Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín Page B

to the newspapers: “In no country save in Ireland could a State-subsidised theatre presume on popular patience to the extent of making a mockery and a byword of a revolutionary movement on which the present structure claims to stand.” She and O’Casey had a spirited debate in the newspapers, but O’Casey became ill during a public debate with her, partly, he said, because of the sight of Maud Gonne MacBride, “the colonel’s daughter still”. Also, a number of younger writers who disliked Yeats now took this opportunity to dislike O’Casey; among them were Liam O’Flaherty and Austin Clarke.
    Once more, despite the opposition from the republican widows and the government representative on the boardand the young writers who disliked him, Yeats and Lady Gregory prevailed. The theatre was packed; the play was not taken off, nor the subsidy removed. In the early years of the Irish state, the production of The Plough and the Stars stood almost alone as a blow for freedom of expression.
    The rejection of The Silver Tassie in April 1928 and the consequent alienation of O’Casey stands alone in Lady Gregory’s career as an example of mismanagement and short-sightedness. The play was read by Robinson in Dublin and Lady Gregory in Coole, and was sent to Yeats in Italy, but he did not read it until his return to Dublin. The fourth director, Walter Starkie, who had replaced George O’Brien on the board, was in Spain. None of them liked it but they did not meet to discuss what they should do with it. Instead, Yeats wrote in his magisterial style: “There is no dominating character, no dominating action, neither psychological unity nor unity of action.” He wrote to Lady Gregory suggesting that O’Casey, to save face, should withdraw the play. O’Casey, in the meantime, was in England, where his first child had just been born; he was so sure that the theatre intended to produce his play that he had suggested a cast-list to Robinson and was preparing the text for publication. Instead, Lady Gregory sent him Yeats’s report, making clear that his view was “what we all think”, although Walter Starkie had still not given his view. (He thought they should produce the play.) Shenoted in her journal for Saturday 23 April: “Of course it must be a severe blow, but I believe he will feel its force, its ‘integrity’ and be grateful in the end … But I had a bad night, or early morning, thinking of the disappointment and shock he will feel.”
    O’Casey was not grateful. He wrote to Robinson in a rage at Yeats’s suggestion that he should withdraw the play to save face: “There is going to be no damned secrecy with me surrounding the Abbey’s rejection of the play. Does he think that I would practise in my life the prevarication and wretchedness that I laugh at in my plays?” Some of the correspondence was published in the Observer in June 1928 and the rest in the Irish Statesman a week later.
    Lady Gregory never saw O’Casey again, although they maintained a formal and sporadic correspondence until her death in 1932. She came to regret what had happened. “It is the only occasion I can recollect”, Lennox Robinson wrote, “when on some important matter of opinion or policy she did change her mind.” On her last visit to London in April 1931 she expressed a wish to meet O’Casey again and see his wife and son, but he did not want to meet her. Finally, on 30 October 1931, she wrote to him from Coole: “I don’t think I am likely to cross the Channel again, for I am at present crippled by a rheumatic attack, and at my age it is not likely to pass away … Perhaps one day you will bring your wife here. I am sorry not to have met her.”
    In his autobiography, despite everything that had happened , Sean O’Casey recited Lady Gregory’s praises: “Not Yeats, nor Martyn, nor Miss Horniman