Irish Nationalism and the Ideology of Ibsen’s Plays

Abstract

The Players’ Club performance of Hedda Gabler on 20–21 April 1904 was their second and last Ibsen production. The little amateur company had been having some disagreements between their two more famous members. One of the actors, P. J. Kelly, recalled that during the rehearsals of A Doll’s House and An Enchanted Sea in 1903, ‘Martyn and Moore fought so many intellectual battles that it was impossible for the company to understand what it was all about. It seemed to me almost a miracle that the plays were successfully produced’.¹ Martyn and Moore’s involvement with this company was not widely advertised; their names did not appear on the programme. Martyn’s later references to the company are dismissive. ‘Although I met with considerable talent, it was not accompanied with any sort of taste,’ he wrote in 1914. ‘I suppose I have no right to be surprised that the only thought of those amateurs was to show themselves off. Any idea of discovering a native work of art and interpreting it with understanding was as far from their minds as from the mind of an average English actor or actress.’² Martyn was particularly disgruntled by the supposed philistinism of Flora MacDonnell, the first Irish Nora:

Would it be believed that one day when I was discussing the possibilities of a society for producing native drama and Continental masterpieces, the leading lady proposed that I should produce Madame Sans Gene at the Antient Concert Rooms, with an elaborate series of dresses for herself in the title part? That poor lady evidently thought that the fascination of silly players was the real motive of my interest in intellectual drama.³