COOLE  LADY

Reviewed for the New York City Yeats Society

by Maureen E. Mulvihill

Princeton Research Forum ♦ Princeton, New Jersey

'TIS her stick upon the floor, her cane upon hard, unyielding wood. This is the sound which begins Coole Lady. And it calls us to attention: "Listen," it says, "here comes a play in the old Irish character."

All students of the Irish Literary Revival (the Irish Renaissance) know a few facts, surely, about Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932, County Galway, Ireland); indeed, her role in the emergence of a Modern Ireland is a cliché by now in Irish Studies. Lady Gregory is chiefly remembered as the engine behind the founding of Ireland’s national dramatic venue, The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. But until just recently, she has been rather neglected, if not overshadowed ironically by the very writers whose careers she effectively launched: Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey. One of her famous circle, George Bernard Shaw, judged Lady Gregory the greatest Irishwoman of her time; yet few today can say that they "know" Augusta (Persse) Gregory. Who was this woman behind the big public persona?

Sam and Joan McCready have given us something quite special in Coole Lady: they have given us a play which discloses the character (the inner springs) of Ireland’s first Woman of Letters. But first, a word on the McCreadys:

Sam and Joan McCready, founding members in the 1950s of the Belfast Lyric Theatre, are well known practitioners of their craft. As the play’s program notes duly state, they have given a lifetime to teaching, acting, and directing, both in Ireland and in the States. After retiring from teaching in 2003, the McCreadys performed throughout the US and Europe, notably in the works of Yeats and Beckett. As demonstrated in their present work with Handcart Ensemble of New York City, they favor young, innovative theatre companies. The McCreadys have resided in the States since the 1980s. Sam McCready, Professor of Theatre emeritus, University of Maryland, has published Lucille Lortel: A Bio-Bibliography (1993), the Yeats Encyclopedia (1997), and many articles on world theatre; he presently is at work on a history of the theatre in Northern Ireland. In a recent online interview with nytheatre.com, Joan McCready valuably adds: "We’ve always worked together …. You know, there are many who will claim that husband and wife cannot possibly share work ‘space.’ That is simply not true if what you share is your commitment and passion for the work. Sam and I really honed our skills by working as a team. We designed and often painted sets for each other; I did the lighting for many of Sam’s productions, we often shared the stage in plays and have frequently directed each other. I think that what has been important for us is that we both admire each other’s work greatly and we are each other’s sternest critics" (April 17, 2005).

The manifest achievement of the McCready’s Coole Lady is the play’s economy. This is a one-character, one-act play (no intermission), over one hour and 30 minutes; it is a monologue delivered from one set, Lady Gregory’s drawing-room in her estate at Coole Park, County Galway, circa 1931. The set is spare: there is a large, handsome floor rug; there is a large Victorian-style chair; and there is a small table of cherished memories -- photographs, letters, documents (the relics of a lifetime). Adding to these "props", there is the cane: Lady Gregory’s walking stick. Its soundings and resoundings remind us of her age, certainly, but also of her power, endurance, and roots in a time long passed.

Owing to Sam McCready’s masterful control of an unwieldy amount of material – the doings of some eighty years, after all – the high and low points of an extraordinary life are recalled and commented upon in less than two hours: a tour de force of artistic compression. "The central difficulty in this play," Sam McCready said to this reviewer, "was to supply the audience with enough biographical and historical materials, for context, yet not let the details overwhelm the play’s interior drama. This was an old woman, needing to tell her story, not to entertain us but to share a life with us. The text was stripped to the bone in rehearsals. Audience engagement with the woman’s imagination and emotions – that was the big challenge. In directing Joan as Lady Gregory, I had to direct, control, assist – but stand aside, too, and give this consummate actress enough space to create, inform, and inhabit her character (a delicate balance, always, for any director)."

The play’s script is a reliable abridgement of the main events in Lady Gregory’s long, eventful life and colorful public career. She remembers – and we observe her doing this – her early years and upbringing in the Anglo-Irish Persse family, seated at Roxborough House, County Galway. She remembers her marriage in 1880 to Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, Galway, a favorite of Queen Victoria and a Governor of Ceylon (a man some 35 years her senior and a widower). She remembers the birth of their only child, a son, in 1881, and then the death of her husband in 1892. A few years later, in 1918, she would mourn the death of her only child. She remembers "the Troubles" of 1916 and beyond, and shouts with gusto, "Up the Rebels!" Most vividly, she remembers the main event of her life: her work as an arts entrepreneur on behalf of Ireland’s new generation of playwrights, culminating in the founding of a first National Literary Theatre in Dublin, of which Yeats wrote in 1898: "This new theatre will be an Irish literary theatre for Celtic and Irish plays. Whatever their degree of excellence, these will be written with high ambition, and so build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature."

This Lady Gregory, in the hands of the McCreadys, is a frank and honest voice; she is not so proud as to conceal her own fragility and peccadilloes, as when she comments on her love affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in the early 1880s and her fling in New York City in 1912 with John Quinn. She also remembers her failures, such as her ugly wranglings with the British government over the ownership of her nephew’s (Hugh Lane’s) Impressionist art collection (a battle posthumously settled, in 1959). Finally, she laments the ravages of time -- her crippling arthritis, the long crisis of her breast cancer.

Owing to Sam McCready’s seasoned direction and writing, the flow of this wide-ranging monologue is brisk. It holds the audience. And we hear Lady Gregory speak in many moods and timbres. She spins her stories with great variety: she laughs, sings rebel tunes, recites Irish poetry, and falls to an articulate silence when the press of memory is too painful to bear. "My biggest challenge in playing Lady Gregory, "Joan McCready shared with this reviewer, "was creating an historical character, totally credible to today’s audience…transmitting the inner life of this extraordinary woman, the inner truth behind her words." The physical demands of this script must not be overlooked. Joan McCready had to learn a full 90 minutes of monologue; she also had to navigate a rather small space – in a long skirt, on a rug, in high heels, and with a cane, mind you – as if it were her own parlor; and she had to progressively show declining health in her voice, gestures, and movements. Much to her credit, Joan McCready’s skillful dexterity almost competed, at times, with her delivery; once, when her busy cane quietly slips from her grasp, she retrieves her prop from the floor with such grace and speed one assumes that the moment was scripted.

Coole Lady is not a nostalgic monologue, nor a sentimental memory play, but rather a play which reminds us of the big achievements of Lady Augusta Gregory and, perhaps more important, introduces us to the character of the woman behind those achievements. The play situates her as a critical transitional figure, one bridging the Old Ireland of rich romantic lore, peasant folk culture, and great family estates, and the New Ireland of bloody political rancor (Yeats' "modern filthy tide"). All of that would have been enough for any first play on Lady Augusta Gregory, but the McCreadys give the story a special take: they show us their subject’s interior life.

Only one aspect of their portrait might have been more prominently represented: Lady Gregory’s several credits as a writer and student of Irish cultural history. For this, readers may consult Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait by Elizabeth Coxhead (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1961); Lady Gregory: Selected Writings, edited by Lucy McDiarmid and Maureen Waters (London: Penguin, 1995); James Pethica’s forthcoming biography of Lady Gregory; and Taura S. Napier’s essay on Lady Gregory’s ‘emigrant notebook’ (LISA e-journal, III:i, 2005).

High praise goes to the McCreadys, to their producer Martin Lynch, to Handcart Ensemble, and to Theatre 315.

Coole Lady. Handcart Ensemble Productions, 244 Fifth Ave., New York, New York 10001. Venue: Theatre 315, 315 West 47th St., New York, New York 10036. April 17 to April 30, 2005. Written, Directed & Designed by Sam McCready. Starring Joan McCready as Lady Augusta Gregory. Martin Lynch, Producer. Richard McCready, Music. Eric Cope, Lighting Designer. J Scott Reynolds, Artistic Director. Kevin Ashworth, Managing Director.

This play has been published as Coole Lady: The Extraordinary Story of Lady Gregory by Sam McCready, with chronology and bibliography, and with an extended preface by James Pethica. Belfast, Northern Ireland: Lagan Press, 2005; ISBN 1 904652 24 7 £7.95. Cloth, 70 pages. Cover photograph of Joan McCready as Lady Gregory by Sam McCready. Book design: December Publications. James Pethica (Williams College, Massachusetts) contributed the Lady Gregory article to the new Oxford DNB (2004); he is at work on a first authorized biography of Lady Gregory.

A principal US repository of Lady Gregory’s papers is The Berg Collection, New York Public Library, The Research Facility, Fifth Avenue at 42nd St., New York City. Additionally, Declan Kiely (New York University), an active member of the WB Yeats Society of NY and of the Yeats International Summer School (County Sligo, Ireland), is a New York City-based specialist on the Irish Literary Revival. Dr Kiely is the Assistant Coordinating Editor of and contributing editor to The Cornell Yeats (in progress).

Acknowledgments & Permissions: The author and the WB Yeats Society of New York are grateful to the McCreadys for access to the two photographs reproduced in this review; and to their son, Richard McCready, for the review’s audio track, taken from Richard McCready’s performance in Coole Lady of Turlough O’Carolan’s Bridget Cruise. The author is also grateful to Andy McGowan, President, WB Yeats Society of NY; Will Linden, the Society’s Website Manager; and Elias Stimac, a New York City actor, who handled publicity for this first New York production of Coole Lady.

The author is an advisory editor of the Encyclopedia of Irish-American Relations, eds James P. Byrne, Philip Coleman, and Jason King, 3 vols (Santa Barbara, California: 2006), to which she is contributing "Mary Robinson" and "Michael Smurfit." Dr Mulvihill has published broadly on Irish and English women writers, pre-1800. To the new Oxford DNB, she contributed the series' first profile of James Esdall, an l8thC Dublin patriot printer and political journalist. She is at work on Irishwomen’s political writings, pre-1800.