I was initially not inclined to give consideration to the role of political drama in JJ's background, but a series of chance finds pointed me in the direction of the need to explore this aspect of his political formation.

The first was a copy of a play by John and Joseph M Muldoon For Ireland's Sake, or Under the Green Flag - a romantic Irish drama published by Ponsonby in Dublin in 1910. This was inscribed by JJ at 30 TCD in September 1915, and it somehow came into the possession of Norman Cardwell the Dungannon Royal School archivist, who returned it to me when I met him in 2000, on the trail of JJ's schooldays. I suspect JJ must have found it in Dublin, and sent it to 'Boss' Dill the headmaster as raw material for a school production. It is romantic nationalist stuff, with a Tyrone regional flavour, somewhat in the style of Boucicault, but in the preface there is a conscious dedication to the memory of Emmet, FitzGerald and Tone, whose 'heroic virtues and lofty patriotism' the play attempts to convey.

I was inclined to set this aside, but then Nessa my daughter, who is currently (2001) in her final year in the TCD School of Drama at the Beckett Centre, came up with a reference to Hagal Mengel's Sam Thompson and Modern Drama in Ulster (Verlag Peter Lang, Fankfurt am Main, Bern, New York, 1986)(1). It seems that there was in Belfast a regional variant of the national theatre movement, rooted in the soil, which Yeats and co in Dublin were inclined to treat with aristocratic disdain. Mengel goes in some scholarly depth into this background to Sam Thompson. Names associated with the political background to this were Alice Milligan, Roger Casement, Joseph Campbell, Bulmer Hobson and Robert Lynd, while in the dramatic front-line were Thomas Carnduff, Lewis Purcell, Gerald MacNamara, Rutherford Mayne, St John Ervine and Lynn Doyle. This immediately rang a bell, for was this not the Alice Stopford Greene network, the Liberal Protestant Home Rule nation-building process in which JJ was embedded.

Reading further into Mengel I came across how Rutherford Mayne had attempted to do for the Ulster Presbyterian peasantry what Synge had done for the Aran Islands. They had tried to produce Yeats in Belfast but the culture-gap was too wide. The Ulster drama enthusiasts felt the need to write their own stuff, often in comic or satirical mode(2). The shipyard workers came to Mayne plays with rivets in their pockets but went home laughing, a sort of foretaste of the current 'Hole in the Wall Gang'.

I am not going to chase this hare any further, except to suggest that the Muldoon play was probably a modest Dungannon echo of this Belfast-based movement, apparently unknown to Mengel. I also discovered that JJ must have known Mayne, or been on his network somehow, because there is among his papers an invitation, signed by Lennox Robinson, to an event in the Country Shop on March 16 1944, at which a portrait by James Sleator RHA of 'Rutherford Mayne' would be presented to the man himself, whose real name it turns out is Mr Commissioner Waddell. He had ended up in the Land Commission, as did Bulmer Hobson in the Forestry Service.

I find it tragic that the intellectual elite of the Belfast drama movement of the 1900s should have ended up in emigration, in Canada, Australia or as Dublin civil servants, in effect refugees from the Carson-Balfour partitionist coup-d'etat. The Country Shop venue for the Mayne presentation was also a reminder of what might have been under an all-Ireland political regime; it evokes Muriel Gahan and the Irish Countrywomen, with Horace Plunkett in the wings. The Mayne event must have been a sad nostalgic get-together of some of the lost souls of the Protestant Liberal Home Rule pre-1916 cultural revival.

I conclude by mentioning that JJ when in college as a student had been a regular attender at the Queens Theatre, which at the time was low-brow music-hall stuff, a long way from the heights of the Abbey. He would have been at home with the earthy Ulster theatre group of the time, and had he lived he would have enjoyed the 'Hole in the Wall Gang'. I also think it probable that when he looked in at AE's Sunday night 'at-homes', as he did regularly during the 1920s, he would have been able to defend knowledgeably the politics of Ulster critical satirical realist drama, while analysing the reasons for its decline.

Notes and References

2. Irish Studies Review 15/2 (May 2007) has a paper by Eugene McNulty (Portsmouth) which analyses the work of Gerald MacNamara as parody, both of the Dublin revivalists of Irish national mythologies and of Orange mythologies in Belfast. The answer to Yeats' Cathleen Ni Houlihan in the work of the Belfast author was Suzanne and the Sovereigns, which interpreted hilariously the Williamite war epoch, with its battles and sieges, as being rivalry for the hand of the lady Suzanne. The Orange Order is credited with having invited William to come over and be their mascot, getting the throne of England into the bargain. In a subsequent play The Mist that does be on the Bog MacNamara sets up a Synge-like situation, complete with Synge language, where a genuine Connemara couple rent their cottage to Dublin theatre people to provide 'atmosphere' for the development of their play. Into this situation comes a roving tramp, who turns out to be a Dublin playwright in disguise, also seeking atmosphere; each takes the other(s) as authentic, generating much hilarity.

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Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2001