Makers of a Modern Theatre: Frank and William Fay

Abstract

‘Our two best men actors were not indeed chosen by chance, for one was a stage-struck solicitor's clerk and the other a working man who had toured Ireland in a theatrical company managed by a Negro.’ With these arrogant and misleading words, W. B. Yeats chose not to name to the Royal Academy of Sweden the two men who trained the original Abbey Theatre Company: the brothers Frank and William Fay. No one now credits Yeats's account, but a scholarly history of the Fays' work for the theatre has yet to be written, in part because the Irish theatre movement itself is only just emerging from the regions of anecdote and gossip, but in part also because of the dominance of the readily available material by the Fays' denigrator, Yeats himself. Thus, the best account of the stage-craft of the early Abbey, James W. Flannery's bookW. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, sets the poet at the heart of the Irish dramatic movement, and although it is admitted to be ‘unjust and erroneous’ to dismiss the Fays' views on theatre as ‘simply ignorant’, it is with the ‘literary and intellectual’ values of Yeats's plays, and their stage-worthiness, that Flannery is primarily concerned. No other published study approaches the thoroughness and intelligence of Flannery's and the brothers Fay continue to suffer the penalties of modesty, inarticulateness, and partial failure.