On Bailie's Strand & The Death of Cuchulain: W.B. Yeats

[poliphilo]

The Cuchulain of the plays undermines the Cuchulain of the poems. The Cuchulain of the poems is an impersonal force; the Cuchulain of the plays is a vain, grandiloquent twit. Yeats was straining after a kind of mythic drama (he took Shakespeare to task for humanizing his kings) but it's in the nature of theatre to demythologize. You put a god or a hero on stage and he immediately becomes a man- personified in a particular actor- and anything you make him say or do reveals his human character- or lack of it.

Both plays rely on the audience having prior knowledge of the mythos. This is particularly- aggressively- true of the Death of Cuchulain- which has a prologue that effectively tells the unscholarly (and for some unexplained reason, the self-educated)  to fuck of and die. This, I would humbly submit, is no way to run a theatre.

Comments

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

which has a prologue that effectively tells the unscholarly (and for some unexplained reason, the self-educated) to fuck of and die.

You will be unsurprised, then, to hear that Yeats was an autodidact who was never able to go to college due to his father's profligacy. As my sister says, Hector Projector...

I'd like to know if you have tried "The Only Jealousy of Emer" - I wrote a play that was a spinoff of that and put it on.

Small typo - on Baile's Strand.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I have a volume of Selected Plays- and I'm working my way through it. Emer is one of the ones I haven't read yet.

How did the spin-off work? Was it a critique? A sequel?

Thanks for pointing out the typo.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

It was very obviously based on his marriage to George Hyde-Lees, which took place during his ongoing infatuation with Maud Gonne's daughter, Iseult. George taking the part of the luckless Emer - and given she had to type up all his works, the analogy could not have been lost on her.

The play was based on the actual events of his honeymoon, and uses the spirits in the play. Only George can see them and speak to them and she calls on their help to retain her husband's affections.

The guy I cast in the main part had an uncanny resemblance to Yeats. I mean, gasp-when-he-entered-the-room uncanny.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That sounds really interesting.

Yeats was a bit of a bastard, wasn't he? But then poets mostly are.