Archive News
Adrian puts Irish stars of Hollywood centre stage
Date Published: {J}
A native of St Louis, Missouri, Adrian Frazier always had a fascination with Irish literature and theatre. In school he was inspired by a teacher who had a particular fondness for Beckett, Synge and Yeats and he was involved in producing a number of Irish plays.
His passion carried through to university when he studied English at Pomona College in California. One of his lecturers was Professor Darcy O’Brien, who wrote a book on Joyce. The professor’s father was Hollywood silent film actor George O’Brien, the star actor for director John Ford in the 1920s.
“Darcy O’Brien knew John Ford and found him a frightening character. A lot of people thought he was the most brilliant director they had ever worked but there are not many stories where he sounds very cuddly,” grins Adrian.
A tiny seed must have been sown back then in the 70s in the impressionable undergrad.
Zoom forward four decades and Adrian is now a professor of English in NUI Galway and his fourth book has just been published. Hollywood Irish: John Ford, Abbey Actor and the Irish Revival in Hollywood focuses on Ford and the Abbey Theatre actors Ford championed, namely brothers Barry Fitzgerald and Arthur Shields, and Sara Allgood.
The Hollywood Irish is an absorbing read of an era which reached its climax with the success of The Quiet Man, one of greats of the golden age of cinema.
The book germinated from Adrian’s Masters programme in drama and theatre and an exploration of the acting style pioneered by the Abbey actors. But reviews of their performances gave little insight, so he began studying movies that many of the actors appeared in from the 1920s
It emerged that they brought “a humorous, crowd-pleasing style which was highly theatrical and full of showmanship”, explains Adrian. It was a style imitated by other established Hollywood actors.
When John Ford saw performances by the Abbey Theatre actors in the US during their long tours there he was enthralled. He approached his studio about importing the entire Abbey cast.
Ford came up with the idea of making a movie of one of the Abbey’s biggest repertory successes, Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, using the theatre’s entire cast. Plans were afoot to follow it with Juno and Paycock.
Fitzgerald, Shields and Allgood were willing to leave Dublin behind. As Protestants, they had eagerly joined the company at the turn of the 20th century, drawn to Ireland’s cultural political movement after watching a one-act play about Ireland, Cathleen Ní Houlihan. While that play was credited to WB Yeats, Adrian points out that Lady Gregory had a huge input into it.
However when the Irish Free State was founded, these Protestant artists found that the prevailing Catholic ethos made life uncomfortable, with a focus on the Irish language and on the sanctity of marriage. The Abbey was, after all, a company “rife with love-making”, by 1938, according to the author.
“Before the [Second World] War broke out, by bringing the Abbey starts to America, Ford imported the Irish Cultural Revival, especially as it was literally embodied in the performers of the plays of Sean O’Casey. The actors carried the [Irish] Revival’s heritage within their own expressive capacities. Their acts of self-expression were the means by which Ford often told his stories . . .,” Adrian writes.
Readers with just a passing interest in Irish theatre and early American film will not fail to enjoy some of the book’s anecdotes about the actors.
Sara Allgood, who was later nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, received two marriage proposals, one from Abbey actor JM Kerrigan, who presented her with a wrist watch when asking for her hand. When he was spurned, he asked for the watch back and stamped it to bits on the floor of the Abbey Green Room.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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