VALERIE SHANLEY
Actresses known for their politics as much as their work are relatively rare: in the modern theatre, Vanessa Redgrave and Maxine Peake come to mind. But the revelation that in the socially conservative Ireland of a century ago there were also actresses whose revolutionary drive informed their work gives yet another perspective on the Easter Rising.
Trade unionist, republican and Abbey actress Helena Molony, arrested for her part in the rebellion, has perhaps been the best known until now. But there was another, one whose memoirs have re-emerged after a silence of almost 60 years. Originally published in 1955, The Splendid
Years by Abbey founding actress and Cumann na mBan activist Máire Nic Shuibhlaigh has lost none of its descriptive powers to engage. It also comes with entertaining observations common to the best theatre memoirs, especially in the candid and ever-so-slightly irreverent character portraits of iconic figures within our heroine’s circle.
The memoirs recount two dramatic events in which Nic Shuibhlaigh played active roles: the birth of Ireland’s national theatre and the insurrection it helped inspire. She was the young leading lady on opening night at The Abbey in 1904 in the production of Yeats’s patriotically rousing Kathleen Ni Houlihan; in 1916 she led a contingent of Cumann na mBan women in the occupation of Jacob’s factory during Easter week.
The book’s cover, reproduced from her portrait by John B Yeats which hangs in The Abbey, hints at the ‘ethereal’ quality alluded to by admirers (including the painter himself, 40 years her senior, and who reputedly proposed marriage).
One English theatre critic wrote in 1903 of the then-teenage actress possessing ‘ a strange, wan, disquieting beauty’. Her talent as a performer also benefited from ‘one of the most beautiful speaking voices every produced by the young Irish theatre’.
In the foreword, Padraic Colum writes of the ‘intellectual ferment’ of turn-ofthe-century Dublin in which his lifelong friend Máire came of age, and the growing number of politico-cultural clubs marking a new fervour for Irish poetry, prose and pamphleteering not seen since the days of Swift. Nic Shuibhlaigh recalls a city ‘ drama mad’ where almost everyone in the nationalist movement was involved in theatre.
Born Mary Elizabeth Walker in Carlow in 1883, into a rising middle-class gaeilgeoir family, her parents’ continued support for Parnell despite his fall from grace cultivated a spirit for going against the tide in their young daughter. On moving to Dublin, she joined Maud Gonne MacBride’s Inghinidhe Na hÉireann with an avowed ‘girl crush’ on its imposing founder.
‘She was the most exquisitely fashioned creature I have ever seen,’ she wrote of Maud Gonne. ‘Her beauty was startling.’
There was similar adulation for Countess Markievicz, who was ‘a memorable soul’, although not especially memorable for her acting talent, ‘she could never sink her own vivid personality in a role’.
There are recollections of the Countess driving her ‘old two-seater car round the city, as fast as it would go, as its joints rattled and clashed, with a dog sat beside her’. Others in the political and cultural circles in which she moved come across less favourably.
While the Walkers were family friends with both the Yeats and Pearse households, and Nic Shuibhlaigh writes of an avowed respect for their most famous sons, she nevertheless described both WB Yeats and Pádraig Pearse as ‘poseurs’.
‘PH Pearse was very much attracted to Yeats. I thought at times he tried to imitate him,’ a trait she said left her ‘fairly well disgusted’. Her row with Yeats in 1905 over the direction of the Abbey – she arguing in favour of maintaining its cooperative and nationalist origins, he insisting on change to a more professional business footing – resulted in her walking out. Her dislike of him was compounded years later when, during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he referred to the early Abbey actors as ‘clerks and shop girls’.
Lady Gregory, who invited the young actress back into the fold in 1910 for the Abbey’s celebrated tour of America, is described as ‘pleasant’ but also somewhat ‘condescending’ with her ‘fixed social smile’.