“In a Position To Be Treated Roughly”: F. R. Higgins in the Abbey Theatre Minute Books Tricia O’Beirne As part of a shared contribution to the Yeats 2015 celebrations and as part of the Abbey Theatre and NUI Galway Digital Archive Partnership that ran from 2012 to 2015, the theater’s minute books for the W.B. Yeats years were digitized and made accessible online. There are seven books, comprising nearly a thousand pages in all.1 They begin in 1904, when Yeats cofounded the Abbey with Lady Augusta Gregory and conclude in 1939, the year of his death. The minute books are written from the perspective of the board of directors and the management of the theater, and as such, they provide insight into the Abbey’s day-to-day business. Despite the formality of tone inherent in the process of recording minutes for board meetings, the Abbey Theatre Minute Books are unexpectedly insightful and revealing of character. Yeats is the sole constant from the company’s genesis up to January 1939, when the minutes record Lennox Robinson’s odyssey to France to try to repatriate the body of his old friend and defender.2 But the minute books also provide a nuanced picture of power dynamics and relationships during this period in the theater’s history. In that context, one larger-than-life personality conspicuously dominates the period from 1935 to Yeats’s death and beyond—one who is rarely noted as an influence on the theater’s policies but who appears involved in every aspect of the Abbey’s artistic and business affairs: the poet F. R. Higgins, whose micromanagement of life in the theater is meticulously detailed during his six-year tenancy on the board and as manager, up to January 1941. Despite his ubiquitous presence, Higgins does not feature heavily in the narratives written about this period of the Abbey’s history. Ernest Blythe, the manager from 1941 to 1967, was undoubtedly the most significant influence in the middle years of the century, but the minute books demonstrate that Higgins was integral to shaping the Abbey’s artistic policies from the thirties to the early [End Page 120] forties. He was also largely responsible for creating an official attitude of resistance to any questioning of the board’s authority. As general manager from September 1938 to his sudden death in 1941, and as Blythe’s predecessor, he helped create a culture amenable to the policies for which Blythe’s directorship is much criticized—policies that steered the Abbey’s artistic choices toward a preference for “kitchen comedies” and “parlourtragedies,” and that favored popular plays over artistic or experimental works. Most academic examinations identify the Blythe years as a conservative and insular era in the history of the Abbey.3 Yet, a close reading of the Abbey Theatre Minute Books for the years preceding 1941 does not identify Blythe as the primary instigator of policy. The minute books reveal the minutiae of theater life during this period. In doing so, they provide an insight into the establishment of the patriarchal culture that remained with the theater for many years to come. Under Higgins’s management, the players lost the access to the board that had been afforded to them by Yeats and Gregory; in his era, the members of the company are continually referred to as subjects requiring control. Those who present a perceived threat—for instance, Frank O’Connor and Hugh Hunt—became the focus of Higgins’s personal vendettas. Teresa Deevy was dropped, without explanation, despite her success as an Abbey Theatre playwright. Women like Ria Mooney, Anne Yeats, and Aideen O’Connor were singled out for harsh treatment. Higgins, it seems, had a compulsion to manipulate those under his management—particularly those who, because of their youth or gender, are perhaps in a position to be treated roughly. Fredrick Robert Higgins (1896–1941) was born in Foxford, County Mayo, into a Protestant family originally from County Meath. He left school early and began earning his living in a building provider’s office in Dublin, becoming an official in the Irish Labour movement after some years. He subsequently worked as an editor of...