Remport Eglantina’s study examines Lady Gregory and Sean O’Casey’s friendship, artistic collaboration, and impact on Irish theatre.
Lady Augusta Gregory was co-founder, patron and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, known at the time as the Irish National Theatre. She has authored around fifty plays, in addition to collections of Irish legends and folk stories, biographies, and an edited collection of essays. She was one of the founders of the Irish dramatic movement that went on to influence the playwrights of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness and Marina Carr. She furthered the dramatic career of Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats, had a close friendship with George Bernard Shaw, and encouraged the playwriting of Sean O’Casey, who had written one of the most groundbreaking dramatic works of the twentieth century, The Plough and the Stars (1926). Receiving initial criticism, The Plough and Stars went on to become an Irish classic and has enjoyed many productions in Ireland since its premiere at the Abbey Theatre in February 1926. The Plough and the Stars commemorated the efforts of the rebels of the Easter Rising of 1916, an event that is seen as the starting point of the Irish independence movement of the twentieth century. This movement resulted first in the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921/2 and then in the founding of the Republic of Ireland in 1949. More recently, Sean O’Casey’s play was revived for the centenary celebrations of the Easter Rising, in 2016, both at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and at the National Theatre in London. For more on this, see my article ‘Irish rebellion in-yer-face or consigned to history: Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 2016’, published in Studies in Theatre and Performance (2024/5).
Literary historians so far have argued that the friendship between Lady Gregory, a Protestant landowner from Co. Galway, and Sean O’Casey, and Irish Protestant socialist from Dublin, was an ‘unlikely one.’ Their value systems have been perceived as polar opposites, although arguments for Lady Gregory’s nationalism have been made by many scholars of Irish literary and cultural history. Eglantina Remport argues that the two dramatists shared more than what has been revealed in critical studies to date. She argues that Lady Augusta Gregory was instrumental to Sean O’Casey’s education in the fine arts, which went on to influence his playwriting technique, as witnessed in The Plough and the Stars and The Silver Tassie (1927). Lady Gregory cultivated the young O’Casey’s interest not only in the visual arts but also in the aesthetics of the modern pictorial theatre. For O’Casey, Lady Gregory was not just a ‘faery godmother’, to use a Shavian reference here, who had supported O’Casey’s dramatic career, but a real mother figure, who reminded O’Casey of his own mother, Susan Archer O’Casey. Hence, in turn, as Remport discusses, O’Casey supported Lady Gregory in her efforts to secure her nephew Hugh Lane’s collection of French impressionist paintings for Dublin. Both playwrights believed in the educational power of the literary and the pictorial arts and made every effort to see this belief played out in real life. Furthermore, O’Casey and Gregory were aligned in their views that it was necessary to alleviate the living and working conditions of the poor in Ireland and considered theatre as means to draw attention to social issues that effected the population of Ireland.
James Moran’s edited volume, Sean O’Casey in Context, published by Cambridge University Press, offers new insights into O’Casey’s life and work. The book is wide-ranging, well researched and expertly edited; the Lady Gregory chapter is central to the section on O’Casey’s critics and collaborators and draws further attention to the work of Lady Gregory as founder and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Eglantina Remport’s chapter further develops her arguments about the pictorial art of the Abbey Theatre, put forward in her pioneering monograph, Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Cover: John Butler Yeats, Portrait of Lady Augusta Gregory, Dramatist, 1903, National Gallery of Ireland, NGI. 1318.