“They were very close friends. They grew up beside each other in Foxrock. Their mothers were very close friends,” Sarah Jane Scaife says over a coffee in the Abbey Theatre’s foyer.
The “they” she’s referring to are Samuel Beckett, Ireland’s most famous playwright, and Mary Manning, one far fewer people will have heard of. Her play Youth’s the Season–?, which she wrote in 1931, opens at the Abbey today, with Scaife directing.
As far as she knows it’s only the second time the play has been performed in Ireland: it was originally staged at the Gate. That production was produced by Hilton Edwards, with the key role of Desmond played by Micheál MacLiammóir, his fellow founder of the Abbey’s rival.
“There is lots of coding going on in the play. For instance, Desmond is gay, and he was played by MacLiammóir.” People would have known the actor was gay, she says, “and that it was so difficult to be gay at the time”.
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Manning was 26 when this play, her first, was performed. She described Youth’s the Season–? as a “tragi-comedy of Dublin life in three acts”. It takes place over three consecutive days, and revolves around the social and personal lives of the three young-adult Protestant Millington siblings and their friends.
They live in a “faded” Georgian house. There is an absent but controlling father, and various themes of longing to escape, whether geographically from Ireland, from a restrictive way of life, or into marriage and away from family.
Four years after Manning wrote Youth’s the Season–? she herself departed Ireland. She emigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, marrying Mark DeWolf Howe, a Harvard law professor; they had three daughters together. Manning, who became known to her friends as Molly, became firmly established on the cultural scene there, including as a founder of the Poets’ Theatre, which described her as “an unforgettable Irish woman” who “brought talent, wit, perseverance and charm to the theatre and to the friends she coerced into becoming her helpers”.
In the 1960s, after her husband died, she returned to Dublin for 10 years, before going back to Cambridge, where she died in 1999, just before her 94th birthday.
Scaife has wanted to direct the play ever since she first came across it, about 10 years ago – “if not 15. For me it really is a special project, one of those times when you read something or see something and you can’t let it go.” She describes Manning and her work as sharp, acerbic and forensic.
A friend gave her a photocopy of the play, and she was struck by its themes, which are very different from those of other Irish plays set in the period.
“It wasn’t set on a farm, or in a tenement in Dublin. It wasn’t about land or small plots of land, or the Catholic religion. It wasn’t about all of the tropes we were so used to dealing with. It’s different. It became a personal mission of hers. I’ve been trying to get it into production for years.”
The Gate Theatre funded a workshop reading of the play for a couple of days last year, but it was the Abbey that eventually came on board to stage a production. Scaife and her team spent five weeks rehearsing.
“It’s a big project and a big cast, and they are all very young,” Scaife says. “They bring into the room all the insecurities that young people are going through: who they are, where their future might be, what’s going on in the world outside.”
David Rawle, Sadhbh Malin and Molly Hanly play the Millington siblings, Desmond, Deirdre and Connie. Desmond, an artist who is about to turn 21, is desperate to escape to London but to get started needs an allowance from their father – a request mediated through their mother (Valerie O’Connor). Deirdre is engaged to Gerald (Jack Meade), and Connie is in love with Terence (Kerill Kelly), but it’s Harry (Youssef Quinn) who has pitched his cap at Connie.
“The themes of the play seem so modern to me. It’s kind of like a seance into the past,” Scaife says. “That feeling of being trapped in Dublin and being trapped in Ireland, and being boxed in. You couldn’t imagine yourself outside of the categorisation you were in in Ireland.”
What did the cast talk about as they were working with the script?
“Environmental issues, gender issues, the fear of being gay in a modern world, the constant threat of violence, what’s going on in the world, social media, and how you present yourself. They are all constantly aware of how they look and what is being said about them. Young people are really confused by gender.
“It’s your duty as a young person to think that the status quo is wrong and that it needs to be changed. If that’s not the case, then we just remain in a stasis as a society.”
Word eventually comes back from the absent father that, no, he is not going to give Desmond an allowance so, no, he can’t go to London and live his longed-for bohemian life there. The message is delivered via Mrs Millington, whose first name Manning does not provide, as if to signal that her entire identity is that of wife.
Why does the father not appear in the play?
“His very absence really points to the damage that the whole male hierarchy, in terms of possibly the State and everything else that was going with it, represents at that time,” Scaife says.
“A couple of years after this there is going to be the Constitution, which will put women very firmly back in their place. Everything is fizzling away. The Protestant population is shrinking very quickly. The ‘faded house’ is not going to last. The Millingtons are still maintaining this class system, but it is not going to last.”
Does Scaife believe that Beckett would have read Manning’s play before it was performed, given that they were friends and one-time neighbours?
“Oh, yes,” she says. “It was Beckett who suggested creating the part of Harry Egosmith” – a Dickensian-sounding character whom the stage notes describe as “a man’s best friend”.
Another character, Terence, whom Scaife describes as “the philosopher and the poet”, has lines that she says could have “come straight out of Krapp’s Last Tape”. This was a time when Beckett had still to write his most famous work, Waiting for Godot.
Why has it taken so long to revive this play of Manning’s, which she wrote almost a century ago?
Scaife believes that part of it was to do with falling out of fashion with the times and with “the Protestant thing, but this is my own opinion. I couldn’t find her in any of the main books about Irish theatre”.
That Manning lived on the other side of the Atlantic for most of her adult life probably had something to do with it also, especially in a period when Irish theatre was male dominated.
She certainly has a champion in Scaife. “I was determined about doing this play ever since I read it for the first time.” She reconsiders her choice of words. “No, more than determined. I was dogged about it.”
Youth’s the Season–? opens at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday, April 8th, and runs until Saturday, May 3rd
