W.B. Yeats’ constructed dramas for the stage that demanded unique vocal abilities from his actors. Through the use of words intoned and spoken at specific pitches Yeats sought to enhance the emotional and poetic impact of his dramas. Decades before I saw a Yeats’ play produced; I heard the playwright’s words spoken. As a child it was the voice of Cyril Cusack, a member of the Abbey Theatre, who introduced me to the Lame Beggar in The Cat and the Moon, the Tramp in The Pot of Broth and the Old Man in Purgatory. Irish actress Siobhan McKenna’s voice conjured Emer in The Only Jealousy of Emer and Mrs. Henderson in The Words Upon the Window-Pane.
My theatre work involves national and international travel. I’m always eager to attend theatre productions in Atlanta and elsewhere. Nevertheless, I’ve had only one opportunity to experience a production of a Yeats’ play. During the early 1980’s I met Dr. James Flannery - Winship Professor of Arts and Humanities and the Director of the W.B. Yeats Foundation at Emory University in Atlanta. Dr. Flannery’s production of Yeats’ A Full Moon in March – full of searing visuals, penetrating music and poetic sensibilities – was produced at Emory University. Beyond this one fully realized production, I’ve had to rely upon written, spoken or recorded versions of Yeats’ plays coupled with my theatrical imagination.
In Cyril Cusack’s article, From Behind the MASK, he describes the vocal style required by Yeats, “…from behind the Mask speech, rejecting natural inflection, incantatory, intoned along a conveyor-belt of poetic stresses; …”
According to Cusack, during the 1920’s and 1930’s a number of actors at the Abbey Theatre left the company and Ireland because they resented Yeats’ “authoritarian rule”.
“This early exodus of actors from Ireland, “ says Cusack, “ is witness to the conflict, steadily pursued by Yeats, between the actor’s practical idea of a theatre theatrical and the poet’s dream of a Theatre of Beauty, a theatre purified and restored to ‘the sanctity of the legends it had once founded itself upon.’ Anything that could come between the Poetic Reality and its communication to the poet’s ‘uncorrupted, imaginative audience’ must be torn away; and that other, that secondary, possibly even parasitic element, the Actor, potential enemy within the gates of such rarefied theatre, must be cut down – at least to size.”
In this age of “actors’ theatre” the vocal style demanded by Yeats might seem as foreign to performers today as it was to the actors who exited the Abbey Theatre and Ireland. Does Yeats, the playwright, need to exercise directorial control over his plays seven decades after his death or can we rely on today’s theatre and spoken word artists to re-imagine Yeats’ work for our time? If this artistic-theatrical impulse can’t be supported or doesn’t exist, perhaps a school to train actors in Yeats’ methods and historical style can be developed. Those who are knowledgeable and able to teach Yeats’ techniques are essential to such an endeavor. A training model exists within Japanese Noh Theatre, which includes chanting 13th century Japanese in a prescribed vocal style. Re-imagining or training - either choice is preferable to none. Yeats’ dramatic and poetic imagery is glorious. His work merits production and inclusion in our ever-growing, global, theatre ecology.
