Co-founder of the Abbey Theatre
A pioneer not only as a playwright, but as a theatre artist, Lady Gregory was a historic co-founder of the Abbey Theatre- the national theatre of Ireland. Through having her contributions erased by her male cofounders, to her rebellion in defining what genres a woman can write in, she inspired generations of theatre artists to create their own niche in the theatre.
The Abbey reminds us of the power of subsidized theatre, and what can happen with that power. Inspiring the Little Theatre movement in the United States, the Abbey continues to be a hallmark of national theatre to this day.
Credits/Bibliography
Music by Tri-Tachyon - https://soundcloud.com/tri-tachyon/albums
Merritt, Henry. "'Dead many times': Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats, two old women, and a vampire." The Modern Language Review, vol. 96, no. 3, 2001, p. 644.
Morash, Chris. A History of Irish Theatre, 1601-2000. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Mikhail, E. H., editor. The Abbey Theatre : Interviews and Recollections. Totowa, N.J. Barnes & Noble, 1988.
Roche, Anthony. "Lady Gregory: Irish Woman Playwright." The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015, pp. 99–118.
Transcript
Lady Gregory
(intro music)
[00:00:00] Dara: Hello, and welcome back to Understudy-ied Theater History with your hosts, Dara-
Colleen: and Coleen.
Dara: Woop woop.
Colleen: Woop woop.
Dara: So do you know who we are studying today?
Colleen: No. I never know.
Dara: You never know.
Colleen: I never know.
Dara: Um, today we are learning about Lady Augusta Gregory henceforth known as Lady Gregory.
Colleen: Ooh, that's a good name, Augusta.
Dara: So let's just go over some, some general facts about her life. Her big connection was in the Irish Literary Revival and she co-founded the Abbey Theater.
Colleen: I'm Irish.
Dara: Yeah. I thought you were going to like this. So she co-founded this with WB Yeats and they were associated with John Millington Synge.
Colleen: I only recognize the Yeats man.
Dara: That's okay. We'll get, we'll get into [00:01:00] both of them more specifically, but let's focus on our lady today.
Colleen: Yes.
Dara: So she co-founded the Abbey Theater and the Abbey Theater is the Irish national theater. So it is the national theater of Ireland
Colleen: Dang. All these national theaters. It makes me wish we had one.
Dara: So interesting fact, um, WEB Dubois was inspired by the Abbey Theater to create the KIRGWA Players.
Colleen: I'm, really starting to think that this is subconsciously a podcast about WEB Dubois.
Dara: It's not, but they are all, they're all like connected in very fun ways. So none of the founders who founded the theater were theater people or playwrights. WB Yeats was a poet before this and lady Augusta Gregory didn't write, but she was widowed at age 40.
So she was afforded a lot of personal freedom and she was a lady. [00:02:00] She oversaw land. She was like a lady of land like that, but she has like a title, you know, so, and because she was widowed, she had a lot of like power in life. Cause she was connected to a man, but that man died. Then they founded the Abbey Theater and they sort of- the founding of the Abbey theater is very controversial because they saw this gap, this hole in Irish theater because theater was.
Theater in Ireland already existed. Like there were theaters that were on the same street as the Abbey Theater that produced work, but they saw this hole in Irish national theater because they wanted to produce work that was separate from that of England because they saw most of the theaters that existed at this time, producing work from England and obviously.
This is after the Irish Revolution where they separated from England. So they want it to be separate, but the Abbey Theater founders held very classist and kind of discriminatory values about what was the kind of [00:03:00] theater that is allowed to be considered highbrow enough for their national theater. He mostly was like that.
WB Yeats held these very classic classist views. So he was also a little bit sexist
Colleen: As one is.
Dara: Yeah.
Colleen: In this time.
Dara: So this is a, there is a quote that I would like to read from him about Lady Gregory's work.
Colleen: Oh boy.
Dara: Um, So-
Colleen: His- his peer.
Dara: His peer, his contemporary. He said, "Being a writer for comedy, her life as an artist has not shaken in her as tragic art would have done the conventional standards. Besides she has never been a part of the artist's world. She has belonged to a political world or one that is immediately social."
So he kind of made the comment that Gregory isn't an artist because she is a woman and she is confined to the merely social world.
Colleen: Yeah, she's too closed off from the rest of. The world and like,
Dara: Yeah.
Colleen: Wow.
Dara: Interestingly enough, the play that was most critical [00:04:00] to the Abbey theater success is WB Yeats play Kathleen ni Houlihan, and it's originally entirely accredited to him, but it's actually now clear from many Lady Gregory's diaries and like other personal accounts that she wrote, most of it. And he just took the credit for it. And the, at the time it was known that she had helped him write it. But the extent of her contribution was not known.
Colleen: The amount of times that's happened in like the late 18, early 19 hundreds. Like with art specifically and playwriting it's. It's just depressing.
Dara: Yeah. So there's actually a couple of trademarks that show that Lady Gregory contributed a lot to this play.
Colleen: What are they?
Dara: The dialect that she perfected, uh, WB Yeats- he didn't have the ability to write in that dialect. He wrote very high brow, [00:05:00] um, with his poems and stuff. It was originally thought that she just wrote the scenes with that dialogue.
Colleen: Hmm.
Dara: But it also, the play itself also has several other of her like kind of hallmarks in ways that you can kind of see that her- she influenced a lot more than just like the plot structure and the, and the dialogue. Kathleen ni Houlihan is, uh, is about the 1798 Irish rebellion. It's an Irish nationalist play.
And so the, the heroine Kathleen is an old woman at the beginning and she becomes youthful. With the blood sacrifice of the young men. She like represents Ireland. She represents the land of Ireland and she becomes youthful with the sacrifice. So the idea is all these men going to war are the sacrifice to save her and make her youthful again.
Colleen: I was going to say, is this some pagan play or something? Did she, did she write pagan plays?
Dara: No, she- [00:06:00] it's more about the, um, asexuality of Kathleen and the very nationalistic identity was very common in her plays and it's very much. Associated with just WB Yeats, but it is very likely that it Lady Gregory wrote most of it.
Colleen: Considering what Yates said about Lady Gregory, being a woman and not, I don't know, not having life experience. It's odd that the lead character of this play, would be a woman who also has agency. So I don't know, just from, you know, the most ignorant perspective, it seems strange that he would write with a woman as the lead and a woman representing Ireland and a woman who has her own opinions and agency. So to me that, that screams Lady Gregory, that's like a direct correlation there.
Dara: So the reason that Kathleen ni Houlihan was so important to the founding of Abbey, the Abbey theater [00:07:00] is because before this play was put on, the Abbey theater was kind of, it was less official. They didn't have any investors, they were performing out of like any space they could get.
And so the timeline is they were the Irish Literary Theater first. And then, so then that was when they were less official. They didn't have any backers. And so the success of this play, Kathleen ni Houlihan uh, led to the Irish Literary Theater staging plays more frequently. And with more commercial success, allowing. Um, Annie Hornimann who was a, just like friend of the theater, they were all very influential people in Irish society. So had a lot of powerful friends. So she wanted to then subsidize the theater, allowing it to become the Abbey and the hallmark national theater of Ireland that it is today.
Colleen: Did it become like the Irish national theater?
Dara: It did-
Colleen: Like during this time period that [00:08:00] Annie's Annie Hornimann.
Dara: Yes. Once the Abbey was subsidized, they were able to renovate a building into their theater. They had a couple more years of commercial success, but then they began to tour. And so they toured all over Ireland. For a couple of years,
Colleen: That's cool.
Dara: Bringing different plays. And there's a lot of controversies in that about which places they performed where. But after that went on tour in the US.
Colleen: Wow. That popular?
Dara: Lady Gregory accompanied them on their first tour of the US. So-
Colleen: Is that where Dubois- did it? Did they ever meet? Never met. Right. Okay. The timeline doesn't line up
Dara: Lady Gregory was born in 1852 and died in 1932.
Colleen: Do you think she was working in the theater like up until her death?
Dara: I guess when they tour, she kept writing plays. And she kept like revising her plays to be performed on tour, but she did transition into more of a producer at that point as well. Just accompanying the actors on tour and like keeping everything together.
That's the brief history of Lady [00:09:00] Gregory.
Colleen: I love her.
I, she is probably one of the most interesting people that I studied for this because of her like range. She wrote so many plays.
Do you think she was feminist?
Dara: Well no.
Colleen: Like early, early feminist.
Dara: There's an argument to be made that she was an early feminist because of her status as a widow.
Colleen: Mmm, mmhm.
Dara: She did-
Colleen: That she's still like involved herself in the community.
Dara: Yes, she did. In a sense, like stand up to Yeats. Um, when he told her or like commented that she was confined only to comedy, she did sneak in one of her dramatic plays and Yeats continually referred to it as a comedy. I think this was on one of their tours, she did have them perform, one of her dramas and Yeats kept calling it a comedy, but it was a drama.
I guess the like real world connection I have for this one, is it the impact of national theater and subsidized theater? We can link that back to the Federal Theater Project in the US during the Great [00:10:00] Depression.
Colleen: Bring it back.
Dara: Uh, yes. We may say that every episode, but bring the Federal Theater Project back.
Colleen: It like supports some kind of national image. Do I want that national image in the US, right now? Nyeaaaaa- But you know, someday, and I think it's having a widespread grant or federal funding just like-
Dara: Kind of like a theater initiative. And it's continuing a legacy of national theater, obviously from the Abbey. The Abbey is considered like really influential and the national and Little Theater movement and the Little Theater movement really did take off in the US. Little Theater was about small art theater. And that's why WEB Dubois was so inspired by it because that's why he founded the KIRGWA players.
Like little theater was about art theater and really speaks again. I'm going to say it again to his tenants of "By us, for us, near us."
Colleen: Yeah. Which I think is very important. Like theater should [00:11:00] be in some capacity relevant to the people that are going to be consuming it.
Dara: Yes. But I think that that could still, that could still apply. And I think the little theater movement was at a height in the U S in like the sixties and seventies, but we've kind of petered out from there.
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Colleen: Well, thank you. So much for teaching me about the lovely Lady Augusta- great name- Gregory. What a fascinating woman and very accomplished playwright. I've def- I have a book about Irish, like five popular Irish plays and she has one of her plays in it. And I enjoyed it.
Probably Riders to, to the Seas and the other one.
I dunno. I don't think, I think it's like underrepresented, um, like popular Irish plays. I don't think Riders to the See is in [00:12:00] it.
Well,
Dara: thank you so much for listening and I hope you tune in for our last episode.
Bye!
Colleen: Byeeee!
(ending music)
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