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

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.

My Home Town

Oldham doesn't know what it's for- and hasn't since the mills closed-  but it's never stopped trying to find out. In the Hilton Arcade (where I think I'm right in saying not a single shop remains open) there are pictures showing how beautiful the town is going to look after the next in a series of reinventions. There'll be an Asian market (quite different, you understand, from the existing market in which most of the stall-owners are Asian), some sort of glorious erection outside the Town Hall and a "speakers corner" for people with soap boxes. You've got to admire the striving, . Even though the shops and nite spots are mostly shuttered the place feels alive and I don't think it's just the wind and rain gusting round the hilltop. 25 years ago most of the faces on the streets were pasty white, now the pasty whites are in a minority. New population, new dreams- new reasons to stick it to the bastards. Or that's how it seems to me.

More Plays By Yeats

Everybody in a Yeats play is an archetype. There are kings, there are beggars, there are fools.  One shouldn't expect any of them to behave humanly. Within these limitations we run up and down the scale from symbolism to absurdism, from Maeterlinck to Milligan.

The Resurrection has characters called the Jew, the Greek and the Syrian. They debate the resurrection of Christ as it is happening. The action is topped and tailed by songs that knock spots off everything in between.

Purgatory has the reputation of being Yeats' best play. Two men- an old beggar and his son- fetch up outside a haunted house. It's melodramatic and grim.

The Herne's Egg is bonkers. It's like Monty Python and the Holy Grail- only shot through with a vein of authentic pagan mysticism.