The Poet in the Theatre

Abstract

IT is difficult to realise that forty-seven years ago the first production of Stephen Phillips' Paolo and Francesca was greeted with effusive comparisons with Sophocles and Dante. Those of us who saw the work in revival in Dublin in the middle thirties hardly felt inclined to agree with William Archer's description of it as "a thing of exquisite poetic form tingling from first to last with dramatic life." Its poetic form, we thought, is the poetic form of a salmon on a fishmonger's slab; its dramatic life, hardly more lively. Was it our strenuous upbringing in Irish theatre which had seemingly so hardened our hearts? Yeats' The Countess Cathleen, dating from 1892, had, we thought, a much greater claim on poetic form and dramatic vitality, yet the critics found no cause in it for calling up Greek or Italian shades.