Yeats’s Cuchulain Cycle at the Abbey, September 1989

Abstract

News that Coca Cola Atlantic were to finance for five years an annual season of Yeats plays at the Abbey was especially welcome in the year celebrating the poet on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. His drama should long since have held a special place in the repertory of the theatre he founded. James Flannery is to be warmly congratulated on bringing about a most generous endowment. Generous it must certainly be to judge by the visual lavishness of the initial production and the technical resources it deployed. At first sight, the choice of the five plays featuring incidents from the life of the saga-hero Cuchulain would seem an apt starting-point for the promised series of productions; in retrospect, one cannot but wonder whether it might not have been wiser to have made the cycle the climax of the five-year venture, once an appropriate style for staging Yeats’s plays had had time to evolve and mature. A consistent style, confidently handled, was wanting in Flannery’s production and the result was a strangely soulless affair. There were excitements chiefly of a superficial, visual kind, but there were few that prompted “reverie in the deeps of the mind”, which was the objective behind the whole of Yeats’s dramatic canon.