The rebel actress with a caustic eye
She had a ‘girl crush’ on Maudd Gonne, thought Pearse and Yeats were poseurs, found Lady Gregory condescending... and didn’t rate Countess Marcievicz as an actor
Nic Shuibhlaigh does acknowledge in her account that the Abbey would never have survived to become a world-renowned institution without Lady G’s efforts, while the elderly theatre manager’s treat of ‘Gort barmbrack suppers’ on first nights are also recalled fondly.
Key among the literary social events was ‘At Homes’ with A.E. who did ‘more for the Ireland of his time than any other man’. Michael Collins, by contrast, comes across as not quite the gentleman in an anecdote in the introduction. He shared a ‘friendly rivalry’ with his IRB contemporary (and Nic Shuibhlaigh’s husband-to-be in 1929) Eamonn ‘ Bob’ Price. According to her younger actress sister, Patricia (‘Gipsy’), ‘a woman couldn’t sit in the same room as Mick without his slipping his hand up her skirt’.
Descriptions of incongruous venues for the fledgling national theatre before the move to Abbey Street bring the city delightfully to life. St Teresa’s Temperance Society in Clarendon Street, as was, was so tiny that the cast had to ‘sidle like crabs’ into position with a set that wobbled farci- cally each time someone moved; the next venue at Lower Camden Street, between a grocer’s and a butcher’s, had the addition of continuous smells of ‘sawdust and onions’.
Just four short chapters at the end of the book are dedicated to the Rising. This gives a somewhat rushed feel to the book, with only the briefest references to the 1913 Dublin Lockout and the outbreak of the First World War in between. But as her grandnephew, the journalist and writer David Kenny, asserts in his introductory chapters, a memoir is not a biography, nor a strict chronology. And those Centenary-timely recollections of the Rising are so very atmospheric.
Of the days in Jacob’s factory Nic ‘A woman couldn’ t sit in the same room as Mick without his slip ping his
hand up her skirt’ Shuibhlaigh recalls feelings of euphoria alternating with anxiety, rumour and sleeplessness compounding the growing sense of their isolation, the noise of firing in the distance ‘a strange, background sound you never, never forget…. The whole week seemed to pass like one long day.’
These memoirs make an absorbing companion to the recently published The
Abbey Rebels: A Lost Revolution by Fearghal McGarry. That book also records the role of the theatre in the radical politics of the time, one when their gender didn’t initially inhibit those women activists.
Given that context, Nic Shuibhlaigh’s remembrance of the greeting by Jacob’s rebel commander on that fateful Easter Monday stands out. On being confronted by her small Cumman na m Ban group, a momentarily perplexed Thomas MacDonagh told her: ‘We haven’t made any provision for girls here…’ A century on, as the stories of those rebel girls and women gradually emerge from the shadows, The
Splendid Years writes the ethereal Nic Shuibhlaigh back into our revolutionary history in disquieting, indomitable style.