INTRODUCTION

In 1931, 1932 and 1934, the Abbey Theatre company left Dublin for long tours of its repertoire through the United States. The third tour brought the Irish actors to Hollywood in February 1935. At the time John Ford, an Irish American with a passion for Ireland and its literature, was making a movie for RKO Studios of Liam O'Flaherty's novel The Informer. A great admirer of the Abbey, Ford staged a welcome banquet for the players on the set of The Informer, which represented a lamp-lit Dublin city street.

The photograph opposite is a key piece of evidence for this book. The event it records is not simply a photo opportunity for Irish visitors with RKO celebrities; it was an occasion of some historical significance. Then and there, creative collaboration between Irish actors and a great Hollywood film-maker got underway.

The following Friday night, a number of Hollywood stars joined the Abbey cast on stage in crowd scenes from The Playboy of the Western World. Ford arranged for Denis O'Dea, the Abbey's juvenile male, to do a turn as a street singer in The Informer. The assistant director's daily call sheet already listed duties for two Abbey veterans who had since settled in Hollywood, J.M. Kerrigan and Una O'Connor. Before the current Abbey troupe left town, Ford took steps to get RKO producers to bring them all back again a year later for the filming of O'Casey's two masterpieces, The Plough and the Stars (1936) and Juno and the Paycock (this second project was abandoned). The collaboration would continue over many years, bearing fruit in great motion pictures, the last of which was The Quiet Man (1952).

While The Plough and the Stars did not turn out to be one of these unquestionably great motion pictures that sprang from Ford's collaboration with Abbey actors, the movement of O'Casey's play from stage to screen itself makes a great story, with Irish sectarian trouble at its heart, and the global entertainment market for background.

The original authors and directors of the Irish National Theatre Society at the time of the Abbey Theatre's opening in 1904, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge, were all Protestants, descendants of the post-sixteenth-century English colony in Ireland; 90 per cent of the country's residents were Catholics. Even though these three authors were all committed nationalists working for Irish independence from Britain, they found themselves in the questionable position of giving dramatic representations of Catholic life from what their audiences expected to be a Protestant point of view. The famous riots over the production of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) had their roots in this sectarian suspicion, or suspicion of sectarianism (arguments over whether the balance of blame lay with the audience or the author are continuing). A similar sectarian conflict heated up among the company's actors in the 1920s, and it boiled over at the time of the first production of The Plough and the Stars, which also caused riots: Protestant actors sided with the Protestant O'Casey, and Catholic actors for the most part found the author to be at fault for the incendiary impact of the play.

O'Casey, partly out of disgust with the lack of support he received from both the Abbey's actors and its audiences, and tempted by rich offers from London producers, left Ireland in 1926 and never worked there again. Barry Fitzgerald, one of the stars of the company, followed O'Casey to London. Sara Allgood had already left the Abbey for good, carried on the tide of her success in the title role of Juno and the Paycock in 1924. O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars became two of the most popular plays in the English-speaking world, and not just popular, but recognized to be great in the sense that Shakespeare's plays are great: literary, human, profound, tragi-comic and pleasurable. These plays paved the way for actors, and other Irish plays, to go from Dublin to London, New York and finally to Hollywood.

After 1926 the Abbey itself resumed its pre-O'Casey decline. Both political parties in the new Irish Free State were conservative, Catholic and theoretically anti-English language. A vigorous censorship of books and films was instituted, and the government - by virtue of its subsidy of the Abbey from 1925 - was able to place a representative on the theatre's board of directors. The War of Independence (1919-21) and Civil War (1922-3) had left the Irish economy in a poor state. The 1929 worldwide depression further sank the standard of living. By 1931 the Abbey, just to keep afloat, found it necessary to undertake the first of what would be four major tours of North America in that decade. The aim was to capitalize on the international popularity of Irish drama in general and O'Casey's plays in particular. In the first 1931/32 tour alone, the Abbey played in 74 cities and gave 238 performances. By the time the 1932/33, 1934/35 and 1937/38 tours were completed, the Abbey was known in nearly every city and town of North America.

It was the custom in the era of the early 'talkies' for Hollywood talent scouts to take up to fifty orchestra seats on Broadway opening nights in order to spot new acting talent.1 Sara Allgood had played Broadway in The Plough and the Stars (28 November-December 1927), Juno and the Paycock (19 December 1927-January 1928), Paul Vincent Carroll's Shadow and Substance (26 January 1938-September 1938) and a revival of Juno (16 January-13 April 1940). Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields had been in Broadway productions of plays by O'Casey and Carroll, a writer now forgotten but in the 1930s regarded on Broadway as the successor to Shaw and O'Casey. By creating a public for Irish drama, and exposing its stars to talent scouts, Abbey tours of the USA opened the door for its actors to enter Hollywood studios.

Research for this book benefited by a stroke of author's luck: a hoard of papers belonging to the key actors in this whole transition of Irish Revival drama from Dublin to Hollywood fell into my lap. At a conference in Galway on the performance history of The Playboy of the Western World, the scholar-author W.J. McCormack mentioned that he had a cousin who had a cousin who had in her possession the personal papers of Arthur Shields and Barry Fitzgerald. Within a few weeks, Christine Shields set before me in Oakland, California, dozens of boxes of papers and memorabilia - documents of family history, the private letters of her father Arthur Shields, her mother Aideen O'Connor and uncle Barry Fitzgerald, business papers from the Abbey tours of the USA, tax records, contracts with theatres and film studios, and hundreds of photographs from movies, plays and family life. This trove of papers (later donated by Christine Shields to the National University of Ireland, Galway) made it possible to tell the story of the Irish dramatic revival flowing into world cinema as a story of individuals. Arthur Shields, Barry Fitzgerald and Sara Allgood (godmother to Christine Shields) carried the traditions of Abbey acting within their persons - their muscles remembered those traditions, their voices were trained in them, their own inventiveness was governed by them. Where these actors went, the Irish dramatic revival went too.

One particularly significant historical moment revealed by the Shields family archive is the afternoon in September 1938 on which Arthur Shields decided to leave Ireland for the United States. He asked the director and founder of the Abbey, W.B. Yeats, if they might have a talk. The poet invited him to lunch at the Kildare Street Club (an exclusive Dublin resort of the Protestant Ascendancy). Shields had fought by James Connolly's side in the Easter Rising in 1916; he had been one of the last rebels to surrender. At the Abbey Theatre he became the leading man and a person who, in Yeats's words, 'incarnates our traditions'.2 But by the late 1930s Ireland had grown impossible for Shields. He complained that now you had 'to say your prayers in Gaelic' to get on at the Abbey, and Shields had neither Gaelic nor prayers. More particularly, though married and with a child, he was in love with a young actress in the company, Aideen O'Connor. Offers to direct on Broadway and to do film-acting in Hollywood had been extended to him, with the chance of parts for Aideen too. He hated to leave the Abbey, but it no longer felt like home. The old poet replied that, all things considered, perhaps it was best for Shields himself that he take up one of his offers; however, as long as Yeats had anything to do with the Abbey, Shields would be welcome to return. By the following month Arthur Shields was in New York to direct M.J. Farrell and John Perry's Spring Meeting, and within seven months, Yeats was dead and John Ford had sent Shields a contract for a new part that had been specially written for him into Twentieth Century Fox's Drums Along the Mohawk.

The rapid transition by Arthur Shields from creative teamwork under W.B. Yeats to work under John Ford is startling. It is not customary to see a connection between these two great artists. They belong to different media, different levels of culture, different continents, and almost different centuries, in that Yeats emerges from 'the long nineteenth century' and Ford is...