Collected Works of W.B. Yeats The Plays

An Introduction For My Plays [1937]I The theatre for which these plays were written was the creation of seven people: four players, Sara Allgood, her sister Maire O'Neill, girls in a blind factory who joined a patriotic society; William Fay, Frank Fay, an electric light fitter and an accountant's clerk who got up plays at a coffee house; three writers, Lady Gregory, John Synge and I. If we all told the story we would all tell it differently. Somewhere among my printed diaries is a note describing how on the same night my two sisters and their servant dreamt the same dream in three different grotesque forms. Once I was in meditation with three students of the supernormal faculties; our instructor had given us the same theme, what, I have forgotten; one saw a ripe fruit, one an unripe, one a lit torch, one an unlit. Science has never thought about the subject and so has no explanation of those parallel streams that make up a great part of history. When I follow back my stream to its source I find two dominant desires. I wanted to get rid of irrelevant movement, the stage must become still that words might keep all their vividness, and I wanted vivid words. When I saw a London play, I saw actors crossing the stage not because the play compelled them, but because a producer said they must do so to keep the attention of the audience, and I heard words that had no vividness except what they borrowed from the situation. It seems that I was confirmed in this idea or found it when I first saw Sarah Bernhardt play inPhedreand that it was I who converted the players, but I am old, I must have many false memories; perhaps I was Synge's convert. It was certainly a day of triumph when the first act ofThe Well of the Saintsheld its audience though the two chief persons sat side by side under a stone cross from start to finish. This rejection of all needless movement first drew the attention of critics. The players still try to preserve it, though audiences accustomed to the cinema expect constant change; perhaps it was most necessary in that first period when the comedies of Lady Gregory, the tragi-comedies of Synge, my own blank verse plays, made up our repertory, all needing whether in verse or prose an ear attentive to every rhythm.I hated the existing conventions of the theatre, not because conventions are wrong but because soliloquies and players who must always face the audience and stand far apart when they speak -- "dressing the stage" it was called -- had been mixed up with too many bad plays to be endurable. Frank Fay agreed, yet he knew the history of all the conventions and sometimes loved them. I would put into his hands a spear instead of a sword because I knew that he would flourish a sword in imitation of an actor in an Eighteenth century engraving. He knew everything, even that Racine at rehearsal made his leading lady speak on musical notes and that Ireland had preserved longer than England the rhythmical utterance of the Shakespearean stage. He was openly, dogmatically, of that school of Talma which permits an actor, as Gordon Craig has said, to throw up an arm calling down the thunderbolts of Heaven, instead of seeming to pick up pins from the floor. Were he living now and both of us young, I would ask his help to elaborate new conventions in writing and representation; for Synge, Lady Gregory and I were all instinctively of the school of Talma. Do not those tragic sentences "shivering into seventy winters," "a starved ass braying in the yard," require convention as much as a blank verse line? And there are scenes inThe Well of the Saintswhich seem to me over-rich in words because the realistic action does not permit that stilling and slowing which turns the imagination in upon itself. II I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung and because I did not understand my own instincts gave half a dozen wrongYeats, W. B. is the author of 'Collected Works of W.B. Yeats The Plays' with ISBN 9780684857237 and ISBN 0684857235.