How different things were in the bad old 1950s, when Ireland was riven with censorship, its citizens’ artistic and academic freedoms curtailed. Or maybe we feel the echoes still.
Dublin Theatre Festival recently acquired a letter that Samuel Beckett wrote on January 20th, 1958, warning that he might withdraw from that year’s event. It brings us back to the second year of the fledgling festival – one that didn’t happen in the end, because of the events Beckett is writing about.
The letter, which the festival has donated to Trinity College Dublin – holder of the world’s largest collection of Beckett correspondence – is from the period when Archbishop John Charles McQuaid ruled supreme and censorship was at its peak.
At the first festival, in 1957, Tennessee Williams’s play The Rose Tattoo caused controversy when a condom was allegedly dropped on the stage of the Pike Theatre as part of the plot; the Garda arrived to arrest its director, Alan Simpson.
The second year’s line-up was to include a new Seán O’Casey play, The Drums of Father Ned; a stage version of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and two mime plays by Beckett. But the infamously controlling, oppressive McQuaid refused to allow a Mass for the festival opening, denying it his blessing because of the O’Casey and Joyce plays.
The power of this crosier led to Ulysses being dropped and O’Casey withdrawing after huge changes to his play were demanded.
The letter Dublin Theatre Festival unearthed was to Beckett’s friend Deryk Mendel, a dancer, choreographer, actor and director. He’s writing to let him know he may withdraw from the festival production Mendel was to perform in: “I am sorry about this, but I know you will understand.” Beckett wrote the one-act mime Act without Words I in 1956 for Mendel, who directed its premiere in London, at the Royal Court in 1957, and was then set to perform it in Dublin.
Rumours were obviously swirling. Beckett says he heard from “John” that Ulysses and the new O’Casey “have been vetoed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin”. “John” is likely the composer John S Beckett, Samuel’s cousin, who wrote music for his plays.
Where do you make a stand? What action can you take? How can you stand up for your values? He [Beckett] was taking action against censorship. He was right in the thick of things, and he was living it, and then he did something about it
— Helen Shenton
The Becketts and Mendel had just done the mimes together in London, and John was “the local person in Ireland, so it would make sense both that he would have the news first and that he would be the understood ‘John’ in a letter with Mendel”, says Nicholas Johnson, Trinity’s head of drama and cofounder of its centre for Beckett studies.
The “Smith” whom, Beckett writes, may confirm this news is Brendan Smith, who ran the Olympia Theatre and the Brendan Smith Academy of Acting, and was founder-director of Dublin Theatre Festival. “If it is true I shall have to withdraw my participation,” the playwright announces.
He did withdraw.
Other letters in Trinity’s collection, to Simpson and Carolyn Swift – who as well as founding the Pike Theatre were husband and wife – also throw light on events.
The following month Beckett writes to Simpson about staging details and refers to possibly “withdrawing both mimes and All That Fall” due to rumoured programme changes “because of opposition from McQuaid. If this is confirmed I won’t have anything to do with it. I have written to Brendan Smith and hope to hear from him that there is nothing in it”.
A later letter to Simpson says, “After the revolting boycott of Joyce and O’Casey I don’t want to have anything to do with the Dublin Theatre ‘Festival’ and am withdrawing both mimes and All That Fall. I have written to Brendan Smith to this effect. I am extremely sorry for any difficulties this may create for you. I know you will understand that it is quite impossible for me to do otherwise.”
In a letter to Carolyn Swift (“Dear Carol”) he retracts his permission for All That Fall and Endgame, which she and Simpson were to produce outside of the festival, at the Pike. After the archbishop’s interference, Beckett withdrew all rights in protest, for all of his works in Ireland, indefinitely.
“I am withdrawing altogether. As long as such conditions prevail in Ireland I do not wish my work to be performed there, either in festivals or outside them. If no protest is heard they will prevail for ever. This is the strongest I can make. I have therefore to cancel the permission I gave you to present All That Fall and Endgame. I hope you will forgive me. My best wishes to you both and long flame to the Pike in that hideous gale.”
All this turmoil figured in an Irish Times editorial that offers the newspaper’s own strong opinion on the events.
The previous year’s festival “ended ignominiously with the effective suppression by the police of The Rose Tattoo”, it says. The 1958 highlights were to have been Ulysses and O’Casey. “No evidence has been adduced that either of these productions contains a hint of obscenity or of blasphemy; yet pressure has been brought to bear against both of them from high places, and the Council has kissed the rod. Mr O’Casey goes on record as having ‘withdrawn’ his play: by what series of irritations he was induced to show himself thus amenable will be revealed, no doubt, in his own good time. And now the blackjack of the Tóstal Council” – which ran the Tóstal series of Irish festivals in the 1950s – “has descended upon the Ulysses adaptation.”
The editorial continues: “The impending Festival is shorn of the two productions on which rested its claim to interest, international as well as domestic. Whatever may replace the two jettisoned plays, the Festival will be merely a pathetic shadow – good enough, no doubt, for a provincial town, but lagging far behind the aspirations of its promoters.”
With O’Casey, Joyce and Beckett gone, what looked like a terrific festival fell apart. News of the abandoned event even made the New York Times.
The new letter to Deryk Mendel that brings us back to those dark days was spotted by Gavin Kostick of Fishamble theatre company, who had “developed a habit of noodling around auctions on the internet”, according to Una Carmody, the chairwoman of Dublin Theatre Festival. In a sweetly appropriate twist, Kostick wasn’t at the letter’s handover, she says, because he was in New York for The United States vs Ulysses, Colin Murphy’s courtroom drama, produced by Once Off Productions, about the trial that liberated Joyce’s novel from American censorship.
We’re increasingly aware of how polarising politics can be, and the challenge for arts organisations in acknowledging the complexities of conflict
— Róise Goan
The letter intrigued the festival, and the composer and Grammy-nominated singer Méav Ní Mhaolchatha and Tom Clinch, a financial adviser who sits on the Dublin Theatre Festival board, provided the money to buy it. Cultural philanthropists who recently created a scholarship for neurodiverse drama students at the Lir, Trinity’s national academy of dramatic art, they were at the event with their daughter Anna, who is studying English at the college; their daughter Catherine was the young star of the Oscar-nominated film An Cailín Ciúin.
At the handover, Trinity’s provost, Dr Linda Doyle, observed of Beckett’s letter, “It’s special, especially in a digital world, to see a piece of paper there, and you know that he touched it. The excitement of that is important.” She also pointed to the wider significance of the letter being about censorship. “One of the things we certainly no longer take for granted is academic freedom, freedom of speech, being able to study and research the things you want.
“When we look at what’s happening across the water, where you’re told what you can and can’t study, what you can and can’t research,” it was fitting to see in the letter “someone standing up for values in a world where there’s a big job ahead of us in standing up for any of those values”.
Helen Shenton, the university librarian and college archivist, said it’s also pertinent that the event was in its renamed Eavan Boland Library. She pointed out that half a century ago, when the “avowedly modernist, radical building” was being planned, Beckett – one of Trinity’s most esteemed alumni – was asked to contribute to the building fund; he donated royalties from the first Broadway run of Krapp’s Last Tape.
Talking later, Shenton observes: “That the Nobel Prize winner is withdrawing makes a very strong statement.” Parallels will be drawn, she says, with current concerns about free speech and academic freedom. “Where do you make a stand? What action can you take? How can you stand up for your values? He was taking action against censorship, He was right in the thick of things, and he was living it, and then he did something about it.”
Róise Goan, who recently took over as the festival’s director, is also taken with the contemporary relevance of Beckett’s stand. As the festival’s 70th birthday approaches, “we’re increasingly aware of how polarising politics can be, and the challenge for arts organisations in acknowledging the complexities of conflict”. She’s interested in how Beckett “shows solidarity with his fellow artists and stands up to the censorship from the Catholic Church in a very clear and uncompromising way – and acknowledges that Deryk Mendel won’t get a pay cheque as a result of this stand”.
Arts organisations worldwide have hard questions about “what we do and why we do it”, she adds. “At what point do you stand up and say, ‘No, we’re doing it anyway.’ Or, ‘Actually, hang on: maybe we need to pause’?”
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Goan cites the clarity of artists pulling out of presentations after “Donald Trump’s self-appointment” to the chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, DC. And she mentions, without judgment, nuanced European challenges, including a contemporary Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester that was pulled after complaints about a scene referencing Gaza.
“We must not shy away from politically challenging conversations” but navigate them “with nuance and sensitivity”. In the 1950s “Samuel Beckett was faced with similar dilemmas. Those ethical questions remain alive for us today in theatre. It’s important for us, for Dublin Theatre Festival, to remember in its early years it was a very edgy organisation, presenting work that challenged the status quo.”
Goan adds that, while Beckett was “absolutely right to make a stand, I can also imagine how hard it must have been for Brendan Smith to navigate. Ultimately you’re trying to make a progressive, challenging, probably boundary-pushing festival for an audience in Dublin, and work within sometimes oppressive systems, while also trying to fly under the radar in deepest, darkest Catholic 1950s Ireland.”
But there was crack back then, too.
Several generations of Clinches have been to Trinity; Tom Clinch studied drama at its Samuel Beckett Centre. His grandfather Jim Clinch, a doctor and rugby player known as Jammie, also went to the university. A “big character”, he was friends with Beckett there. “Jammie was a bit of a joker. There are stories about him borrowing Samuel Beckett’s jacket to pawn, to put money on the horses.”
And Beckett’s book Murphy has three Clinches: Bom, Bum and Bim. Was Bim Clinch named for his friend? “I don’t know. Beckett’s idea of an in-joke. I’ve always liked to think there’s some family connection.”
Trinity College Dublin is showcasing additions to its collections over the past five years in Zealous Mercurial Dreams Were About to Be Realised: New Treasures of the Old Library, an exhibition in its Long Room. Visitors can also ask to view Samuel Beckett’s letter to Deryk Mendel by emailing mscripts@tcd.ie
