On Baile’s Strand

Abstract

On Baile’s Strand was first performed on 27 December 1904 by the Irish National Theatre Society. The cast was: Cuchulain, Frank Fay; Conchubar, George Roberts; Daire [an old King, not included in later versions of the play], G. Macdonald; the Blind Man, Shamus O’Sullivan; the Fool, William Fay; the Young Man, P. MacShiubhlaigh; the old and young kings were played by R. Nash, N. Power, K. Wright, E. Kegan, Emma Vernon, Doreen Gunning and Sara Allgood. Owing to the small size of the company at the time, women played men’s parts. Yeats later remarked, ‘it were indefensible could we have helped it’ (A Selection from the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, Leipzig, 1913; Selected Poems, New York, 1923). Yeats commented on it in his notes to Poems 1899–1903 (1906) which contained the text of this play and The King’s Threshold:

It was revived by the National Theatre Society, Ltd., in a somewhat altered version at Oxford, Cambridge, and London a few months later. I then entirely rewrote it up to the entrance of the Young Man, and changed it a good deal from that on to the end, and this new version was played at the Abbey Theatre in April, 1906. It is now as right as I can make it with my present experience, but it must always be a little over-complicated when played by itself. It is one of a cycle of plays dealing with Cuchulain, with his friends and enemies. One of these plays will have Aoife as its central character, and the principal motive of another will be the power of the witches over Cuchulain’s life. The present play is a kind of cross-road where too many interests meet and jostle for the hearer to take them in at a first hearing unless he listen carefully, or know something of the story of the other plays of the cycle. Mr. Herbert Hughes has written the music for the Fool’s song in the opening dialogue, and another friend a little tune for the three women. These songs, like all other songs in our plays, are sung so as to preserve as far as possible the intonation and speed of ordinary passionate speech, for nothing can justify the degradation of an element of life even in the service of an art. Very little of the words of the song of the three women can be heard, for they must be for the most part a mere murmer under the voices of the men. It seemed right to take some trouble over them, just as it is right to finish off the statue where it is turned to the wall, and besides there is always the reader and one’s own pleasure (VPl 526)