter telling of the death of a relative in America, for whom he has no particular affection, and who has left him a fortune. He cannot lament, for that would be insincere, and his first words must not be rejoicing. Father Dineen has found for him the one beautiful thing he could say, Its a lonesome thing death is. With, perhaps, less beauty than there is in the closing scene of Creadeamh agus Gorta , the play has more fancy and a more sustained energy.