The Irish theatre director Tomás MacAnna was artistic director of the Abbey Theatre on three occasions and proved to be a major supporter of O’Casey’s work. This chapter traces MacAnna’s interactions with O’Casey’s writings, pointing to a number of key stagings and explaining how MacAnna wanted Ireland to follow Germany’s example in using O’Casey’s scripts as part of a developing culture of theatrical experimentalism. This chapter demonstrates how, after O’Casey’s death, MacAnna directed a remarkable number of unfamiliar O’Casey works at the Abbey Theatre between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, although the chapter shows that the reception of these works was often lukewarm or hostile.

Experiencing a Synge play for the first time is not just watching any story unfold. Something is happening on the stage that you have never quite felt before. People are speaking in a language which appears to be English, but it is an English once or twice removed. What precisely it is removed from is not that clear either. But the sets and the setting tell you that this is Ireland, and these are people who would be speaking Irish if the audience could only understand them. But most of the people of Ireland could not understand a play in Irish in the early years of the twentieth century and, more assuredly, the greater part of the world could not either. It is obvious, therefore, that Synge is doing something with his Irish peasantry, and is attempting to mimic some kind of Irish. When characters in a Synge play speak, the air hums with something that does not quite belong. Their relationship with reality is oblique and romantic. Their tongue is a twisted idiom, at times crude, at times poetic. The serious academic question is, what part of his language belongs to him, and what part of it belongs to the Irish language? There is no doubt whatsoever that Synge had a fine command of Irish. Declan Kiberd's book Synge and the Irish Language is the most authoritative study of Synge's relationship with the language, and most anything else is likely to be no more than a footnote to that study.

The Gaelic Revival

The novel came late in Irish. Despite an unbroken literary tradition that predates the arrival of literacy and Christianity, the fortunes of history decided that secular prose composition for the ordinary reader would be much attenuated. While the major world languages were developing the novel for the growing literate public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Irish language was retreating both socially and geographically. There may have been more Irish speakers than ever before on the cusp of the Great Famine in 1845, but they were almost exclusively poor and unlettered. Had somebody written a novel in Irish at that time, its readership would have been confined to a small coterie of scholars (many of whom were learners), some members of the new Catholic middle class - a class that in large measure was trying to forget the language as quickly as it could - and whatever scribes remained, who would have looked down upon it as a poor substitution for the traditional literature. We can be sure that it never entered the head of William Carleton, a native speaker of Irish, to write in his native tongue.