Lennox Robinson

• Born: October 4, 1886
• Birthplace: Douglas, Ireland
• Died: October 15, 1958
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

Other Literary Forms

Lennox Robinson’s nondramatic writings are of interest only because of the insights they provide into his development as a nationalist and man of the theater. Central in this regard are two volumes of autobiography, Three Homes (1938) and Curtain Up (1942), and A Young Man from the South (1917), published as a novel but little more than a fictionalized autobiography. In the last of these, Willie Powell, the hero, is a Protestant Anglo-Irishman from southwest Cork, a physically weak fellow who has become a successful dramatist (writing plays that are like Robinson’s). As a result of a confrontation between nationalists and unionists, Powell reappraises his commitment to nationalist extremism and decides to seek more reasonable outlets for his patriotism. The book is a lucid portrait of the social, intellectual, and political milieu of Ireland in the decade leading up to the Easter Rebellion, but it is not much of a novel. From the same period and of interest for similar reasons is the 1918 collection of political sketches, Dark Days. These pieces give Robinson’s reactions to Ireland’s troubles and show how his growing nationalism was tempered by doubts about the extremist methods of the Sinn Féiners. The attitudes and problems that Robinson dramatized in The Big House in 1926 emerged for the first time in such earlier nondramatic works as A Young Man from the South and Dark Days.

Achievements

Lennox Robinson’s relationship with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre spanned half a century, beginning in 1908 when his first play, The Clancy Name, was presented there. During this period, he was one of the theater’s most prolific dramatists; its manager for a time; a producer, director, and board member; and author of an officially commissioned Abbey history. The most prominent of the Irish playwrights known as the Cork Realists, Robinson helped chart the course of the theater during the period that included World War I and the height of Ireland’s political turbulence, leading the transformation of the literary theater of the Abbey’s founders into a realistic one.

In addition to his work for the Abbey, Robinson also acted in productions of the Dublin Drama League, of which he was a founder; edited collections of Irish poetry; wrote drama criticism and other articles for newspapers; and turned out a novel, two volumes of autobiography, short stories, and two biographies. A frequent judge at amateur drama festivals throughout Ireland, he also lectured in the United States, China, and on the Continent. Both at home and abroad, he was widely recognized for several decades not only as one of Ireland’s leading playwrights and theatrical figures but also as an important all-around man of letters.

Robinson’s most enduring achievement is his dramatic œuvre, thirty plays written between 1908 and 1954. Among these, the conventional comedies and realistic dramas were his most popular works. The White-Headed Boy, his first full-length comedy, was an immediate Abbey success and gained for him an international reputation. His second most successful play, The Far-off Hills, also a comedy, focuses on provincial life and satirizes foibles of the Irish character. His most notable serious work is The Big House, which dramatizes the tragedy of Anglo-Irish Protestants in a Catholic country during the tumultuous period following World War I. This play and others of its type have echoes of Henrik Ibsen, a major influence on Robinson as on most of his Abbey contemporaries. Robinson also ventured into political drama: Patriots, The Dreamers, and The Lost Leader all reflect William Butler Yeats’s political views. Though Robinson’s major contributions to the Irish drama were as a realist, he shows the influence of Eugene O’Neill in the expressionistic Ever the Twain, and in Church Street, he employs techniques and themes of Luigi Pirandello. In addition, while Abbey manager, he introduced Dublin audiences to plays by such non-Irish dramatists as Gerhart Hauptmann, August Strindberg, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Although Robinson possessed some of Yeats’s romantic idealism, he followed more closely in the footsteps of such realists in the Irish Literary Renaissance as Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory. His contemporaries so admired his early plays that they also wrote morbidly realistic peasant dramas. T. C. Murray’s Birthright (pr. 1910) is one such, and A. P. Wilson, Robinson’s successor as Abbey manager, said that 95 percent of the manuscripts he received were of this type. Perhaps second only to Lady Gregory as the most prolific twentieth century Irish dramatist, Robinson was much more versatile than his sometime mentor and, during his long career, provided the Abbey and other Dublin stages with comic and serious plays that remain penetrating studies not only of his compatriots but also of the human condition. Although not a dramatist of the first rank, Robinson indeed may be, as a biographer has characterized him, “a modern Goldsmith.”

Biography

Esmé Stuart Lennox Robinson was born on October 4, 1886, in Douglas, southeast of Cork, to Andrew Craig and Emily Jones Robinson, Anglo-Irish Protestants. He was the youngest of seven children. His father, who had been a stockbroker, was ordained a minister of the Church of Ireland in 1892 at the age of fifty and given a parish in Kinsale, County Cork, where the family lived until he was transferred in 1900 to Ballymoney in West Cork. In the same year, young Robinson, who had been tutored at home, began attending Bandon Grammar School for Protestants, but this formal education ended in a year because of his ill health, and his father again became his tutor. Robinson long after wrote of how, during this period, he devoted himself “to music, to rough shooting, and fishing, to reading, to a little boyish writing.” He recalled, too, how he and a cousin started Contributions, a monthly magazine that ran for three years: “At first many relatives and friends contributed; later they fell away, and my cousin and I had to write it all ourselves under a bewildering variety of noms-de-plume.” During this period in his late teens, Robinson also became friendly with a Catholic family connected to the nationalist Daniel O’Connell and began to stray from his family’s unionist sentiments.

The landmark event in Robinson’s progress toward identification with the cause of Irish nationalism and the theater as vocation occurred in August, 1907, when he saw a performance at the Cork Opera House of Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (pr., pb. 1902) and The Hour Glass (pr. 1903) and Lady Gregory’s The Jackdaw (pr. 1907) and The Rising of the Moon (pb. 1904). He wrote years later: “Certain natural emotions and stirrings . . . were crystallized for ever by Cathleen ni Houlihan. . . . Those two hours in the pit of the Opera House in Cork made me an Irish dramatist.”

The first product of his new vocation was The Clancy Name, a one-act play based on a story by his sister; it was produced at the Abbey on October 8, 1908, “a play as harsh as the stones of West Cork, as realistic as the midden in front of an Irish farm house,” according to Robinson (who reacted to criticism of the harshness by rewriting the tragic melodrama for the next Abbey season). His second work, The Cross Roads, opened on April 1, 1909; a full-length problem play with overtones of Ibsen, it was well received by the Abbey’s audiences mainly because the actors—Sara Allgood, Maire O’Neill, and Arthur Sinclair—obscured its defects (which Robinson unsuccessfully attempted to correct for a 1910 production).

Recognizing Robinson’s talent, Yeats and Lady Gregory made him the Abbey ’s producer and manager late in 1909, and to prepare him for the responsibilities, they sent him to London early the next year to see plays, observe rehearsals, and get to know such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville-Barker. As manager, Robinson was an arbitrator of disputes among actors and promoter of the Abbey; he also directed plays, including some of his own; and he led the troupe on its 1911 and 1913 American tours. On returning from the latter tour, he resigned his post, mainly because of conflicts with Lady Gregory that stemmed from Abbey financial matters, but also because he wanted more time to write. The next year, he joined the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust as an organizer and developer of libraries, a position he held until 1919, while continuing to write plays, a novel, short stories, and newspaper and magazine articles. During this period, his nationalism emerged in political sketches published as Dark Days as well as in the novel A Young Man from the South and in The Lost Leader, a play dealing with Charles S. Parnell (and which also reveals Robinson’s growing interest in spiritualism and psychic phenomena). In 1919, he returned to the Abbey as manager and presided over the theater for four years at a time of financial stress (which led the government in 1924 to recognize the Abbey as the official national theater of Ireland and to grant it a subsidy) and artistic advances (with playwrights Brinsley MacNamara, George Shiels, and Sean O’Casey being introduced to its audiences).

When Robinson again was free of Abbey administrative responsibilities, he was able to devote more time to the Dublin Drama League, and after marrying Dorothy Travers Smith (an Abbey scene designer) in 1931, he began to make lecture tours of the United States and to teach and direct on American campuses. His last trip to the United States was in 1947-1948. On his return, Trinity College, Dublin, awarded him an honorary doctor of literature degree. Though his health was failing, he continued to direct and write plays (his last, The Demon Lover, a reworking of a 1914 manuscript, was produced in 1954), to judge amateur theatricals, to write a weekly newspaper column, and to represent Ireland at gatherings in China and Norway. He died on October 14, 1958, and is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.

Analysis

Lennox Robinson’s real strength was in his comedies, with their brilliant technique, sharp observation, and deft touch. In The White-Headed Boy and The Far-off Hills, he created his masterworks. Although he never attained the stature of a first-rank dramatist, Robinson’s contribution to the Irish national theater was crucial, for he did much to create a climate favorable to the development of indigenous talent.

The White-Headed Boy

The White-Headed Boy, Robinson’s masterpiece, was first presented at the Abbey on December 13, 1916. A gentle satire of his compatriots with a plot and characters that are wholly complementary, it may have autobiographical origins because Robinson’s own frail health as a youth caused his mother to be overprotective and to treat him (like Denis in the play, a youngest son) as her pet, or “whiteheaded boy.” He previously had used the theme in his first play, The Clancy Name, in which a doting mother orchestrates a marriage for her only son and then shields him—and the family name as well—after he accidentally kills a man.

Though Robinson later lamented that everyone had overlooked his political intent in The White-Headed Boy, his humorous asides to the reader and stage directions in Irish idiom demonstrate that laughter, not allegory, was his primary goal. The action begins with the Geoghegans—a widowed mother, two sons, three daughters, and a visiting aunt—awaiting the return of Denis, the third and youngest son, from Dublin, where he has been studying medicine and has twice failed his examination. All expect a triumphant homecoming this time, however, and Mrs. Geoghegan looks forward to Denis’s becoming a Dublin doctor, not “one of your common dispensaries, hat in hand to every guardian in the country.” However, while family members sacrificed so the mother’s favorite could get an education, Denis wasted his allowance on horse races and neglected his work. When a telegram comes for him (“Hard luck. Geoghegan’s Hope also ran. Sorry, Flanagan”), brother George, the family breadwinner, correctly interprets it as reporting that Denis has failed a third time, and all except Mrs. Geoghegan agree that they no longer will subsidize the prodigal.

When Denis returns, he at first appears to be vain and irresponsible; told of this third examination failure, he reacts indifferently: “Isn’t that a beastly nuisance? I’m not surprised; I guessed I hadn’t got it.” He had not wanted to be a doctor after all but had allowed himself to be led by his mother’s misguided expectations for him and hope of enhanced reputation for the family. When brother George offers him passage to Canada as a final familial gesture, Denis retorts:

I never asked to be sent to College; I never asked to have all this money spent on me. I’d have been content to live here with the rest of you—Yes, I’m different now, but whose fault is that? It’s not mine. Who was it made me out to be so clever; who insisted on making a doctor of me, or sending me to Trinity? It was all of you.

He shows more spunk and good sense when George also offers to pay passage to Canada for Delia Duffy, Denis’s fiancé: “Thank you for nothing. I’m asking no money from you, and I’ve no intention of asking Delia to come out and rough it in Canada. She wasn’t brought up to that sort of thing.” Jilting Delia, however, arouses the wrath of her father, who threatens to sue for breach of contract. This prospect and its possible consequences frighten the family into frenetic attempts to forestall public shame, and Duffy reaps a harvest as George, Mrs. Geoghegan, and Aunt Ellen offer him payoffs, and Aunt Ellen (who years earlier had rejected him) agrees to become his wife. Ironically, though all had intended to rid themselves of the burden of Denis, they remain in his thrall.

Delia and Denis, meanwhile, confound the schemers by marrying. Further, instead of emigrating to Canada, Denis gets a job in Ballycolman as a laborer on a work crew. Duffy and the Geoghegans are shocked. George says, “Think what everyone will say of you, and what sort of name will they put on us to say we drove you out on the road!” Again, reputation is a prime consideration, and they offer Denis the payoffs previously tendered to Duffy, but Denis wants independence: “I only want to be able to do what I like with my own life—to be free.” He agrees, nevertheless, to go to Kilmurray and manage a cooperative shop, the latest enterprise of rich Aunt Ellen, and he accepts the family’s money, the prospect of Aunt Ellen’s estate, and Delia’s promise to look after everything: “An easy life, no responsibility, money in your pocket, something to grumble at—What more do you want?”

Robinson said that The White-Headed Boy “is political from beginning to end, though I don’t suppose six people have recognised the fact.” It is easy to miss, for the play moves briskly through a series of comical situations, with the second-act wooing scene between Aunt Ellen and old Duffy a comic classic. It is Duffy who expresses the political theme. He is “one of the solidest men in Ballycolman, Chairman of the District Council, Chairman of the Race committee, and a member of every Committee and every League in the village,” and he mocks Denis’s desire for independence: “Free? . . . Bedad, isn’t he like old Ireland asking for freedom, and we’re like the fools of Englishmen offering him every bloody thing except the one thing? . . . Do Denis, do like a darling boy, go out to Kilmurray and manage the shop.”

Denis (like Ireland) desires the freedom to chart his own course, but the family (like England) assumes that financial support will suffice. “Will I never be free from you?” Denis asks, but he acquiesces in almost the same breath. Futile though his assertion of self-determination may seem, at least he marries. The prospects for his brothers and sisters, however, are bleaker, their dreams of marriage and careers still mere illusions at the final curtain. Robinson’s satiric portrayal of ineffectual Irishmen trapped by their environment and sense of inadequacy is softened by his whimsical handling of their conflicts and problems, and given the tense political situation in Dublin in 1916, perhaps it is just as well that almost everyone missed the subtle allegory and serious intent of The White-Headed Boy.

The Far-off Hills

There are no such hidden purposes in The Far-off Hills, which opened at the Abbey on October 22, 1928, and was Robinson’s first three-act comedy of Irish life since The White-Headed Boy in 1916. A lighthearted portrayal of the marriage game, it has its roots in the same provincial background as that of the earlier plays but ends on a more optimistic note, for all the characters (except the fickle servant Ellen) realize their ambitions. Though its spirit, characters, and milieu are Irish, the central motif of woman as matchmaker may come from Searfín Álvarez Quintero and Joaquín Álvarez Quinteroro, four of whose plays were translated by Helen and Harley Granville-Barker and published in 1927.

In this second most successful of Robinson’s plays, the Clancy family, like the Geoghegans of The White-Headed Boy, is overseen by a woman, in this instance the eldest daughter, Marian, who puts off becoming a nun because of her widowered father’s blindness. Severe in demeanor, she is a strict disciplinarian who reins in her exuberant younger sisters but fails to gain similar control over Patrick Clancy’s drinking, smoking, and socializing with cronies. The girls Ducky and Pet, however, plot to get their father married so Marian will be free to enter the convent and they will be rid of her stern control. Susie Tynan, an eligible old flame of Clancy, is available and willing, so the girls’ plan succeeds, but Marian then decides to postpone going to the convent until the girls are older, primarily because she has begun to have doubts about a religious vocation. When Pierce Hegarty, Susie Tynan’s nephew, calls her a pretty girl, for example, “she drifts to a mirror and does something to her hair,” and later, when Harold Mahony, another young man, loses his wife, Marian invites him to propose to her, but the gloomy pessimist turns her down. Ambitious and personable Pierce is a better man, however, and, encouraged by Pet and Ducky, he eventually prevails. Patrick Clancy delivers the valedictory: “This little room is as full of happiness as an egg is full of meat. Marian dear, Pierce . . . good luck, God bless you both.”

The blind father is married to a woman who will tolerate his drinking, smoking, and cronies; Marian, no longer a tyrant, is soon to be wed; and the younger girls have freed themselves from unwanted control. Everyone, in other words, discovers that though far-off hills beckon, those closer to home may be just as verdant. The message of this play, then, is more optimistic than that which most Irish plays deliver, and though some have remarked about a padded plot, the seemingly irrelevant farcical interludes contribute significantly to the play’s pervasive blitheness of spirit as well as providing opportunities for character development.

Though in his plays he ranged far and wide in subject matter and form, Robinson regularly returned to what he called “this strange Irish thing, the commanding force in my life.” He wrote in the manner of O’Neill and Pirandello, and he adapted Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Guy de Maupassant, but he was at his best in plays that have, as one critic put it, “their inspiration in the warp and woof of Irish life.”

The Big House

Robinson’s third most successful play deals with the “Irish thing” in a serious manner. The Big House opened at the Abbey on September 6, 1926. Robinson focuses on a favorite Anglo-Irish literary theme, the decay and destruction of the Big Houses, aristocratic country homes of Protestant families whose forebears had come from England as long ago as the seventeenth century but were still regarded—and saw themselves—as different from their Irish Catholic neighbors. The decline of the Big Houses and the departure of many Anglo-Irish families were inevitable when the conflict between the Irish and the English reached its peak following World War I, and a number of the estates were destroyed by nationalists as reprisals for actions of the government, but as early as 1912, Synge had written: “If a playwright chose to go through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is very likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the decaying of these old families.” In his 1931 biography of Bryan Cooper, an Anglo-Irish landlord, Robinson recalls his reaction to a decaying Big House:

Perhaps . . . in that Georgian house or sham Gothic castle there remained an old father and mother and a couple of aged daughters. The house was too large for their needs or too large for their purse and what reason was there for clinging to it? Meanwhile the old house was too full of memories of past greatness, too full of memories of boys who had shot rabbits in the long summer evenings.

A decade later, he wrote in his autobiography of the same experience: “I fell into a reverie and spoke no word until we reached home. A play of mine was born then.” The Big House is a lament on the passing of an old order that Robinson admired, and at the same time it rallies the young Anglo-Irish to a dynamic commitment to Protestantism and their country.

The play is set at Ballydonal House, County Cork, ancestral home of the Alcocks, atypical Anglo-Irish landlords in that they have not lapsed into penury or decadence (unlike the O’Neills, with whom they are contrasted). Mr. Alcock has devoted himself to public service for years but continues to remain apart from his Catholic neighbors, though without Mrs. Alcock’s overt sense of alienation.

The first scene takes place in 1918 on Armistice Day, with the Alcocks celebrating the end of a war in which two of their sons served. Reginald, the elder, died, but they await the return of Ulick, the younger. With them is their daughter Kate and a visiting English officer, Montgomery Despard, who served with Reginald and met Kate in London, where he fell in love with her. Despard, who sees the atypicality of Ballydonal House—“It doesn’t seem to be so awfully Irish . . . the way it’s run, and—everything”—asks Kate to marry him and come to London, but she is unwilling. She is committed to Ballydonal House and dreams of running it with Ulick after the war: “Reggie wouldn’t have cared if he had dragged Ballydonal down. But Ulick and I do care—tremendously. We’re going to hold our heads above water, hold Ballydonal above water, proudly and decently.” So strong is Ulick’s tie to the estate, she says, that “I see him sometimes when he’s not here at all,” the most recent vision having occurred three evenings before: “That was just when the armistice had begun to seem inevitable. He was dreaming it all over you see, he was dreaming he was home.” The vision was a prescient one, for a telegram arrives with news that Ulick was killed three days earlier.

The next scene takes place in 1921 during the terror wrought by the Republicans and the Black and Tans. The O’Neills, burned out, have left for England (where Irish refugees, Mrs. Alcock supposes, “will soon become as distingué as the Russians”), and Mrs. Alcock wants to join them (“I know that we’re living in a community of criminal lunatics and that the sooner we get out of it the better”), but Mr. Alcock intends to stay until he is “put out . . . burned out . . . or starved out.” To avenge an ambush the night before, the Black and Tans have shot Maggie Leahy, who had been Kate’s childhood nurse. Kate, who has been working to overcome the alienation between the Anglo-Irish and the Irish Catholics, returns from Maggie’s wake to report that despite her efforts (“I threw a bridge across the gulf and ran across it”), she remained an outsider, “different, away from them. . . . Yes, there was religion to make me feel outside but lots of other things too; education, I suppose, and tradition and—and everything that makes me me and them them.” Though she always has felt this separation, she “thought it could be broken down.” Alcock tells her that she never will be like the neighbors: “It will be always ‘them’ and ‘us.’” Later, while alone, Kate is surprised by a drunk Despard, now a member of the Auxiliary Police, whose men are searching for nationalists. He proposes to her, but she again rejects him, and the scene ends with a solitary Despard firing his revolver at the voice of Ulick he thinks he hears, as if the protective spirit of Ballydonal has begun to haunt him, too.

Two years later, the Alcocks, almost destitute, have closed off most of the house. Kate, who had taken a job in London, returns, unable to stay away from “country-houses going up in flames, senators being kidnapped and all kinds of thrilling goings-on.” Her report of the financial and social successes of the O’Neills in London contrasts vividly with the Alcocks’ stoic endurance and Kate’s rejection of the “sentimental play-acting” of London life and her decision to return, to “criticize and dislike Irish people—some of them—and be either a Free Stater or a Republican.” The family reunion is interrupted when three Republicans come to blow up Ballydonal House in retaliation for the execution of a young Republican by the Free State government, ironically the very fellow whose life Mr. Alcock had been trying to save.

The next morning, the family gathers in the aftermath of the destruction to retrieve some possessions. Mr. and Mrs. Alcock will go to England after all. Mrs. Alcock is happy to return home after more than two decades in a foreign country; he is relieved that the turmoil will be part of his past, though he still cannot understand the aspirations that have fostered it. Kate, however, will try to shape a new life amid the ruins, renouncing her “poor attempt to pretend” that she was not different from her compatriots and quoting Yeats: “We must glory in our difference, be as proud of it as they are of theirs.” Her intentions notwithstanding, she remains tied to the past, for a vision of Ulick appears at the end of the play, smiling with apparent satisfaction at his sister’s heroic resolve. Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (pr. 1924) and The Plough and the Stars (pr. 1926, seven months before the The Big House) dramatize the political upheavals from the perspective of Dubliners. Robinson’s play provides a realistic portrait of a different aspect of the era: the tragedy of an Ascendancy family.

Bibliography

Dorman, Sean. Limelight over the Liffey. Fowey, Cornwall, England: Raffeen Press, 1983. These essays, first serialized under the title “My Uncle Lennox,” describe Robinson’s life and the theater in Ireland. Index.

Hogan, Robert. The Abbey: Ireland’s National Theatre, 1904-1978. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. This history of the Abbey Theatre by one of its former directors contains an account of Robinson’s two significant connections with that institution. Describes Robinson’s years as a director and examines his work as a playwright. Includes a complete listing of Abbey Theatre productions.

Hunt, Hugh. The Abbey: Ireland’s National Theatre, 1904-1978. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. This history of the Abbey Theatre by one of its former directors contains an account of Robinson’s two significant connections with that institution. Describes Robinson’s years as a director and examines his work as a playwright. Includes a complete listing of Abbey Theatre productions.

Journal of Irish Literature 9 (January, 1980). This special Lennox Robinson issue contains hitherto fugitive and unpublished materials. Perhaps the most important item is the controversial short story “The Madonna of Slieve Dun.” In addition to another short story, a full-length play entitled The Red Sock, written pseudonymously by Robinson, is published here for the first time. Also contains an article on Robinson’s relationship with William Butler Yeats.

O’Neill, Michael J. Lennox Robinson. Boston: Twayne, 1964. This study provides a thematic approach to Robinson’s wide-ranging and productive career, including his nondramatic writings. The biographical material is related to the development of the playwright’s themes and techniques. Contains a detailed chronology that functions both as a bibliography and as a calendar of productions of Robinson’s plays.