The theatrical first nights in Dublin that brought crowds to their feet... but for all the wrong reasons! For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to Memorable First Nights by Dominic Dromgoole above.
It seemed inevitable once I decided to write a book on history's most seismic first nights, that my first port of call should be Dublin. Few cities have packed in as many premieres of mayhem and magic as Dublin, and few countries have funnelled their tensions and rages through the theatre as greatly as Ireland.
Maud Gonne’s memorable entrance in a doorway in Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, is one of the all time first night moments - the argument and dreams of its authors, the hunger and need of its audience, and the expressive capacity of a charismatic figure all coming together in one stark image.
The first Abbey was a cockpit of fantastic imagining and bitter truth, and within its wooden clatter were played out the passions of the emerging nation state. Here, Playboy fireworked into life, roared along by a brawl confected by Yeats, who had invited a group of drunken Trinity students along to make mischief. Yeats was at the centre again fifteen years later when The Plough and the Stars opened, and he stood on stage and barked at a seething mob, 'You have disgraced yourselves again’. Yeats could be said to be a connoisseur of the riotous first night, having attended the legendary brouhaha of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. He clearly had a taste for chaos.
My initial weekend of research in Dublin was spent in discussion with a number of academics talking about why the city had a propensity for concocting the broth that boils over and spills out onto the grate. My last conversation was with the theatre scholar Chris Morash. At the end of our delightful chat in the National Library, he pressed into my hands his book A History of Irish Theatre. I read it and discovered that on Cathleen and The Playboy and The Plough, he had got there first and unimprovably, his overall narrative studded with short chapters summoning up the excitement and the drama of each first night.
I was, in literary terms, gazumped.
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
