Besotted Yeats’s unrequited love forMaud
Yeats left lovelorn for Maud in this periodically intriguing tale of opposites
The relationship between WB Yeats and Maud Gonne MacBride was certainly no Romeo and Juliet affair. Yeats was mesmerised by her, and they were both interested in Oriental mysticism, but her preference in men was for revolutionary types, while she kept Yeats on a tight leash. Even her switch from the Anglican to the Catholic church seems to have been as much political as devotional. When asked to renounce all heresies, she said she hated nothing but the British Empire.
She bedded Yeats at least once, but always insisted marriage wasn’t on the cards. The pair of them added weirdness to wilfulness. She only wanted a second child as a reincarnation of her dead young son, which was tough on her daughter Iseult. But ready for any opportunity, Yeats eventually asked Iseult to marry him; she too turned him down.
Even in his 60s, married to Georgie Hyde-Lees, he was still writing wistfully about Maud Gonne. She’d had enough of sex with her French politician lover and later with her husband John MacBride – who was executed after the 1916 rebellion – in a marriage that lasted just over a year. She separated from him because of his alcoholism and suspect behaviour with her daughter. For the lovelorn Yeats, he was ‘a drunken vainglorious lout’.
The play starts with the Constitution debates in the Irish Senate which established the ban on divorce. It pits Yeats, defending divorce, against Thomas Westropp Bennett (Seán Duggan). Bennett was a serious politician and a distinguished Cathaoirleach of the Senate, but after the debate on the Constitution, the play turns him, for cheap laughs, into a thoroughly ridiculous caricature quoting pruriently from a supposed notebook of Yeats’s.
The portrayal of Yeats and Maud Gonne gives an intriguing image of opposites, shown through his poetry and the exchanges between the two over the years. Yeats (Philip Judge) is portrayed as a rumpled, lapdog figure, alternately humiliated and flattered by her; she like a statuesque Greek goddess, loftily putting him in his place. But Maud Gonne (Melissa Nolan) must have had a more forceful personality than is shown here to have brought Yeats to this kind of grovelling helplessness.
Some of the poems are spoken in English and then repeated in song by Seán Duggan, in Irish translations by Gabriel Rosenstock. It gives the uncomfortable feeling of introducing the language for no particular reason. Those who don’t speak Irish won’t know what’s being said anyway, and may be left wondering if they’re missing something.