The Gate: From avant-garde nationalism to cultural convergence

Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940
By Ruud van den Beuken
Syracuse University Press, 277pp, $29.95

Cultural Convergence: The Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1960
Edited by Ondrej Pilny, Ruud van den Beuken and Ian R Walsh
Palgrave Macmillan, 244pp, £40.60

For most of the past century, with regard to the two theatres dominating the Dublin scene, the Abbey has engrossed almost all of the critical attention; studies of Yeats, Synge, Gregory and O'Casey still appear at regular intervals. In contrast,  there has been very little critically on the Gate since it opened its doors in 1928 (centenary alert!); the exceptions were Richard Pine, who organised exhibitions and co-authored a book on the theatre, and Christopher Fitz-Simon, whose joint biography of its two founders was published as The Boys. The rest, over 80 years, was silence.

That situation has begun to rectify itself, first with the appearance of a substantial volume on the Gate’s entire history three years ago, and now with these publications, the first two of a four-volume project by Gate Theatre Research Network, which is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

Critical assessment of Irish theatre for decades tended to privilege and foreground the playwright; other contributors to the theatrical process (directors, actors, designers, etc) were very much sidelined. This critical emphasis on the playwright favoured the Abbey. The Gate, on the other hand, as Ruud van den Beuken puts it in his introduction, “open[ed] up Dublin to experimental plays from abroad” and focused on innovations in artistic design and lighting techniques.

But the issue is less clear-cut than that. Van den Beuken contends that the Gate Theatre produced enough noteworthy Irish plays to form the substance of his book. These plays – by Micheál Mac Liammóir, Denis Johnston, Lord and Lady Longford, Mary Manning and others – were very different from the Abbey’s peasant drama: urban rather than rural, marked by wit and an engagement with Irish history, but from the perspective of the Anglo-Irish (whom Mary Manning wittily dubbed “the Descendancy”).

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Creative act

Recent developments in theatre studies have come to focus on production itself as a creative act. This favours greater attention to the Gate: not only the direction but the intricate lighting designs of Hilton Edwards, the elaborate set and costume designs of Mac Liammóir, as well as the acting of both. The essays in Cultural Convergence look at the intersection at the Gate of mainly contemporary avant-garde plays from mainland Europe with the talents of Irish or Dublin-based theatre artists, and has a number of outstanding chapters by individual contributors.

The Gate Theatre was the ambitious creation of two extraordinary men, Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards. For 50 years they lived in Dublin as an openly gay couple, much loved by their audiences and Dubliners generally. There was a sense in which Mac Liammóir was acting as much offstage as on, wearing full make-up in daylight and speaking with actorly emphasis. He was the perfect Irishman: fluent in both written and spoken Irish, dedicated to the artistic example of Yeats. But was it not, one or two people wondered, rather too perfect?

A few years after Mac Liammóir’s death, Micheál Ó hAodha revealed in a biography that Mac Liammóir was really an Englishman, Alfred Willmore, who had invented an Irish persona and biography. The fictionalisation of his Irish identity was extremely thorough. I have a volume of Wilde that belonged to Mac Liammóir which is inscribed: “Micheál, ó-n a athair, Nollaig 1919”.

Van den Beuken deftly maps the complex strands of Mac Liammóir’s hybrid personality on to the cultural productions at the Gate. These are often engaged in seeking to embrace modernism while managing to hold on to some form of tradition, to imagine the future while not forgetting the past. This tension runs all the way through the Gate’s most famous play, Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says No! (1929), which jumps from the end of the 18th century into the blaring modernity of 1920s Dublin; but as van den Beuken points out, the play holds on to the figure of Robert Emmet throughout.

‘Quintessential Englishman’

Many of the essays fill in the blanks on a variety of Gate biographies. Edwards, that “quintessential Englishman”, is supplied with an Irish grandmother called Murphy. When the original board of the Gate Theatre was announced, there were four names on it: not only Edwards and Mac Liammóir but Madam Desirée “Toto” Bannard Cogley (no less) and Gearóid Ó Lochlainn.

The latter’s five decades in Irish-language theatre are skilfully delineated by Pádraig Ó Siadhail. None of Ó Lochlainn’s eight plays in Irish sound too impressive; his real skills appear to have been as an actor. Since he knew that either of “the Boys” would take on the role of Macbeth in any Gate production, off with Ó Lochlainn to the Abbey, where he played the title role in October 1934.

Little was known heretofore about the leading Gate actress, Coralie Carmichael. Mac Liammóir had written in All for Hecuba that “the lands of her ancestors ranged from Scotland to Morocco”. David Clare and Nicola Morris show that this exotic claim was nothing but the truth; Carmichael had Moroccan grandparents on her mother’s side.

One of Carmichael’s most famous roles (as an older teacher) is featured in Yvonne Ivory’s discussion of Children in Uniform, among the “queerest” of the Boys’ productions at the Gate. Ivory’s essay is titled Prussian Discipline and Lesbian Vulnerability; and while Irish critics tended to highlight the former in their reviews, it is clear from Ivory’s account that Hilton’s direction kept the focus unambiguoulsly on the thwarted lesbian relationship between teacher and pupil.

Elaine Sisson’s pioneering work on theatre design at the Gate is continued here in Kismet: Hollywood, Orientalism and the Design Language of Pádraic Colum’s Mogu of the Desert. The play from a literary point of view is clearly tosh, but Mac Liammóir’s ravishing costumes and magnificent sets are vividly brought back to life by Sisson.

Robots on stage

The absolute gem is Ondrej Pilny’s The Brothers Capek at the Gate: RUR and The Insect Play. Karel Capek had lit up the international stage in 1923 with his science- fiction play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, where the word “robot” first appeared (it means “slave labour” in Czech).

Hilton Edwards nowhere more showed his commitment to theatrical expressionism and the avant garde than in his decision to stage RUR in the Gate’s second season and to sign up the rights to The Insect Play, an even more surreal play by Karel and his brother Josef, which was eventually staged by the Gate at the Gaiety in 1943. On this occasion, Edwards commissioned Myles na Gopaleen to produce an Irish adaptation, set in St Stephen’s Green and featuring an outrageous array of Irish accents, from Cork through Dublinese to Belfast.

By then, of course, the war had come and it was a hugely different political landscape. The Capeks were Jewish and anti-fascist; so in 1938 the Nazis arrived on their doorstep. They refused to believe that Karel had died the month before and ransacked the place. As a consolation prize they took away the brother Josef and incarcerated him in Belsen, where he died in 1945.

How much of this was known at the Gate two years earlier? Pilny states the matter unequivocally: the staging of The Insect Play “combined an aesthetic choice with an unequivocal political attitude”. Further, Pilny shows that “Edwards generously sanctioned an amateur production of the play by the Dublin University Players in June 1942, directed by a 21-year-old Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia, Hans Drechsler”.

Pilny is in a unique position to supply as much detail on the Prague premieres of the Capek brothers’ plays as on their Gate productions. Both he and his essay illuminate the cultural convergences – between Ireland and the Continent, mainly – which are at the heart of both of these exemplary volumes and of the Gate Theatre’s achievements. I very much await the succeeding two volumes in the series.