Actor plays 'quiet woman' on debt to Yeats as Sligo school summer opens

MAUREEN O’HARA knew WB Yeats but in a welcome address to the students attending the opening of the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo yesterday, she was disappointingly discreet.

The legendary actor, who for many will always be fiery Mary Kate Danaher from The Quiet Man,gave little away about what it was like learning her trade in the Abbey Theatre as a teenager, when Yeats was still a director.

O’Hara, who will be 91 next month, did not make it to Sligo to join students as they made the annual pilgrimage to Yeats’s grave at Drumcliffe church, but she did send a message which was read at the opening ceremony last night, in which she acknowledged her debt to the poet.

She told students from Japan, Brazil, Australia, the US, Europe, Britain and Ireland that she had “much to thank Yeats for”, describing him as “a diversified and talented human being” .

“Some of you may know that, like Yeats, I also was born and educated in Dublin,” she wrote, explaining that along with the Ena Mary Burke School of Elocution, the Abbey Theatre had played a major part in the success of her acting career.

But being accepted into the national theatre in the 1930s was not a short-cut to glamour, it seems, as “once you were accepted into the Abbey you were expected to work hard from the bottom up and sometimes that meant doing things that you felt had nothing to do with acting”.

She didn’t say whether Yeats had a hands-on role in training aspiring young actors, or whether he got a taste of her temper, but she did recall being less than impressed with the regime. “Cleaning up around the stage was not my idea of moving ahead with my acting, but we all did what was demanded of us to keep our place that was so hard to gain.”

As it happened, around the time she got her first role in an Abbey production, Hollywood beckoned, and by 1938 it was Alfred Hitchcock and not Yeats who was giving her directions.

It's going to be a hectic two weeks for students at the 52nd Yeats school, where the heavy academic programme will be balanced by an eclectic mix of entertainment, including a concert in the Hawk's Well theatre this Friday by Larry Kirwan, described by James Pethica, director of the summer school, as "the effervescent frontman of Irish-American punk-rock-trad band Black 47". Kirwan, a veteran of  US talk shows like Letterman, Leno and O'Brien, is at the Hawk's Well this Friday with the "world premiere" of his one-man show about the influences of Yeats and Joyce on his own art.  (One of the tracks on Black 47's CD A Funky Ceiliis I Got Laid on James Joyce's Grave).

On a more traditional note, the summer school lectures include Yeats, the Revival and Bilingual Culture, Tragedy and Comedy in later Yeats and Transformations in Yeats’ Poetry in the 1890s. As always the poetry will be the high point of the school but there will also be a strong emphasis on the drama, according to James Pethica, who promised “pure gold” over the two weeks in the form of readings by contemporary poets such as Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Peter McDonald.