One has, on one side, Mallarme and Huysmans
producing this literature; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the
reality of life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have
reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama
has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy,
that has been given them in place of the rich joy found only in what is superb
and wild in reality. In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured
as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works
among people who have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years
more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender;
so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to
writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten,
and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.
J. M. S.
January 21st, 1907.
PERSONS
CHRISTOPHER MAHON.
OLD MAHON, his father, a squatter.
MICHAEL JAMES FLAHERTY (called MICHAEL JAMES), a publican.
MARGARET FLAHERTY (called] PEGEEN MIKE), his daughter.
WIDOW QUIN, a woman of about thirty.
SHAWN KEOUGH, her cousin, a young farmer.
PHILLY CULLEN AND JIMMY FARRELL, small farmers.
SARA TANSEY, SUSAN BRADY, AND HONOR BLAKE, village girls.
A BELLMAN.
SOME PEASANTS.
The action takes place near a village, on a wild coast of Mayo. The first Act
passes on an evening of autumn, the other two Acts on the following day.
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