Lady Gregory's 1919 comedy is set in a mythical castle on the Burren, where, according to a prophecy, a princess will be devoured by a dragon. Photo: NUI Galway archives
One night in July 1918, J.A. Dougheritt walked home from church to his house in Dublin. Along the way he passed a number of indoor venues crowded with people. “Why are the queues of people waiting to get into the various picture-houses permitted?” he wrote in a letter to the Irish Times.
Dougheritt, like many, had started to become aware of the dangerous Spanish Flu spreading throughout the country, claiming 92 lives the previous week in Dublin alone. Schools had closed, but theatres and picture-houses stayed open long into the chilling winter.
In February 1919, while combatting the second wave of the pandemic, medical doctors recommended that theatres, churches and all places of assembly be closed. Dublin Corporation followed recommendations from the parliament in Westminster, which didn’t implement a shutdown.
Against the confused public health response, the Abbey Theatre seemed to operate as normal during the pandemic. You could blame it on the fact that information about contagion didn’t circulate well. Or that the theatre, in an era before subsidy, was focused on staving off bankruptcy.
They say escapism is the best entertainment is times of stress, and the Abbey’s season in the latter half of 1918, while topical, wasn’t jolly. Maurice Dalton’s Sable and Gold was about a bank clerk running off to join the fighting in the 1916 Rising. Atonement by Dorothy Macardle was a gritty family drama about political violence.
There was something light-hearted in Lady Augusta Gregory’s new fantasy comedy The Dragon, which she was preparing to direct herself.
The fairy tale plot is generic in a sense. In a mythical castle on the Burren, word spreads of a prophecy that the princess will be devoured by a dragon, a prophecy that will only be broken if she gets married. A stiff evil stepmother, disapproving of the princess’s youthful and joyful attitude to life, seizes the opportunity to send her into the boring grown-up world of courtship and homemaking.
Thus begins a contest of noble bragging between three suitors. A sweet young prince arrives, chaperoned by his overbearing aunts. There is a creative man who is former royalty, having escaped from his palace to live among the people. An imposter turns up, posing as a member of the most important family in the land. All three say their part, and then they’ve to fight the dragon.
It’s easy to imagine this as a brightly attractive fairy-tale production, but a photograph shows actors in a wild gallery of patchwork costumes, dressed with eye-patches and woolly beards. The Abbey’s master-carpenter Seaghan Barlow, in lieu of building a mechanical dragon, played the flying lizard with a papier-mâché mask.
Eccentric touches seemed to have been appropriate. Gregory’s comedy takes place somewhere between a Graeco-Roman classical world and the modern village settings of her previous comedies. It’s an odd place where people can read an important message on an ancient tablet, and also go the post office.
A lot of the humour flows in excessive detail, rarely arriving somewhere precise. How ridiculous it is to take in a compliment about a princess's hair “as smooth as if a cow had licked it,” or a chef putting in food orders with a hawk and an otter, or a lake appearing out of nowhere to reflect a vain prince’s reflection. Gregory billed The Dragon as a “wonderplay,” and it’s tempting to reach for Lewis Carroll’s brand of literary nonsense as an influence.
Above all, the play is sympathetic to its younger characters. There's even a pre-Pratchettian satirical jab where the Dragon complains about how grown-ups are just the worst.
According to people in attendance, both adults and children laughed and gave standing ovations at The Dragon when it was staged in April 1919, towards the end of the pandemic.
A joyous release, after a deep long breath.
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